[In the following essay, Squires explores the significance of three of Tate's poems: “The Maimed Man,” “The Swimmers,” and “The Buried Lake.”]

It may well turn out that of Allen Tate's poems those which will claim the greatest attention are those that today are the least read. These include two poems written in 1952, “The Maimed Man” and “The Swimmers”, and one poem written in 1953, “The Buried Lake”. They must be approached from several different directions: first, as logical developments in Tate's poetry as poetry; second, as logical developments in Tate's thought; third, as a logical break on Tate's part with certain aspects of T. S. Eliot's poetry.

The suggestion behind the phrase “logical developments in Tate's poetry as poetry” is that a writer's poetry possesses a life of its own. It may be affected by many externalities, yet it possesses a core immune to influences. This is so because poetry exists in an alliance of rhythmic, imagistic, and linguistic forces. Any one or all of these powers can be magnetized by events or another poet's accomplishment, but the alliance will adjust to a new balance, and the alliance will continue. Another reason that an individual's poetry has an autonomous existence is that the compulsive images of a poet come from private experience, and, even more importantly, that these images sometimes beget, without extramural contact, further images by parthenogenesis. To observe this process in operation we may ponder Tate's outburst of creativity in 1942 and 1943, that culminated in “Seasons of the Soul”, which in its phrase “make the eye secure” entreats a correction of vision. This same fascination with the metaphoric eye continued in a negative way in the poem “The Eye”, written in 1947. In 1950 Tate published in pamphlet form from the Cummington Press a poem, “Two Conceits for the Eye to Sing, If Possible”. The very title of this poem suggests an aesthetic desperation. The poem itself is based on parodic imitations of nursery rhymes—and nursery rhymes often border on hysteria.

Sing a song of 'sistence
                    Pocketfull of Eye

or

Big, inside the tub,
Rubbed hey dub-a-dub,

and

Mary quite contrary
Light as a green fairy
Dances, dances. Mary.

No disrespect to Tate is intended in saying that these formulations are “fond and foolish”. They are the kind of fatuity that is sometimes necessary to move one's art to another plane. And Tate himself has not thought enough of the poem to preserve it in later collections. The point, however, is this: although the poem takes the image or symbol of the eye—employed suggestively in the poems of 1942-1943, austerely in “The Eye”—and reduces it momentarily to gibberish, two significant extensions of the image emerge. First, the “eye” obtains a ratiocinative twin (a “conceit”) through a pun:

When the I's were opened
          They saw ne'er a thing …

Second, this poem, which is about the triumph of naturalism and science over humanity, terminates with the vision, quoted above, of Mary who is “green”. To be brutal in paraphrase: the Mother of Christ is separated from the world of the positivist's eye and the egoistical “I”, and in her greenness, growth, and life, she dwells only in an infantine world of mysterious doggerel. Now, in the poems of 1952 and 1953, the eye and the pastoral (green) world reassemble, but they do so seriously and importantly. All this is a way of saying that a poet must sometimes use up his failures before he can find his success. This development, at any rate, lay within the boundaries of the logic of Tate's poetry.

As to the second direction, the “logical developments in Tate's thought”: we need to able to weigh the effect of Jacques Maritain's views on Tate's own concepts. This is most difficult to do. Tate's ideas on religion and art were developed and similar to Maritain's before they met. One needs only to remark how early Tate had reacted against the secularity of twentieth-century neo-humanism to see that he and Maritain were intellectual allies. But doubtless Maritain stood as a confirming hero to Tate, and Maritain's book The Dream of Descartes (1944) gave support and vocabulary to him. This book, which was very fashionable reading after World War II, takes the position that Descartes, in giving form and direction to the rising rationalism, split man in two. Maritain speaks of Descartes as possessing “two precious truths—one that is old, the other new”. The new is “the living truth of physico-mathematical science”. The old is “that ancient truth, the Socratic and Christian precept: Go back into thyself and into the spiritual element which is within thee.” Yet, according to Maritain, Descartes's famous solitude and introspection were not those of a man of prayer; the solitude and introspection served the creation of a cosmos, a very abstract one, within Descartes's intellect. It is a mechanical cosmos free from the senses. It accounts for what Maritain calls “the three great Dante, he should attend to memories of childhood and the inner world of fantasy and dream. The place of childhood is obvious enough. The eye of the child is fierce and fresh. So we may see here that Tate's desire is like Wordsworth's desire to see in a visionary way. He wishes to recapture the poignancy of “fair seed time” when everything is seen as new, when nothing yet has lapsed into patterns. Hence in “The Swimmers” the voice goes forth crying in the deserts of middle age:

          O fountain, bosom source undying-dead
          Replenish me the spring of love and fear
And give me back the eye that looked and fled
          When a thrush idling in the tulip tree
          Unwound the cold dream of the copperhead.

