Of the writers born in 1899 who achieved world wide recognition—among them Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Allen Tate—Tate is probably now the least familiar to readers. He never became the center of a cult of bull fighting, he did not invent a word such as “nymphet” and he did not write the hall of mirrors fiction that would fascinate a Michel Foucault or a Jacques Derrida. He has dropped from favor partly because, as Louise Cowan has said, he “may well be the most difficult poet of the twentieth century, more difficult even than Pound or Eliot” (372), and partly because he is associated with the New Criticism, which is now treated by post-structuralist theorists as though it were both naive and subtly reactionary. Recently, he has become subject to political attack from an unsuspected quarter. As a Southerner who participated in the Agrarian Movement in the 1930's, he is implicitly included in Allan Bloom's denunciation of Southern writers in his introduction to The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom blames the Southerners of Tate's generation for popularizing a vocabulary of cultural relativism and anti-constitutionalism that fueled the excesses of the New Left in the Sixties (32).¹ Tate is very clearly not guilty, but if Bloom is believed, he will be damned in the general censure.

These tendencies in posthumous fame are most unfortunate, especially if they keep him from being read by those interested in Dante and Christian culture. There is probably no deeper or more subtle mind in twentieth-century letters than Allen Tate's. The difficulty of his poetry indicates the complexity of his refusal to abandon this world in his search for spiritual truth. His essays have a broad cultural range and an unpredictable subtlety of argument; although he was one of the most influential “New Critics,” he never wrote the kind of close textual analysis usually associated with imitators of Cleanth Brooks's The Well-Wrought Urn. His achievement both poetically and critically reached its height in the four or five years surrounding his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1950. What is remarkable about his writing of that period is the pervasive presence of Dante, who is the overt subject matter of perhaps his finest essay, “The Symbolic Imagination,” and the source of the terzarima that Tate uses in his greatest poems, including “The Swimmers.” Dante's presence is not an overbearing influence that Tate cannot escape, but a difficulty achieved mode of the Christian imagination; it is for Tate the highest mode because it is the only one that affirms “the body of this world” at the same time that it seeks the highest spiritual truths—and admits its own ultimate limitations.

From the time that he began to recognize the importance of Dante, no doubt because of T. S. Eliot, it took Tate more than two decades to begin to achieve the Dantean mode in his own work. The early career of Tate certainly seems alien from that of Dante. The last thing one can imagine Tate writing in his mid-twenties is the kind of love poetry that characterizes the Vita Nuova. Tate's poems were acidic in their ironies, jarring in their juxtaposition of images; instead of mourning the loss of Beatrice, he meditated on the death of little boys: “the windowpane extends a fear to you / From one peeled aster drenched with the wind all day” (“Death of Little Boys,” 1977: 3). If he thought of ladies, he imagined a mother who had convinced herself that the dances of the twenties still resembled “what their great grandfathers did.” She scans the dance floor with a lorgnette for eligible suitors while her flapper daughter “squirms” in the Toddle and the Shimmy:

A spade is not a spade, and it is just
That any tremulous twisting of her lips
Should be mere prettiness, or call it grace
The canto amoroso of her hips.

(1977: 180)

That is not quite the same thing as “Ladies who have intelligence of love”; Provencal or the Florence of the dolce stil nuovo are bitter reminders to this satirical young man.

Tate saw himself and his generation, not as men and women coming to maturity in hopeful times, but as “wearied infants / In a palsied age” (“Calidus Juventa?” 1977: 193), glutting themselves with infantile selfishness in a moribund culture. Nevertheless, at 26, Tate was already considering what Dante had done at the same age. In a letter to his friend Donald Davidson in November of 1925, Tate complained that he was not writing any poetry at the time: “and the reason is obvious: I have no idiom for a Vita Nuova, for it will take a long time for me even to understand it. For poetry is the triumph of life, not a commentary on its impossibility” (Fain 148). From the time of this letter until his conversion to Roman Catholicism 25 years later, he sought the spiritual and artistic plenitude, the unity of action, thought, and faith, that he saw in the idiom of Dante's mind; he wanted to bring it into being in his own personal voice and in the circumstances of his own time. His achievement of that idiom in his poetry of the early fifties was won, not by stylistic imitation, but by a gradual clearing of his own vision and a recognition of the tradition into which he had been born.

