Criticism > Poetry > Tate, Allen - Morton Dauwen Zabel (review date February 1929)

Tate, Allen - Morton Dauwen Zabel (review date February 1929)

Morton Dauwen Zabel (review date February 1929)

SOURCE: Zabel, Morton Dauwen. “A Critics Poetry.” Poetry 33, no. 5 (February 1929): 281-84.

[In the following mixed review of Mr. Pope and Other Poems, Zabel argues that most of Tate's poetry is obscured by “texture of allusions and intricate phraseology.”]

Allen Tate's poetry shares many of the perversities and stylistic mannerisms of what was called, a few years ago, the cerebral school. The reader, confronted by a texture of allusions and intricate phraseology, is soon willing to accuse the poet of disguising a poverty of emotion and a shoddiness of concept with deliberate obscurity. Occasionally, when the fabulous imagery wears thin, we stand face to face with ideas as commonplace as those in “For a Dead Citizen:”

He was the finest of our happy men,
He had all joys, he never thought of death;
He fiddled sometimes with his mind, and then
Shook off the tremor...

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