As to why Tate should have worked into these poems the irrational dream world, the answer must be more complex and less satisfactory. Childhood is held dumb and hidden (dead childhood is carried like the unborn child in the psyche) beneath adult consciousness except for times such as dream-states, when the terrors or fixations of the earlier state break forth. In this way the dream and the childhood experience are similar. We can find a stronger reason in a letter Tate wrote to Wallace Stevens on December 7, 1949:

I have been reading your ten new poems [“Things of August”] in POETRY, and I am very much moved by two of them. This is a letter to myself which you have picked up from the floor and read because it is about your poems. I take these two poems very much to myself as the occasion of stating certain differences from the work of an older contemporary whom I admire and have learned from. The poems are numbers 2 and 3. To attempt to formulate differences is to try to keep on learning.

When I was young I admired “Sunday Morning” more than any other poem of our time; and I still do, for what it taught me, and for its own magnificence. But I knew then that what you were doing was not for me: I could never reach it. The angelisme of the intelligence which defines “horizons that neither love nor hate” I could believe in as a human possibility but I could not possess it, or live inside it. It is perhaps a little presumptuous of me to take these two poems of yours as a profound insight, accidentally reached, into my own special limitations; if so, you will accept my apology. The “air within a grave or down a well” is almost the inevitable air for the man of our time who cannot be, like the woman in “Sunday Morning,” alone in the world with the “thought of heaven”.

That is my message to myself. The man who breathes the air of the well cannot breathe purer air unless it be the air of revelation: the angelic intellect is not within his reach. What I have learned, then, from these two poems is a new way of putting a dilemma of our time—and it may be the dilemma: either the revealed access to the world or the angelic mind looking down upon it.

Quite naturally, Tate, who in “Seasons of the Soul” had written “I was down a well,” would be arrested by Stevens's phrase. More significantly, one can see that for Tate the avoidance of angelisme (in the sense Maritain uses the word, not quite in the sense Stevens uses it in his essays) derived from his looking out from his “well”, his Plato's cave, his mind, rather than gazing gigantically down like Poe's Satan. In other words, Tate approaches vision through the self's confined space rather than the universe's isotropic vistas.

“The Maimed Man” is locally confined to the very common space of a street and a vacant lot. Nevertheless, it begins with an invocation to “didactic Laurel”, who is asked to “assert your blade / Against the Morning Star, enlightening Thief / Of that first Mother who returned the Maid.” The invocation cuts the human universe into three parts, that of the Laurel, that of the ruptures” of modern man: “the rupture of thought with being, of the movement of the soul toward wisdom, and of the human compound.”

Tate incorporated some of this view in his incomparably fine essays on Edgar Allan Poe, “Our Cousin, Mr. Poe” (1949) and “The Angelic Imagination” (1951). Poe's “angelism” directs the creation of a world of absolute order, indeed of logic, but one which yields no true equivalent to the world as revealed by the senses. Poe's angelism is modern man's:

Poe as God sits silent in darkness. Here the movement of tragedy is reversed: there is no action. Man as angel becomes a demon who cannot initiate the first motion of love, and we can feel only compassion with his suffering, for it is potentially ours.

Against Poe's a-sensuous cosmogony in which Satan has triumphed over God—for it is the sin of intellectual pride Tate is talking about in “The Angelic Imagination”—Tate counterweighs the cosmos of Dante. In his great essay “The Symbolic Imagination” Tate's primary point is that Dante works from the common and sensual to the extraordinary and the suprasensual. Tate's word for it is not “suprasensual” but “anagogical”, a word that appears frequently in the later essays, just as the word “failure” occurred frequently in the earlier essays. Indeed, the anagogical or mystical discovery became Tate's way of surmounting what he once thought to be inevitable failure. In his classes at Minnesota he taught that there are four levels to poetry, the historical, the substantive, the rhetorical, and the anagogical which gives us the spiritual meaning of a poem. The anagogical plane was forbidden to Poe, who in order to “discover” God can only become a god. The opposite, Tate came to believe, was true of Dante, who employs among his common analogies an analogy of mirrors, which allows him to partake of God rather than supplant him.

