The contemporary poet is a man whom our sophisticated awareness of extramental and preconscious conditions of existence causes us to credit with having even more to withstand from these quarters than he is likely to maintain in the way of technical resources with which to organize his response. If we apprehend one note common to the poems of our contemporaries, an extraordinary if diversely distributed weight incumbent upon their makers, it is freedom. For our traditions inform us cumulatively of nothing more patent than that the great modes have achieved their maturest expressions, that the most strident rebellion must follow established paths, but that where much is disponible little is apt for possession in so eclectic a time.

The poet's freedom is coextensive with the repertory of choices, formal and interior, at his command. Yet the antimonies implicit in this condition can only have been intensified by the exaggerated self-watchfulness inherited from the Renaissance. Since all language is metaphor, all the arts of language are, in a sense, arts of translation. But translation must always be as well a way of talking to oneself: at its best a truly impersonal dialogue justified equally by its content and by the forms it may be urged, perhaps gratuitously, in newness to assume. This particular conjunction of the two forces, creative ego and imperative form, seems to account for the note of hubris characteristic, I think without exception, of the work of every poet of superior accomplishment in the present century. One can have little doubt in reading Mr. Pound's work, for example, that it is tragic in scope, without his mediating choice, because—in the tradition of all Renaissance poetics—his is an invocation of Ego. It is, in effect, this noumenous and histrionic presence of the ego within the semblances of action which gives his version of Propertius its dramatic congruity. This surely is the identity, not of a single shadow, but of the ‘one tangle of shadows’

Moving naked over Acheron
Upon the one raft, victor and conquered together.

Operatio sequitur esse is a motto viable as ever, but laden now with ironic overtones effectively reinforced if we juxtapose merely two passages describing differently the mind. Bacon the empiricist's description is poetic, but incorporates only the passive role of intelligence (in what scholastics distingush as reason in ‘first act’). His postulation in the Novum Organum, of the mind “as a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence” sorts instructively with another in the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas, a trenchantly abstract statement treating the mind primarily as an active agent: “Reason is the first principle of all human work.”

Insofar as it is a thing at all, a poem is conceived as a work to be done. It is a work which reason is uniquely competent to undertake. But by affirming the intellectuality fundamental to the condition of poetry and permeating its simplest constituents, one does not disallow the accessory richness that remains undiscussed under those terms. On the contrary, certain predicates invite others and suggest at the same time something respecting their relatedness. By acknowledging the roundness of oranges one does not exclude the possibility of their being juicy as well.

The poet of these circumstances is called upon to equilibrate in practice both metaphysics and science since he attends transitively to Being and Becoming at once. The science of making was by Aristotle set above both practical insight and political science (dianoia and episteme praktike) because it conduces directly to the contemplation of truth. Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, has said: “Contemplation and fabrication (theoria and poiesis) have an inner affinity and do not stand in the same unequivocal opposition to each other as contemplation and action.” The poet's mind is the copula joining these two and a poem is the expression of that intensive act.

The poetry of Allen Tate discloses a powerful intelligence in a state of urgency, a facultative concentration through which that knowledge is sought which can be effectually achieved only in making. The strategic continuity in his poetic practice has been sympathetically reviewed by Miss Vivienne Koch in the Kenyon Review for the summer of 1949. The relatively compact body of the selected poems makes that variety the more impressive whereby he subjects to the rigorous discipline of craft those motives for desperation which have inclined his lesser contemporaries with increasing pusillanimity toward the précieux.

