Criticism > Poetry > Tate, Allen - Delmore Schwartz (essay date winter 1940)

Tate, Allen - Delmore Schwartz (essay date winter 1940)

Delmore Schwartz (essay date winter 1940)

SOURCE: Schwartz, Delmore. “The Poetry of Allen Tate.” The Southern Review 5, no. 3 (winter 1940): 419-38.

[In the following essay, Schwartz discusses Tate as an honest poet and investigates the relationship between his essays and poetry.]

An honest man is one incapable of deceiving others. An honest poet, however, is one incapable of self-deception, at least in his poetry. This requires much difficult labor. One of the essential facts about Allen Tate's writing is the tireless effort and strained labor to be honest as a writer. The effort, the strain, the labor, and the honesty are, in a sense, a dominant quality of the very surface of his verse. I say: in a sense, because strictly what we know as the surface is a certain unique harshness of diction and meter, and an equally curious violence of imagery and sentiment. It is only when we have grasped the writing as a whole vision that we...

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