ABSTRACT
John Crowe Ransom (b. 1888) was educated at Vanderbilt (Tennessee) and Oxford Universities. Mter service in World War I he returned to teach at Vanderbilt University, where Cleanth Brooks (see below, pp. 291-304) and Allen Tate were also educated. All three men are identified with the rise of the New Criticism in America. They also shared religious, political, and cultural convictions of a traditional, conservative character, coloured by a special allegiance to the American South. With a number of other writers, notably Robert Penn Warren, they formed a recognizable group known as the Southern Agrarians or Fugitives (after the title of The Fugitive, a magazine edited by Ransom). What exactly was the intellectual connection between the inherently didactic views of these critics, and the allegedly objective, formalistic principles and methods of the New Criticism which they promoted, is a difficult question which perhaps they, themselves never quite faced.