I

In the late twenties, when the South was being mocked as ignorant and backward in the aftermath of the Scopes trial, Tate and his friends from the “Fugitive” group at Vanderbilt began to feel the need for a defense of their region. Tate himself had never been a strong advocate of Southern things, but when he saw the uncomprehending scorn with which the South was viewed by the rest of the nation, he wrote to Davidson, “I've attacked the South for the last time, except in so far as it may be necessary to point out that the chief defect the Old South had was that in it which produced, through whatever cause, the New South.” He added that “contemporary Southern poetry which contains any of the Pure Ingredient is incomprehensible in its milieu. The sham stuff … is easy. [Its writers] merely exhibit for a foreign audience; they employ the accidents and omit the essences” (Fain 191-2). His point here is clear enough: any Southern writing that comes from the genuine Southern tradition—with its emphasis on noblesse oblige, personal honor, the piety of place, and the classical education of gentlemen (Weaver)—could not be understood in the culture of the twenties, especially in New York City, where Tate was at the time. If Dante's idiom was alien to him, his own Southernness was alien to his sophisticated contemporaries in much the same way. Increasingly, he felt himself as a modern Southerner to be in exile from the Old South where, as Radcliffe Squires has written, “much of his spiritual loyalty [lay]” (93).

Admittedly, exile was popular in the twenties. Most prominently, the circle of Gertrude Stein and Hemingway in Paris had followed Henry James and T. S. Eliot into a self-imposed exile from bourgeois America. When Tate was in Paris on a Guggenheim, he did a rather disgruntled stint at the feet of Miss Stein, who had sent him a note that read, “You will come to tea next Thursday.” But he was a poor disciple; he had trouble with Miss Stein's assertion that American literature was good to the extent that it was abstract, as Emerson had been, and that Henry James was bad—European—to the extent that he was bogged down in experience. Tate apparently said something to Miss Stein (who had ended this lecture with the proposal that she was the culmination of American literature) that could be construed as a reservation about her theory, whereupon he was upbraided (Squires 86). But the notion that American literature should be abstract, as Wallace Stevens later said about the “supreme fiction,” repelled Tate. Abstraction was the condition of his exile from a wholeness of vision that the South at least remembered in its continuity with the European heritage; in such famous early poems as “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” Tate struggled with the kind of crippling self-consciousness that stopped his speaker at the gate of the past and made him unable to enter, even in imagination, the world of heroic action. Perhaps Gertrude Stein helped Tate define what he sought by praising its opposite; increasingly, Tate sought to recover the meaning gained through the action of intellect upon whole (not abstracted) experience, given form in poetry. He would later call this mode of knowledge the “symbolic imagination”—a capacity to ground speculative thought in the particulars of action and not to indulge a kind of visionary Romantic introspection. In his defense of the South, which had never displayed any tendencies toward transcendentalism, he began to see that he could address problems of the highest cultural concern through a close attention to his own region and its past. Like Edmund Wilson and his other New York friends who espoused Marxism in the thirties, Tate got his bearings from history, but very much unlike them, he understood it in its particulars as the necessary literal level of all higher spiritual meaning.

Unlike some of his Southern friends, on the other hand, Tate made a special point of refusing to idealize the ante-bellum South, a tendency that he saw as “Romantic traditionalism.”² Interestingly, he could not separate his defense of the South from his early concern for the necessity of the Church. In a letter to Davidson in 1929, Tate wrote that “the modern humanists, however they try, cannot, without religion, get rid of the monistic assumptions of naturalism; without a clean break between the natural and the supernatural, humanism commits suicide. It can't be both monistic and dualistic, and unless it espouses religion (which it refuses to do) it must cling to science which is monistic. There is no dualism without religion, and there is no religion without a Church; nor can there be a Church without dogma” (Fain 224). This concern informed his thinking about the failure of the South to sustain its way of life.

