John Crowe Ransom

John Crowe Ransom was one of the leading poets of his generation. He was a highly respected teacher and critic. Ransom was intimately connected to the early twentieth-century literary movement known as the Fugitives, later the Southern Agrarians. Around the year 1915, a group of Vanderbilt University teachers and students began meeting to discuss trends in American life and literature. They recorded their concerns in a magazine of verse entitled the Fugitive, which, though it appeared little more than a dozen times after the first issue was published in 1922, proved to be in the vanguard of a new literary movement—Agrarianism—and a new way of analyzing works of art—the New Criticism. As one of the group's major spokesmen, John Crowe Ransom