In these essays Tate is engrossed as always in the pursuit of wholeness, particularly the wholeness of the poet. Yet his concern has shifted from Eliot's “dissociation of sensibility”, that split between feeling and intellect, to a dissociation of the self and outer nature. In 1964 Tate put it this way in “The Unliteral Imagination; Or I, too, Dislike It”:

But if we still find useful the idea of dissociation, I suggest that what was dissociated—whenever it may have been dissociated—was not thought from feeling, nor feeling from thought; what was dissociated was the external world which by analogy could become the interior world of the mind.

The passage makes us think of “The Trout Map”. It also contains the third direction, “a logical break on Tate's part with certain aspects of T. S. Eliot's poetry”. It was a logical break because it was ordained by Tate's Catholicism.

We may put these directions together by considering his three late poems. “The Maimed Man”, “The Swimmers”, and “The Buried Lake” are autobiographical poems, constituting but three parts of one long poem. The original, though tentative, scheme was for nine parts, with “The Maimed Man” standing first. Later Tate altered the scheme to include only six poems, with “The Maimed Man” standing last. Other sections of the poem exist in various stages of completion, but they have not been published. We deal with the parts, then, not the whole. Just as the poems of 1942-1943 materialized through the medium of severe prosodic form, so these poems speak through the form most difficult to employ in English, terza rima. “The Swimmers” retells an experience from childhood; the other two poems also depend upon youthful experiences but they primarily develop from dreams or reveries reminiscent of the nightmare section of “Seasons of the Soul”.

At the outset one may well ask why, if Tate wanted to bring into his poetry an external sensuous world after the model of Morning Star, and that of the myrtle. The Laurel, sacred to Apollo, evokes a poetry located in reason; the myrtle, sacred to Aphrodite, evokes Pandemic love. Exactly what association of the Morning Star is intended cannot be so surely asserted, for the Morning Star can be a number of planets. But because of the reference to the “enlightening thief”, one supposes with R. K. Meiners that the reference is to the planet Mercury, hence to Hermes. It is Hermes who is the son of Maia, which means “mother”, and he does return Persephone to Demeter. In the Homeric “Hymn to Demeter”, the goddesses Demeter and Kore (Persephone) are referred to as the “Mother” and the “Maid”. Hence, the beginning of the poem sets Apollonian reason against passion and Hermetic knowledge. The associations of Hermes as the archetypal thief, the god who conducts shades to the underworld, as well as the scientist god of alchemy, emerge wittily and ultimately associate Hermes, through the one word “enlightening”, with Cartesian Enlightenment.

                                                            … because I am afraid
Of him who says I have no need to fear,
          Return, Laurel!

The fear is of the scientifically “explained” universe. The poet continues then to sue for the help of Apollonian Laurel because the world of sense has failed him and he can no longer feel. His tear is “metal”. Hence, his poetry must be realized through form and tradition.

After the invocation the poem veers suddenly to a scene, represented as a memory, where the poet walking in sunlight sees a young man who is headless and whose feet are bluegrass. The grotesque encounter reminds one of Shelley's encounter with Rousseau, ruined and gnarled like a tree root, in the beginning of “The Triumph of Life”—a poem that like Tate's is also Dantean. One suspects that the headless figure is based, like part II of “Seasons of the Soul”, upon a recurrent dream. There is no evidence for the suspicion, but the suspicion is intensified by a late chapter in Caroline Gordon's novel The Malefactors. Here the hero dreams of pursuing two figures who hurl themselves over a precipice. He looks down to see that they are headless. He is prevented from following them by his father, who also threatens in the dream to remove his head. A bit later we discover that the abyss is in a cave entered by pushing aside a growth of laurel. It is perhaps of significance also that one of the headless figures in the dream is Horne Watts, who is obviously modeled on Hart Crane. Finally, in this context two lines are quoted from Tate's early poem “Homily” (1922):

Tear out the close vermiculate crease
Where death crawled angrily at bay.

