THIS essay was undertaken in an effort to penetrate the masks of John Crowe Ransom. For years I had assumed that logic provided the driving force behind the man's cheerful public exterior and his far more complex private nature. Alien Tate has persuasively argued that logic was Ransom's ultimate standard of judgment, the value to which everything else—emotion, ambition, passion—was subordinated. Superficially the argument appears to be unassailable, yet when one considers the most important decisions in Ransom's life (as they are revealed in Thomas Daniel Young's richly detailed biography and in the man's extensive correspondence), the issue becomes problematic. Most of Ransom's major decisions—such as his entering matrimony and his teaching English rather than philosophy or classics—were made in a spirit that was anything but coldly logical.

My hunch was that the dualism that underlies Ransom's criticism and poetry must also inform the life. So I began my investigation of Ransom's complicated attitude toward sentiment, an investigation which led to his relations with various friends during the last 60 years of his life, especially the relation with Tate. Considering the connection between a critic who incidentally became a great minor poet and a poet whose criticism is not only superior to his own poetry but superior to that of any Southerner of his time (including his master Ransom) illuminates the private and public selves of both principals. In each case one sees to what extent knowledge was carried to the heart.

The essay that ensues is an account of the history of sentiment in the life of John Crowe Ransom, a history of the ways in which the curve of his behavior touches the shape of his thought. My procedure is biographical, with critical excursions.