In 1930, he, Davidson, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom and the other “Agrarians,” published a collection of essays against industrialism and for the Southern tradition called I'll Take My Stand. Tate's contribution argued that the real defeat of the South did not come from the war but from a spiritual capitulation to the North. What made this defeat inevitable was the fact that the agrarian South “had a non-agrarian and trading religion that had been invented in the sixteenth century by a young finance-capitalist economy: hardly a religion at all but rather a disguised secular ambition” (“Religion and the Old South,” 1970: 570). Tate is probably thinking of Calvin's overturning of the Catholic position on usury. Influenced among the common people by Calvinist teaching and among the aristocracy by Anglicanism, with its subordination of religion to politics, the South was “a feudal society without a feudal religion.” In other words, the factor in the Old South that had produced the New South was its Protestantism.

In speaking of Protestantism as a religion “invented” by finance-capitalism, Tate sounds uncomfortably close to the Marxist teaching that religion is part of the superstructure built on an economic system, as he does when he writes that the South “could not create its appropriate religion.” But part of his intent is to satirize this kind of thinking; a traditional society like the South would never do anything so self-conscious as to “invent” a religion to justify it. The religion already existed in Roman Catholicism, which fulfilled in its sacraments and defended in its theology the life actually led by the South, slavery aside. Although Tate does not raise the question of slavery, one may infer from his remarks that the finance-capitalist religion of Calvinist Protestantism, with its view of nature as subject to man's will, made the institution of slavery possible historically and at the same time obscured the sacramental character of the agrarian life.

In Tate's view, the Old South had only half of what is needed. Although it enjoyed the personal, dramatic, sensuous vitality of the natural scene, it could not make the ascent to the theological level without experiencing discontinuity and contradiction; in a sense, the Civil War between sections of the country was also going on within the individual Southerner. Tate writes,

The South would not have been defeated had she possessed a sufficient faith in her own kind of God. She would not have been defeated, in other words, had she been able to bring out a body of doctrine setting forth her true convictions that the ends of man require more for their realization than politics. The setback of the war was of itself a very trivial one.

We are very near an answer to our question: How may the Southerner take hold of his tradition?

The answer is: by violence.

(1970: 570)

With an irony aimed at the Marxists, Tate goes on to suggest a violent political revolution, whose end would be the reunion of feudal agrarianism and Catholicism. “The Southerner is faced with this paradox,” says Tate in closing: “He must use an instrument, which is political, and so unrealistic and pretentious that he cannot believe in it, to re-establish a private, self-contained, and essentially spiritual life. I say that he must do this; but that remains to be seen” (1970: 576). In this enigmatic ending, Tate implies that the Southerner as a twentieth-century revolutionary is a contradiction; one does not act like Lenin in order to become George Washington (although Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen made the attempt). The modern southerner can never return from his exile by political means, but only by the true radicalism that “aims at cutting away the overgrowth and getting back to the roots.” Finding himself in the dark wood of his regional history, Tate recognized the continuity of the South with medieval Europe, and he saw that getting back to the roots of Southern culture would require the same kind of spiritual and poetic radicalism that Dante's exile demanded of him. Eventually, it would have to be enacted as conversion.

