Poet John Crowe Ransom accepted the challenge of correlating empirical fact with the shadowy world of feeling. Grouped with Robert Penn Warren, Merrill Moore, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson as one of the original Fugitive Agrarians, an influential circle of Southern scholars, critics, and poets, he was the most distinguished critic and editor of his age. His verse, composed during a complex period of phenomenal scientific and technological advancement, registered a modern paradox—the intellectual delight in progress set against the spirit’s ambivalence, a tortuous state that the poet described as a “[walk] in hell.” His literary fervor precipitated a rebirth of Southern literature and resultant awards and honors to the era’s foremost proponent of modern verse.
Ransom, a native of Tennessee and the third of four children, was born in Pulaski on April 30, 1888, to Sara Ella Crowe and the Reverend John James Ransom, a Methodist minister. He studied at home with his father during his childhood, when the family moved among four parishes. In 1899, he profited at a Nashville boys’ academy from the teachings of its principal, Angus Gordon Bowen. Ransom was tops in his high school class, completed two years at Vanderbilt University, then left to teach middle grades in Taylorsville, Mississippi, and Latin and Greek at Haynes-McLean School in Lewisburg, Tennessee.
Ransom was eager to get back to scholarship and completed a B.A. at Vanderbilt, again graduating valedictorian with membership in Phi Beta Kappa. He was selected Rhodes scholar in 1910 after a year as principal in Lewisburg, and he earned an M.A. with honors in the classics from Christ Church College, Oxford, before traveling Europe and the British Isles. After a year of teaching Latin in Lakeville, Connecticut, he returned to Vanderbilt in 1914 to teach English literature, numbering among his pupils Cleanth Brooks, Donald Davidson, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren.
Before serving as first lieutenant in the field artillery in France during World War I, Ransom had already begun submitting poems to Contemporary Verse and Independent. With the help of essayist Christopher Morley and poet Robert Frost, he published Poems About God (1919) in England before returning to the United States. About the time that his conservative discussion group, the Fugitives, was meeting to debate the future of Southern literature, he married Robb Reavill and began a family of three—daughters Helen and Reavill and son John James. Ransom developed into a skilled, restrained wordsmith and a master of clarity who admired dense texts enhanced by precise diction and technical skill.
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.
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.
