In 1937, Ransom founded and edited Kenyon Review, a leading literary journal for twenty-two years. He decided that he was finished with poetry, but issued revisions in subsequent collections in 1945, 1963, and 1969. Ransom then concentrated on essays, which he published in The World's Body (1938) and The New Criticism (1941), a call for literary analysis that focuses on the work alone, excluding considerations of movement, age, and the author's life. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship to the University of the Southwest, Exeter, a Bollingen Prize in Poetry, Russell Loines Memorial award from the American Institute of Arts and Letters, and honorary consultancy in American literature at the Library of Congress.
Ransom remained active, publishing critical essays on poetry and a collection, Beating the Bushes: Selected Essays, 1941-1970, and serving as visiting professor at Northwest University and Vanderbilt. Despite his shift from pure creative art, by the end of his long life, his reputation had already begun to revert to master poet rather than mentor or critic. He died in his sleep in Gambier, Ohio, on July 3, 1974; his ashes were interred at the Kenyon College Cemetery. Posthumous works include Selected Essays of John Crowe Ransom (1984) and a compendium of letters in 1985.