II

It is evidence of Tate's integrity that he could not separate his concerns as a Southerner from his literary and religious ones. If he opposed Northern industrialism, it was because he saw that such industry sprang from a modern separation of intellect and will from feeling, and “it is through feeling alone,” he wrote, “that we witness the glory of our servitude to the natural world” (“The Symbolic Imagination: The Mirrors of Dante,” 1970: 429). His great adversary from 1930 to 1950 was positivism in particular, but in general any system of thought that abstracted the knower from his actual experience. During this period, his concept of the “symbolic imagination” became clear, and he saw the intimate connection between applied science and the poetry of personal will. As early as 1934, he argued that the modern scientific habit of seeing the qualitative particularity of things (“St. Thomas's accidents”) merely as instances of physical laws was an abuse of the poetic imagination, the properly human mode of knowledge. In his essay “Three Types of Poetry,” he writes that science is a more efficient form of Renaissance allegory, which uses images for only that part of their significance that illustrates the abstract principles desired.³ His counter both to such poetry and to modern science is “Dante's ability to look into a specific experience and to recreate it in such a way that its meaning is nowhere distinct from its specific quality” (“Three Types of Poetry” 1970: 180). With Dante as his consistent example, Tate grounds poetry in experience, the matrix from which meaning actually emerges, embodies in specific history. His real argument is against an imposition of the will on this given matrix of nature, to which we owe a glorious servitude.

By the late forties, he had identified the great adversary of the Dantean imagination as “angelism,” a term he learned from Jacques Maritain's book The Dream of Descartes. In December of 1949, a year before his conversion, Tate wrote to Wallace Stevens that he had come to a new formulation of the dilemma of his time: “either the revealed access to the world or the angelic mind looking down upon it” (Squires 202). Tate was to choose the way of revelation, and certainly Stevens, that poet of Emersonian abstraction whose one book of essays entitled The Necessary Angel, represented the alternative. However, neither Stevens, nor Hart Crane, nor Valery, nor Rilke, nor a number of other possible candidates became Tate's particular foe; instead, he devoted two essays to the Southerner, Edgar Allen Poe, who managed to become angelic in ante-bellum Richmond, Virginia. Tate liked the acid test. After he became Catholic, for instance, he wrote that “Catholic poets have lost, along with their heretical friends, the power to start with the ‘common thing’: they have lost the gift for concrete experience” (“The Symbolic Imagination,” 1970: 430). Poe, an almost exact contemporary of his fellow Virginian, Robert E. Lee, was Tate's major example of this loss, which had become epidemic in the twentieth century; in his Romantic emphasis on personal will and the superiority of his own intellect to an essentially dead external world, Poe became a highly influential figure of what Tate called the “angelic imagination.”

In February of 1951, two months after his conversion to Catholicism, Tate gave the Candlemas Lectures at Boston College. The first night, he talked about Poe, the second night about Dante. His brilliant summation of the concept of the angelic imagination put Poe and his sensibility in direct contrast with what Tate admired in Dante:

The symbolic imagination takes rise from a definite limitation of human rationality which was recognized in the West until the seventeenth century; in this view the intellect cannot have direct knowledge of essences. The only created mind that has this knowledge is the angelic mind … [which] suffers none of the limitations of sense; it has immediate knowledge of essences; and this knowledge moves through the perfect will to divine love, with which it is at one. Imagination in an angel is thus inconceivable, for the angelic mind transcends the mediation of both image and discourse. I call that human imagination angelic which tries to disintegrate or to circumvent the image in the illusory pursuit of essence. When human beings undertake this ambitious program, divine love becomes so rarefied that it loses its human paradigm, and is dissolved in the worship of intellectual power, the surrogate of divinity that worships itself. It professes to know nature as essence at the same time that it has become alienated from nature in the rejection of its material forms.

(1970: 428-9)

Unlike the great Romantics and their successors, Tate refuses to praise the imagination as the divine creative source in man to which the poet tries to appeal directly; for Tate, it is the faculty in man which reveals his condition as a being whose knowledge is limited by his senses. He does not belittle the imagination, however, since he understands the Incarnation as a revelation of divine things through the world of the senses.