All of this may be only coincidence, or, if it has any basis in fact, it may have been altered beyond relevance by the exigencies of fiction. In Tate's poem the headless and footless figure is offered as a premonitory symbol of a life without reason and a life—so one takes these bluegrass feet—incapable of movement, hence incapable of moral action. The speaker then observes that he ought to join his own head and feet with the maimed man's body by putting them together in the grave. But he goes on to ask how he could “know this friend without reproach”. That very question is the one he says he will be asking “in the poor boy's curse, / Witching for water in a waste of shame”. The reference to Shakespeare's sonnet reminds us that one pays for waste of shame by an “expense of spirit”. Nevertheless, to these “pastoral terrors of youth, still in the man”, Tate promises to devote “emblematic verse / Rattling like dice unless the verse shall scan / All chance away”. The rest of the poem will not yield to paraphrase:

Meanwhile the scarecrow, man all coat and stem,
          Neither dead nor living, never in this world—
          In what worlds, or in what has essenced them,
I did not know until one day I whirled
          Towards a suggesting presence in my room
          And saw in the waving mirror (glass swirled
By old blowers) a black trunk without bloom—
          Body that once had moved my face and feet.
          My secret was his father, I his tomb.
(By I I mean iambics willed and neat;
          I mean by I God's image made uncouth;
          By eye I mean the busy, lurked, discrete
Mandible world sharp as a broken tooth.)
          And then rose in the man a small half-hell
          Where love disordered, shade of pompous youth,
Clutched shades forbearing in a family well;
          Where the sleek senses of the simple child
          Came back to rack spirit that could not tell
Natural time: the eyes, recauled, enisled
          In the dreamt cave by shadow womb of beam,
          Had played swimmer of night—the moist and mild!
Now take him, Virgin Muse, up the deeper stream:
          As a lost bee returning to the hive,
          Cell after honeyed cell of sounding dream—
Swimmer of noonday, lean for the perfect dive
          To the dead Mother's face, whose subtile down
          You had not seen take amber light alive.

This is a parade of earlier poetic materials. The “shades forbearing in a family well” recalls “Sonnets of the Blood” and, more obviously, part II of “Seasons of the Soul”. The play on the word “I” recalls “The Eye” and “Two Conceits for the Eye to Sing, If Possible”. But the poem also looks forward to “The Swimmers” in the icon of the embryo-child whose senses shame the mature man who has lost the natural world. To this child beneath the skin the poet at the end turns. And the ending of “The Maimed Man” is as sublime poetry as the century has produced. Unfortunately, the rest of the poem does not come up to it. The puns and colloquialisms are embarrassingly embedded in the graver matrix of the poem. Some of the passages are incomprehensible; some are clumsy. And the end gives no certitude that the invocation to Apollonian reason at the beginning squares with the emphasis on “the sleek senses” at the end. It should square, for Tate had come to believe that true reason required tutoring by the senses. But the philosophic conviction behind a poem is a different matter from its demonstration. Although “The Maimed Man” was published in The Partisan Review in 1952, Tate did not choose to include it in Poems (1960). The two poems that followed “The Maimed Man” belong with his best.

“The Swimmers” did exactly what Tate hoped it would. The terza rima worked perfectly. The imagery presented thematic epiphanies. Furthermore, the poem is so lucid that any extended “interpretation” would constitute an insult. “The Swimmers” retells, with only a few facts altered, the experience Tate had of seeing when he was eleven the body of a lynched Negro dragged into the town of Mount Sterling, Kentucky. The lynching was not the standard “rape-case”. The Negro had murdered his landlord after an altercation, but Tate does not specify any background to the lynching, for he wants the drama to remain a universal agony upon which he can affix his personal yet conforming specifics. There are visible specifics—even the names of his playmates are given. He goes so far as to make a joke at his own expense. His memory of his parents' apprehension that he suffered from hydrocephalus appears in his reference to “Tate, with water on the brain”. A compound joke, philosophical, religious, as well as biographical.

The ending of “The Swimmers” is true to the important fact of the incident—the town never admitted to itself that the lynching had occurred:

My breath crackled the dead air like a shotgun
          As, sheriff and the stranger disappearing,
          The faceless head lay still. I could not run
Or walk, but stood. Alone in the public clearing
          This private thing was owned by all the town,
          Though never claimed by us within my hearing.