Perhaps the most obvious inference to be drawn from those poems in which the formal elements common to the classic are dominant is the jurisdiction of reason. The more presentative form evinces these qualities of rhetoric, phrasing, metre and tone, the inclusiveness, the restraint ceremonial to such a mode, the more conscious we are, in reading, of the shadow of the mind behind the species expressa apportioning these resources. “The Mediterranean” is such a poem:

Where we went in the boat was a long bay
A slingshot wide, walled in by towering stone—
Peaked margin of antiquity's delay,
And we went there out of time's monotone:
Where we went in the black hull no light moved
But a gull white-winged along the feckless wave,
The breeze, unseen but fierce as a body loved,
That boat drove onward like a willing slave:
Where we went in the small ship the seaweed
Parted and gave to us the murmuring shore,
And we made feast and in our secret need
Devoured the very plates Aeneas bore:
Where derelict you see through the low twilight
The green coast that you, thunder-tossed, would win,
Drop sail, and hastening to drink all night
Eat dish and bowl to take that sweet land in!
Where we feasted and caroused on the sandless
Pebbles, affecting our day of piracy,
What prophecy of eaten plates could landless
Wanderers fulfill by the ancient sea?
We for that time might taste the famous age
Eternal here yet hidden from our eyes
When lust of power undid its stuffless rage;
They, in a wineskin, bore earth's paradise.
Let us lie down once more by the breathing side
Of Ocean, where our live forefathers sleep
As if the Known Sea still were a month wide—
Atlantis howls but is no longer steep!
What country shall we conquer, what fair land
Unman our conquest and locate our blood?
We've cracked the hemispheres with careless hand!
Now, from the Gates of Hercules we flood
Westward, westward till the barbarous brine
Whelms us to the tired land where tasseling corn,
Fat beans, grapes sweeter than muscadine
Rot on the vine: in that land were we born.

Where does this simplicity receive its authority? For this is an early if nearly perfect poem and simplicity is not of itself authoritative. It becomes so here, I believe—and I can only put it tautologically—through the interanimating efficacy of its figural statements. The journey which stands for a birth and a recovery, a conquest and a submission, the surfeit and loss at work in the mystery of origin, is elegiac. It is a reflection on the historical possibility of belonging in a dispersed society. The journey is a journey (not a dream) of reason. It is made knowable by association with the Aeneas myth of the reinstatement of civilization, the experience of transience being one way of understanding permanence. These memories of the possible are both allegorizing and allegorized by the acts of communion (the feast) and love so explicitly likened in the very setting out. That this action is time-bound yet ever presently implicated in “antiquity's delay” is also part of the poem's message, and by a similarly time-bound act of intellectual communion we apprehend it, according to our means. Each of these primal motives recurs thematically in successive poems, sometimes with less contemplative stress, but always in the sustention of forms—order, if you will, invoked against chaos—and in them we recognize not the minor poet who must cast about for topics and await occasions, but the intelligent obsession of the significant poet whose subject has selected him.

No man's mind is observable except analogously through the actions which it proffers for interpretation. And probably no action to which it applies itself is more highly fashioned than the poem. Mr. Tate himself clarifies the means at all our disposals when he says, in his essay “The Angelic Imagination”: “The reach of our imaginative enlargement is perhaps no longer than the ladder of analogy, at the top of which we may see all, if we wish to see anything, that we have brought up with us from the bottom, where lies the sensible world. If we take nothing with us to the top but our emptied, angelic intellects, we shall see nothing when we get there.”

The sensible world as Mr. Tate reads it is characterized not merely by succession and change, but by a nightmare disjunctiveness. History is not synonymous with order. The “famous age” is seen in a number of poems in analogical rapport with the present, never as an undiscriminated idyll, but inevitably with tragic irony. In “Aeneas at Washington” that time “when civilization / Run by the few fell to the many” is now, and carries with it its own destructive principle. The old soldier in “To the Lacedemonians” must say “There is no civilization without death.” And in the “Ode” the Confederate Dead are addressed:

You who have waited for the angry resolution
Of those desires that should be yours tomorrow,
You know the unimportant shrift of death
And praise the vision
And praise the arrogant circumstance
Of those who fall
Rank upon rank, hurried beyond decision—
Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall.