Though Tate does not say so, the angelic imagination—the attempt to circumvent the limitations of the mimetic image—can be understood as a corollary of Nietzsche's proposition, “God is dead.” Once God is understood as a cultural projection of the human mind, a concept tied to historical experience and thus capable of historical “death,” like the gods of Greece or Assyria, then the “given-ness” of the image shifts its ground to the imagination of the perceiver; instead of clearing his own vision to see the ontological depth of what is there, the perceiver believes himself to be the source of whatever radiance, beyond the mechanism of its presence, shines from the object. “Lady, we receive but what we give,” writes Coleridge, “And in our life alone does nature live.” Almost all of the Romantics who begin by praising nature eventually abandon it to mechanical causality, “the light of common day,” and turn inward to the higher creative power of the imagination; this inward turn is a thinly disguised Cartesian dualism in which the image-making power supplants the more passive reasoning power. This view emerges very clearly in Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In this belief, the man of angelic imagination or self-conscious “Poetic Genius” battles the mind-forged God of limitation, circumscription, and law, whether figured as Blake's Urizen or Shelley's Jupiter. Poe's spiritual descendant Michel Foucault finds that “the death of God leads to an experience in which nothing may again announce the exteriority of being, and consequently to an experience which is interior and sovereign” (32). The poet like Poe puts himself into the place of the Godhead and worships his own “surrogate of divinity,” as Tate puts it. His antinomian will (understanding nature itself as a repressive nomos) can get its metaphysical bearings only by the kind of transgression that brings him into the psychic space of the death of God. One of the symptoms of angelic imagination is the dominance of sensation over sensibility. As Tate writes, “sensation locks us into the self, feeding upon the disintegration of its objects and absorbing them into the void of the ego” (1970: 392).

Dante, on the other hand, finds in nature objects that can yield “the higher syntheses” when they are viewed “in depth and in the round.” In explaining what he means by the symbolic imagination, Tate emphasizes the action which brings these objects from potency into fully realized meaning by means of a “coherent chain of analogies” in the moving body of this world. As Tate writes,

To bring together various meanings at a single moment of action is to exercise what I shall speak of here as the symbolic imagination; but the line of action must be unmistakable, we must never be in doubt about what is happening; for at a given stage of his progress the hero does one simple thing, and one only. The symbolic imagination conducts an action through analogy, of the human to the divine, of the natural to the supernatural, of the low to the high, of time to eternity.

(1970: 427)

Everywhere, Tate says, Dante begins with the “common thing,” even in the heights of the Paradiso. He shows that the analogy of the mirror, that ordinary object, allows Dante to symbolize the relation of creation to its Creator, especially the turn from the reflected image to the truth. Using the scene in the Moon in Canto II of Paradiso, Tate shows that Beatrice's imagined experiment with three mirrors reflecting one candle behind the perceiver (meant to show equal intensity of light despite differences of distance) always puts the reflection of the perceiver into the mirrors; although Dante does not explicitly mention this phenomenon, he lets the nature of mirrors themselves complete his meaning. As the Romantics saw, the perceiver always sees himself in the image. But Dante is willing to pursue the metaphysical implications of this mirror metaphor: if the image, which is given, reflects the perceiver, it must already be the reflection of something behind the perceiver, which he will have to turn around to see. Instead of turning around, the Romantics turn inward, because they have already misjudged the ground of the reflected image to be the mysterious inwardness of imagination rather than another level of reality.

Tate shows that Dante the character undergoes a number of experiences involving mirrors in the action of the Paradiso; the poem can concentrate the accumulated force of these analogies upon the moment of ultimate recognition in Canto XXXIII. When Dante sees the three circles of the Trinity, he finds in the one that appears as “reflected light”—that is, as a mirror image—the effigy of man. What Tate carefully prepares his reader to see is that this effigy is Dante's own image in the mirror where God Himself is “reflected,” God being by analogy “behind” Dante, as the ground and source of his intellective seeing. Dante recognizes the Incarnation, in other words, as God's assumption of his own bodily form so that Dante, emblematic of man, can be moved by this act of love to see his own deepest powers of consciousness as “objective,” themselves an image, a reflection of God. He can suddenly turn around to see the source of his own inner mystery outside himself, a turn which no power of poetry could render since it necessarily leaves behind the image, the limit of human knowledge.

