John Crowe Ransom was born in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1888. He was the oldest of two sisters and a brother. In 1909 he received his undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. He continued his studies as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in England. Before returning home from 1917 to 1919 he served in the First World War. He was assigned to the U.S. Field Artillery Training Base in Saumur, France. Following his discharge from the Army, he returned to Tennessee and became a member of the English department at Vanderbilt. He founded the "Fugitive Group- where he and other members argued against the dominance of modern industrialism, science, and urbanism. The group stood for the virtues of agrarian life, tradition and literature. Ransom's two essays Who Owns America? in 1936 and I'll Take My Stand in 1930 outlined the groups ideas and motives. In 1937 he left Vanderbilt and moved to Ohio where he became a professor of poetry at Kenyon College. At Kenyon he founded a literary magazine called the Kenyon Review. He became a leading voice of the "new criticism- which advocated the close study of literary texts that had been isolated from social, historical, and biographical considerations. During this time from 1930 to 1941 he wrote God Without Thunder which attacks modern secularism, The World's Body where he asserts the superiority of literature over science, and The New Criticism which contains his major statements about literary criticism. However most of Ransom's verse was written in the 1920's in three volumes, Poems About God, Chills and Fever, and Town Gentlemen in Bonds. His poetry had common themes of love, death and mutability. He believed that poetry showed humans their true limitations and leads to self-Knowledge whereas science leads to pride and arrogant power. His poetry is tightly constructed, his versification is formal, and his dictation is archaic.