Unimportant facts were changed for dramatic purposes. Tate did not, as in the poem, follow the sheriff back into town, but cut through the fields and beat him into town. Nor, in the actual incident, did Tate's companions desert him. But the solitariness of the boy who followed the “cloudy hearse” was necessary to the full impact of the Jesus-Christers' ritual sacrifice of the Negro. The town itself had to be rendered as nearly deserted as possible so as to tune to a blinding sharpness the focus upon all humanity's desolation in evil. In that desolation we perceive that the evil must be “owned”.

Robert Lowell wrote to Tate to say that “The Swimmers” was the best poem Allen had ever done, the finest terza rima in English. He found it better even than Shelley's use of the form. Yet Lowell was less sanguine about Tate's next poem, “The Buried Lake”. He found the sound of it like “choking”. And he objected to its similarities with “Seasons of the Soul”, its “Allenisms” and contorted phrasing. In contrast, W. H. Auden wrote that he thought “The Buried Lake” might well be Tate's best single poem. Let Lowell and Auden both be right. “The Swimmers” is Tate's most nearly perfect poem. “The Buried Lake” is his richest.

It will be remembered that “The Maimed Man” begins with an invocation to the “didactic laurel”, while “The Swimmers” begins with an invocation to the hypersensitivity of childhood. “The Buried Lake” trundles a vulgate epigraph from the Apocrypha: “Ego mater pulchrae dilectionis, et timoris, et agnitionis, et sanctae spei.” (“I, mother of rare beauty, fear, knowledge, and divine hope.”) This mother, as versatile as Robert Graves's White Goddess, serves to draw us into the invocation which this time is addressed to the lady of light or Santa Lucia. As others have pointed out, among this saint's virtues is her power to cure blindness—at once we understand her presence. She has been waiting for years for Tate to come to her with his optical problems. These words are not intended to be flippant. The poem, all one hundred and twenty lines, is about a cure of the vision. The cure requires an approach, a way, to Santa Lucia:

The Way and the way back are long and rough
          Where Myrtle twines with Laurel …

And so the Heraclitean odos trodden by Eliot in the Four Quartets combines here with the elements of laurel and myrtle which were kept separate in “The Maimed Man”. This twining of love and reason, which is the cure for the failing vision, takes us for a time down in a dream trance below the play and terrific babble of childhood toward the buried lake of—shall we say—memory; we could say “salvation”. Finally, the poet enters a “pinched hotel” where a dog, like Cerberus, welcomes him with “a sickly cark”. Suddenly it is not really a hotel he has entered. It is a deserted music room with benches ranged along the walls. We are then informed that he exults in a secret plan: he has come there to play his violin.

I laid my top hat to one side; my chin
          Was ready, I unsnapped the lyric case;
          I had come there to play my violin.
Erect and sinuous as Valence lace
          Old ladies wore, the bow began to fill
          The shining box—whence came a dreaming face,
Small dancing girl who gave the smell of dill
          In pelts of mordents on a minor third
          From my cadenza for the Devil's Trill.
No, no! her quick hand said in a soft surd.
          She locked the fiddle up and was not there.
          I mourned the death of youth without a word.

We can pinpoint one memory to which the poem has returned. Between October, 1916, and April, 1917, Tate studied violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. At a student recital he played for his teacher, Eugène Ysaye, Tartini's “Devil's Trill Sonata”. Ysaye complimented him on his left hand but said he had no talent for music. At this time Tate abandoned his aspirations to a musical career. It would seem, therefore, that the episode records a blighted hope. If this is so, the dancing girl is not to be taken as a girl Tate knew, but only as the face that appears in the sheen of the violin. Come to think of it, the resin applied to violin bows smells, as does this girl, like dill. With this failure, just as Tate returned to academic studies after giving up music, the poet must seek for another, more capable existence, asking if he could “go where air was not dead air”. He is met, however, by the enemy:

And could I go where air was not dead air?
          My friend Jack Locke, scholar and gentleman,
          Gazed down upon me with a friendly glare,
Flicking his nose as if about to scan
          My verse; he plucked from his moustache one hair
          Letting it fall like gravel in a pan …

Surely John Locke is really Descartes or Hermes. And how very nicely Tate depicts his own exclusion from the world of “enlightenment” in the ironic picture of the hair falling like gravel into one pan of the scales. And how much this John Locke is like Zeus, who is fond of weighing the fates of heroes in the scale pan. The encounter with John Locke dramatizes another failure, this time a failure not of art but of one of art's antipodes, the positivist's rationalism.

