The career of the American Critic and poet John Crowe Ransom seems marked by discontinuity. An acclaimed poet, he disowned his first collection of verse and virtually abandoned poetry at the end of the 1920s. A political activist during the 1930s who was devoted to a vision of complete and complex human life he went on to dedicate himself to the apparently formalist and exclusive New Criticism. Though critical attempts have been made to explore the connections between the various phases of his career, the overall shape and importance of Ransom's critical project has to date been unclear. This thesis draws upon unpublished correspondence, and the manuscript for Ransom's Agrarian book Land! which was assumed destroyed by Ransom himself in 1932. It indicates that Ransom was involved with a systematic attempt to shape his own career by the revisions of his poems, destruction of his correspondence and recantation of the critical positions he had previously held to. It contextualises many of the central decisions of Ransom's career, and discusses his often alienated position within the movements with which he is associated, the Fugitive group of poets, the Agrarians and the New Critics. It problematises many of the conclusions about Ransom which have been accepted since his death in 1974 and provides a revisionist view of Ransom's poetry and critical writings.