Ransom continued to issue poems and essays in American Review, Southern Review, and The Fugitive, Vanderbilt's literary-social journal that professed agrarian values and rejected modern technology, big business, and human displacement. In support of his coterie's strongly earth-based, anti-industrial philosophy, he joined eleven regional writers in two literary debates: I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930), for which he supplied an opening essay, "Statement of Principles," and Who Owns America? (1936). He published a stand-alone volume of essays, God Without Thunder (1930), which criticized insipid religion, and in 1938 publicly debated the essence of agrarianism.
Ransom established himself among America's finest poets while at the same time growing as a teacher, critic, and philosopher. He produced two volumes in 1924: Chills and Fever and Grace after Meat. The latter was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize. He followed with the critically successful Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927), additional submissions to Virginia Quarterly Review and Southern Review, and Selected Poems (1945), a solid contribution to his canon that was twice reissued.