Then the poet sinks deeper into his dream, and a lost love comes to him. She has come back to give him “all”, she says. But as he reaches her, her head becomes “another's searching skull whose drying teeth / Crumbled me all night long and I was dead”:

          Down, down below the wave that turned me round,
          Head downwards where the Head of God had sped
On the third day; where nature had unwound
          And ravelled her green that she had softly laved—
          The green reviving spray now slowly drowned
Me, since the shuttling eye would not be saved.

The conception of the Head of God speeding down is very strange. Literally it refers to the legend of Christ's going down to harrow hell after His resurrection on the third day. But the image exceeds its literal basis. Perhaps it was originally intended to mate with the line in “The Maimed Man” where we find “I mean by I God's image made uncouth.” It is also possible that Tate is thinking of one of Thomas Hardy's poems he had admired for a long time, “Nature's Questioning”, from which he quotes the following lines with approval:

Or come we from an Automaton
          Unconscious of our pains?
          Or are we live remains
Of Godhead dying downwards, brain and eye now gone?

In a final estimate, we need neither “The Maimed Man” nor Thomas Hardy. God has disappeared into a pastoral world that has become hidden under a covering of Cartesian science. That insight is William Blake's rather than Hardy's. Indeed, the image of the Head of God speeding down toward hell has much in common with the spatial energies of Blake's graphic art.

In any case the image takes us as deep as we can go into hell. Then from the dark night of the senses the dream begins to rise. And it seems significant that the poet must rehearse his own and history's failures, must go down to the ultimate dark of the self before he can bend his knees and receive the benison of Santa Lucia. He receives this benison or awareness exactly in the way that Tate observes that Dante receives his awareness—that is, through a mirror symbol. In his essay “The Symbolic Imagination” Tate quotes from the beginning of Paradiso XXVIII and comments as follows:

Beatrice's eyes are a mirror in which is reflected that ‘sharp point,’ to which Dante, still at a distance from it, now turns his direct gaze. As he looks at it he sees for the first time what its reflection in Beatrice's eyes could not convey: that it is the sensible world turned inside out. For the sensible world as well as her eyes is only a reflection of the light from the sharp point. Now he is looking at the thing-in-itself. He has at last turned away from the mirror which is the world.

Tate has further commentary upon the mirror symbol and Beatrice's laboratory demonstration of the symbol, but this much is sufficient to relate the poem with the essay. Once the poet's vision is corrected, “The Buried Lake” moves toward restorations of the sensuous world, promising that “all the sad eclogue … will soon be merry.” The final lines are entirely beautiful:

[I] knew that nature could not more refine
          What it had given in a looking-glass
          And held there, after the living body's line
Has moved wherever it must move—wild grass
          Inching the earth; and the quicksilver art
          Throws back the invisible but lightning mass
To inhabit the room; for I have seen it part
          The palpable air, the air close up above
          And under you, light Lucy, light of heart—
Light choir upon my shoulder, speaking Dove,
          The dream is over and the dark expired.
          I knew that I had known enduring love.