Malraux, in another context and of another medium, has said: “L'Artiste a besoin de ses prédécesseurs ‘vivants,’ qui … ne sont pas toujours leurs prédécesseurs immédiats mais les derniers grands.” (Voix du Silence, Paris, 1951) The poems at hand are a special and complex instance of this relationship, for at its source are to be had not simply the learnable craft, but the irreplaceable lessons of sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

The most analytic passion must be constructive in poetry. Moreover, Mr. Winters, in his book In Defense of Reason, rightly reminds us that language itself is a kind of abstraction, even at its most concrete. These are truths with which any good poet teaches himself to work. Many a counsel from the critical sidelines endorses his requisitioning of particulars, and has long done so, as a glance at any of the 12th century Arts Poétiques proclaims. But whether the rules are uttered or not, practice observes them. No living poet, I believe, in English has come more closely or more expertly to grips with the problems engendered by his analytical-creative purpose and the obstinate immateriality of the medium than Allen Tate.

The perfection of the virtue of art consists in the act of judging (St. Thomas). Baudelaire and M. Maritain in turn refer us to the necessary coincidence of the critical with the creative faculty. All poets must be critics, though critics are by no means necessarily poets. Yet a good many very competent poets never venture far beyond their first judicial mastery of concrete detail. It is the case indeed with Mr. Tate that the more analytic the content of a poem, the more specific and pressing the density in which it is achieved. In “Shadow and Shade”:

The torrent of the reaching shade
Broke shadow into all its parts,
What then had been of shadow made
Found exigence in fits and starts
Where nothing properly had name
Save that still element the air,
Burnt sea of universal frame
In which impounded now we were:

In “The Last Days of Alice”:

All space, that heaven is a dayless night,
A nightless day driven by perfect lust
For vacancy, in which her bored eyesight
Stares at the drowsy cubes of human dust.

Thus are the abstractive and the concrete brought into formal collaboration, and in too thoroughgoing and consistent a pattern, too deeply cognitive to be summarized as tactic. This is notably so in the sonnets, in “Death of Little Boys,” “Idiot,” “Subway,” “Ancestors,” and more familiarly in “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” There in the graveyard behind the shut gate and the decomposing wall it is constituted as

The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,
Riots with his tongue through the hush—
Sentinel of the grave who counts us all …

by no mere trick of style. But it is most comprehensively realized in the “Seasons of the Soul.”

T. E. Hulme once proposed that the masters of painting are born into the world at a time when the particular tradition from which they start is imperfect. M. Maritain and Mr. Tate himself agree that the luckiest moments for poetry are those when great civilization is on the verge of decline. In Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, Maritain says: “Then the vital force of this civilization meets with historical conditions which cease being appropriate to it, but it is still intact … in the sphere of spiritual creativity, and it gives its last fruit there, while the freedom of poetry avails itself of the decay of social disciplines and ethos.” There is nothing like deprivation in the existential realm to propel us to celebrating its integrity in more durable forms. Such was Dante's occasion for the Commedia and such, with even more tangible precipitants of our late wars both hot and cold, is the occasion for “Seasons of the Soul.” Here is the artist shoring up the ruins of culture until he may have nothing left to do it with save irony, and silence (invoked finally in the fourth section of this poem).

Any one stanza of this metaphysically oriented work serves notice on us—as would any of John Donne's—that the precarious freedom of the metaphysical, like that of a religious vow of chastity, is firmly rooted in traditional forms. Were the forms not present there would be no resistance to qualify the tensions which are the necessary matrix of this mode:

Summer, this is our flesh,
The body you let mature;
If now while the body is fresh
You take it, shall we give
The heart, lest heart endure
The mind's tattering
Blow of greedy claws?
Shall mind itself still live
If like a hunting king
It falls to the lion's jaws?

There are four seasonal sections, each presenting six intricately rhymed ten-line stanzas, with fugal variations of each tenth verse, with internal counterpointing recurrences of certain words, all in accentual trimeters; 149 out of 240 verses are run-on; only one of 24 stanzas is unclosed. Yet it would be impossible to claim that this poem postulates the primacy of style or celebrates technique in the substantive flux so evident in the mannerist practice of its contemporaries.

