Criticism > Poetry > Tate, Allen - Morton Dauwen Zabel (review date April 1932)

Tate, Allen - Morton Dauwen Zabel (review date April 1932)

Morton Dauwen Zabel (review date April 1932)

SOURCE: Zabel, Morton Dauwen. “The Creed of Memory.” Poetry 40, (April 1932): 34-9.

[In the following positive review of Poems: 1928-1931, Zabel traces Tate's poetic development.]

The twenty-two poems and sequence of ten sonnets in this book represent less a new phase of Mr. Tate's work than a conscious attack on problems defined in his first collection, Mr. Pope, of 1928. Any concern arising from the volume's immediate reference to its predecessor is rendered gratuitous by Mr. Tate's anticipation of it. By making that reference implicit and organic he joins the small group of contemporary poets who have realized, at whatever cost of popular approval with its preference for familiar repetitions or facile “growths,” the meaning of unity. Both in arrangement and in foreword he emphasizes the continuity of a project: “The books of a poet are finally one book; this author is...

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