With these confident lines Tate's published poetry ceases. Looking at the three late poems one sees that they belong to a pattern repeated throughout Tate's career. It is a pattern in which we are conscious of a ratio of relative failures to relative successes. “The Maimed Man”, fine as it is in places, fragments, and the macabre elements will not stay with the rational. “The Buried Lake” vibrates continuously but does not move very far. “The Swimmers”, perfectly attuned to Dante's form, moves through its journey-encounters and stands at last, as all fine poetry does, not as a set of symbols, but as an action which is in toto symbolic. Now, this same ratio may be observed in the summits of all of Tate's poetry. “Ode to the Confederate Dead” emerges from a context of several inferior poems that are thematically similar. “The Mediterranean” rises above the lesser poem “Aeneas at Washington”; “Seasons of the Soul” issues from the lesser poem “Winter Mask”. But that is only part of the pattern. It remains to be observed that all of these poems are concerned with integrity or its absence. The visitor to the Confederate graveyard is locked in his sensibility; the picnicker at the Mediterranean cove has exchanged the telic search of Aeneas for a search for those spiritual roots which will give him a sense of wholeness; the man who looks at World War II and perceives that the world is a dead land, perceives also that the world could be restored by love—although he is not sure that love can be found; the man who sinks into the buried lake of the self is self-baptized, and his pastoral vision is restored. Tate was right, then, when he told his friends that he was always writing only one poem. But there are peaks in the one poem and these peaks obtained with the most severe effort throughout his career are the poems which make him one of the masters of a varied and brilliant epoch. But even if his superior poems had not come, he would still be an important poet, for we should have “Death of Little Boys” instead of “Ode to the Confederate Dead”. We should have “The Buried Lake” instead of “The Swimmers”. And we should pay them homage as examples of a poetry that strained, indeed wrenched, the language with bitter zeal. We should see, moreover, that that zeal was one that sprang from a refusal to tolerate falseness either in the self or in man in general. Tate's language is of that kind which wells forth when the poet presses with all his force for a victory which he knows he will not obtain.

Because he has been unable to lie to us about victory, his poems have never been very popular. For popular poetry is the kind that encourages people who are not poets to believe that they are. Tate's poetry cannot have that effect. But the effect it can and does have is that of reminding us that the heroic, the saintly act is a subjective, even a hidden, act of such private intensity that its public implementation is only an inevitable step, not a greater step. In this way Tate is entirely different from T. S. Eliot, whom he resembles in such obvious but superficial ways that some critics stopped digging for the treasure when they found a few coins in the topsoil. Eliot's poetry has no private morality. His figures are either public saints or paralyzed puppets, just as his cats are either practical or dead. But it is by reason of this very difference that Tate in his later poetry could achieve an optimism that never came to Eliot. One can after all save what can be saved if he does not try to save what cannot be saved.

A question remains as to why Tate has not finished or at least has not published the rest of the long poem of which “The Maimed Man”, “The Swimmers”, and “The Buried Lake” are parts. If the question cannot be answered it can be surrounded. It is noteworthy that “The Buried Lake” was written just at a time when the whole life of poetry underwent one of its periodic changes. “The Buried Lake”, like Eliot's Four Quartets and Stevens's Auroras of Autumn, belongs in a category of poetry which brings a literary movement to an end. Though they are not weary poems, they are not poems written with either the bravura of beginnings or the impudence of revolt. “The Buried Lake” incorporates most of the devices of the great modernist period, all the effort at “concreteness”, which as it becomes formula threatens to become abstraction; all the subtleties of symbol, which as it becomes décor threatens to become obvious. These and other devices of Modernism come up like slow, beautiful bubbles in the viscous element of “The Buried Lake”. Yet “The Buried Lake” is a beautiful poem. After all, it takes as high a talent to finish an age as to begin one. But the phrase “to finish” applies only to “The Buried Lake”. It does not apply to “The Swimmers”, which contains so much organic life that it could be carbon-dated every day for the next century, and the reading would always come back: “Born today.”

“The Buried Lake” appeared just as a new poetry began to rise in America. This new poetry's obsessions with oratory, romantic gesture, and exhibitionism have for nearly two decades altered the way poetry works in the modern world. Even some of Tate's friends shifted eventually toward the new mode, among them Robert Penn Warren, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman. Tate knew that this change had occurred sooner than the proponents of the new poetry did, for he wrote in 1955 to Brewster Ghiselin: “The long poem I am doing (at intervals) is difficult, and I fear that even when it's done—if it ever is—it will make little headway with even the ‘literary’ people. The drift today is all against this sort of thing.” But would this knowledge keep Tate from completing his poem? Probably not. It is only part of the picture. In any case Tate has continued to work over other sections of the poem. As late as 1964, with his grandson for company, he made an automobile trip through Kentucky, visiting places he had not seen for forty years in order to acquire confidence in what he was writing.

It may be that Tate will publish the rest of the long poem soon and thereby render these words obsolete. That is an antiquation devoutly to be wished for. For one may be sure that new poems will not be given to the world until Tate is certain that the world is where they belong. It is because of this scrupulousness that one can say of Allen Tate, who has not been a prolific poet, what Dryden said of a very prolific poet: “Here is God's plenty.”