Jean Rousset, in La Litterature de L'Age Baroque, Circé et le Paon (Paris, 1960) says of the baroque spirit (which seems pervasive in so much contemporary poetry) that it is the enemy of all stable form, that it is “poussé par son démon à se dépasser toujours et a défaire sa forme au moment qu'il l'invente pour se porter vers une autre forme.” We delegate such terms to account for the kinds of poetic practices, but it is as schemata that they fall into disarray. The disturbance, the unrest which qualify what we name baroque are not first structural, but signify the tension of irreconcilables with which as process the perceiving mind is in the act of coping. There are conventions which, while they do not do the whole work, sustain it in a vital way. There is the old-fashioned invocation used with incremental irony in Winter: “You, Venus, come home / To your salt maidenhead,” and later: “Irritable spring, infuse / Into the burning breast / Your combustible juice.” Dantean allusion (as to the wood of suicides) is predicated in Dantean simile. The same obtains as well, both in overall plan and specific techniques, in the recent poems in terza rima, “The Swimmers” and “The Buried Lake.” Yet to have made this point is not to say that these are poems “of surfaces.” It is rather to have begun to see that these poems both are and are about the mind engaged in meeting the unalterable manic season of the present … and prevailing, upon the only grounds where it is possible now to prevail:

Under the summer's blast
The soul cannot endure
Unless by sleight or fast
It seize or deny its day
To make the eye secure.
Brothers in arms, remember
The hot wind dries and draws
With circular delay
The flesh, ash from the ember,
Into the summer's jaws.
It was a gentle sun
When, at the June solstice
Green France was overrun
With caterpillar feet.
No head knows where its rest is
Or may lie down with reason
When war's usurping claws
Shall take the heart escheat—
Green field in burning season
To stain the weevil's jaws.

Malraux has said in Psychologie de l'Art, “L'art est une façon de faire, et non une façon de voir ou de sentir,” and rightly so. Yet one cannot make what one has not in some manner seen; one cannot see what has not impinged upon the senses. What use are the weevil of summer or winter's rigid madrepore if they do not perform a service beyond the mere data of the event? Here we must admit, I think, that these along with other occasionally problematic figures are instruments of a drastic revelation. The poet is at least one step deeper in his predicament than the philosopher. If both are given to reductive analyses of the world around them, the poet must also make what he sees and in the process impart to it in transreality an order which in its own state it never possesses. If we were to lose our symbolic language, I think Mr. Tate has somewhere said, then we should no longer have the means of surviving the conditions of our own humanity. The philosopher Robert Jordan has this to say about the working conjunction of seeing and making:

The important philosophical task is to rescue metaphor from the manipulators of the psychological image and restore it to its relevant ontological status. In the context of metaphysical structures, metaphor can be seen not as the product of wayward associations but as the embodiment of the intentional acts of the mind which terminate not only in simple objects of perception but in complex relational structures possessing real being, or having a foundation in reality. The complexity of the poet's vision, on the side of its object, involves, then, a whole philosophy of participation and analogy and cannot be regarded as if it were simple …

The complexity of the poetic vision on the side of the subject is another theme … It is like the philosophic vision in being, as the phenomenologists call it, an intentional act. The intentionality of human experience refers not to purposive intent but to the relational structure of all human awareness and especially to the ‘tending toward’ or conscious and significant awareness which makes active and fully rational experience bipolar in its very nature. It contrasts with the psycho-biological ‘state’ which is the favorite preoccupation of the image cultists and the quivering foundation of the private-precious mythos, the only real threat to the artist there is …

(Two Modes of Revelation,” Sewanee Review 67).

To such a threat Mr. Tate has given no indications of capitulating. Nor has he ever compromised, in the search for the completeness of knowledge which is the poem, his views of what this office as maker demands of the poet. In the purity of his attention to the task at hand lies the heroism of the rational.