The Poetry of Tate by Allen Tate

First published:Mr. Pope and Other Poems, 1928; Three Poems, 1930; Poems: 1928-1931, 1932; The Mediterranean and Other Poems, 1936; Selected Poems, 1937; The Vigil of Venus, 1943; Poems: 1922-1947, 1948; Poems, 1960

Critical Evaluation:

A reader who comes across a volume of poetry by Allen Tate will probably read only a few pages before words such as “obscure” and “rigid structure” from literature survey courses make him put it back on the shelf. Tate is not, in fact, an easy poet to understand. There are four principle reasons why his poetry is not at first as engaging as that of several of his contemporaries; the heirs of our literary tradition will perhaps give these same reasons to explain why his works have survived. Certainly Tate will survive in the myth he has created; four interrelated, yet distinct, aspects of his poetry are component parts of that myth.

Tate himself has commented on the common charge that modern poetry is obscure: in his famous essay, “Tension in Poetry,” he says that poetry is bound to be impenetrable and obscure if the reader does not share the poet’s feeling. Tate does not, for example, share the feeling of “sentimental” poets, and therefore calls their work “obscure,” even though the poems are technically very simple. One of Tate’s feelings is evident in his concern with history, man’s closest link with the past. He believes that history should be a matter of myth rather than patterns and systems. “The Swimmers” recalls a young boy’s feelings as he saw a Negro hanged by a posse. He could not run, but watched what he felt was a matter which concerned the whole town, even though no one would acknowledge the fact. But history is more personal than statistical, as Tate makes it in “Ode to Our Young Pro-Consuls of the Air” with its images taken from the Revolution and the Civil War. History is not as big a thing as war; it is, rather, as small as one man in a war. Or it is a man, like Tate, observing the results of war.

John Orley Allen Tate, who was born in 1899 in Kentucky, began his career through association with the Fugitives, a group of Southern writers including John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren (his professor and roommate at Vanderbilt), Andrew Lytle, and Donald Davidson. In a literary journal, THE FUGITIVE, and a book, I’LL TAKE MY STAND, this group sought, or at least advocated, the re-establishment of the Old South in opposition to the New. Although this theme of disenchantment with the new was not unusual for the times, Tate’s concern was not only for the waste and despair of one world war; his despair went back to and sought relief in the days of the Old South, which became his symbol of the lost tradition of America. Perhaps not many can share his feeling for the Old South, but an understanding of the symbols Tate has structured from his past certainly will help release him from the charge of obscurity.

Some critics feel Tate’s poetry indicates that he would have been happier had he been born early enough to be a Confederate soldier in order to fight for his Old South rather than being forced to brood inactively over its death. That view is a literal interpretation of his symbols: the Old South is merely a representative for him of the better tradition which has been replaced by the less noble, less alive, less “human” condition he sees today. “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” as Donald Davidson has said, does not eulogize dead soldiers as much as Tate’s dead emotion. The “modern” world of science has a nightmarish wasteland quality to men of sensitivity, as implied in “Sonnets at Christmas.” In fact, when “Euthenasia” was published in 1922, Harte Crane wrote to Tate saying that he recognized an Eliot influence. Tate, however, had not yet read Eliot. The similarity in theme has been attributed to a similarity in reaction to the times. Both poets were concerned with man’s inactivity, the “dry bones,” the “wasteland.” Both men also believed that civilization must return to religion in order to escape the death-in-life that Tate symbolized as twilight. “The Last Days of Alice” bitterly asserts that it is better to be sinners than twilight dwellers; the premise sounds very like Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.”

Tate’s despair has also been compared with that of Edgar Allan Poe, who predicted that man was becoming dehumanized. Despite the similarity, Tate is not as bleak as Poe because he seeks to reconcile man; the major vehicle he offers us for escape from the twilight is an increased awareness of the double level of language. There is a difference, he insists in “The Man of Letters in the Modern World,” between what he calls political communication used for the control of others, and the communion of language used for self-knowledge in literature. Mere communication is a symptom of mechanized society: communion includes love, and to be complete communication must also include communion. Tate’s concern for poetry as a symbolic language, a possible safeguard of continuing humanity, can be seen in his translation of the “Pervilgilium Veneris” (“The Vigil of Venus”). The silence of twilight, the lack of communion, lamented by the Latin poets, is also equated with sleep in Tate’s “Retroduction to American History.”

Because Tate is so concerned with symbolic language as the only escape from non-existence, it is not unusual that his own poetic language is highly symbolic. To obfuscate further his early readers, his symbolic language is based on a polar ambiguity; two levels are juxtaposed with the assumption that neither can be totally correct. In an article on Tate titled “The Current of the Frozen Stream,” Howard Nemerov conjectures that Tate’s duality is the generating principle of his poetry. He cites a passage from “The Meaning of Life” as the key to Tate’s ambiguity indicated in the polar categories of commentary and essence. Tate’s poems of commentary have a theme with which they deal explicitly; they are characterized by meditation and reflection; they offer no conclusion; they are usually in blank verse. “Fragment of a Meditation” is an example. The poems which aim at “essence in itself” are organized around subtle thoughts making implicit connections; they are typically brief and concise in formal metrical schemes. “Ode to Fear” is cited as an example. His most frequent symbol for “essence” is blood, as is shown in “The Mediterranean.”

Blood is liquid, hot and fluid, and is contrasted with the solid, cold, rigid symbolism of “commentary” that cracks the hemispheres. Blood and a cold frieze are set in opposition in “To the Romantic Traditionists.”

Extending his symbols still farther, in “To the Lacedemonians,” blood represents youth and life, as opposed to the rigidity of age and death.

One could surmise from Tate’s preocupation with the Old South that it represents his world of “essence”; the North represents “commentary.” The continuous ambiguity in Tate is the fact that the symbols of both life and death are needed in the paradoxical polarity of his world.

Like many poets, Tate believes that the Man of Letters has a role to play in modern civilization: poets must show the way to interpret society and how to live in it. Typical of the intricately symbolic myth he has created, Tate is a withdrawn scholar. He feels poets should not be actively engaged in politics. It is, Tate says in “To the Lacedemonians,” up to poets to see that the polarity remains, that “communication” does not mechanize “communion” as well.

These major themes—history, language and religion—all combine as a major statement on the necessity of a duality in modern life which will prevent our being swallowed in mechanization. It is, therefore, perhaps ironic that Tate once described a good poem as primarily a work of craftsmanship. That Tate is a careful craftsman is obvious in his tightly structured poems with strict metrics and rhyme. But it is equally obvious that the carefully controlled format of his poetry does not entirely control the very personal rage that slashes convention.

Tate insists on honesty; he refuses to produce a forced lyricism which pretends to be relaxed. In most of his poems he does not “strain”; he balances tight structure and an almost casual irony to voice his rage. The myth Allen Tate has created is not an easy one to crack, and it is difficult, as Marianne Moore pointed out, to admire what we do not understand. But once understood, the poetry of Tate’s myth is smashing, slashing, consistently paradoxical, and consistently individual.