The effect of this insight on Tate's own life is difficult to calculate, but the mirror in which he saw Dante's reflection also necessarily contained the image of Allen Tate. The turn that takes place outside the powers of poetry might also apply to his own conversion. It is again a sign of Tate's integrity that the very way he understands the end of the Paradiso is inseparable from his concerns as a Southerner. Donald Davidson once told Tate that his favorite word was “failure” (Fain 187). Tate once wrote in a letter that the first ten years or so of his career had been more or less consciously enacted under the myth of failure, which was his way of entering and experiencing the heritage of Southern defeat. It is crucial, then, to recognize what is at stake in Tate's recognition of what he calls the “tragic mode” in the Divine Comedy:

Perhaps the symbolic imagination is tragic in sentiment, if not always in form, in the degree of its development. Its every gain beyond the simple realism of experience imposes so great a strain upon any actuality of form as to set the ultimate limit of the gain as a defeat. The high order of the poetic insight that the final insight must elude us, is dramatic in the sense that its fullest image is an action in the shapes of this world; it does not reject, it includes; it sees not only with but through the natural world, to what may lie beyond it. Its humility is witnessed by its modesty. It never begins at the top; it carries the bottom along with it, however high it may climb.

(1970: 446)

The point for Tate is this: if his spiritual and poetic insight requires that he leave behind his own personal, historical experience—the common things of his own life—then it falls short of the Dantean achievement, yet the attempt to carry the bottom upward puts such a strain on his art that he must ultimately fail. This failure, however, is the noble one, the symbolic one, that finds the plenitude of meaning because it acknowledges man's limitations as a creature in time. It is the failure that, for Tate, will allow him as a Southerner to understand the completed, Catholic form of his tradition. The defeat of the personal, dramatic, sensuous South, in other words, finds its personal teleology for Tate in the defeat of imagination itself—the mode of knowledge through the senses—at the end of the Paradiso, at the limits of poetry.

III

In a comment on the relation of critical discernment to the writing of poetry, Coleridge remarks that “in energetic minds, truth soon changes by domestication into power.” Tate's insight into Dante soon issued into some of his greatest poems, “The Maimed Man,” “The Swimmers,” and “The Buried Lake,” all composed in terza rima. Robert Dupree, in his excellent book Allen Tate and the Augustinian Imagination, remarks with slight condescension that “‘The Swimmers’ has tended to attract the kind of reader who prefers straight forward, easily accessible narrative” (219). But surely Tate was such a reader himself; it is Tate who said that “the line of action must be unmistakable, we must never be in doubt about what is happening.” A straightforward narrative in a poem of such symbolic complexity as “The Swimmers” is a very high achievement, perhaps Tate's highest one. What happens in this poem is clear. The eleven year old Tate and four of his friends are on their way to the swimming hole outside town on a hot, dusty July day in the summer of 1911. They are passed by a posse of horsemen, who scare them from the road down onto a hog track beside the creek; the horsemen return, all but the leader. When the boys get to the swimming hole, they find a dead Negro who had just been lynched. The sheriff slouching against a sycamore tree picking his teeth with a sprig of sassafras, points to the dead man and says, “We come too late.” The sheriff and a stranger drag the dead body back into town and leave it in the courthouse square, where Tate, who has followed them, stares at it. The deed is never acknowledged by the community.

What makes the poem remarkable is the chain of analogies that Tate finds in pursuing what is happening, so that, without leaving the “common things” behind, he brings together many meanings at each moment of the action. For instance, he begins the poem with an image that seems to emerge suddenly out of memory:

Kentucky water, clear springs: a boy fleeing
To water under the dry Kentucky sun,
His four little friends in tandem with them, seeing
Long shadows of grapevine wriggle and run
Over the green swirl; mullein under the ear
Soft as Nausicaa's palm; sullen fun
Savage as childhood's thin harmonious tear.

(1977: 132)

The passage already contains two parallel actions: the boy “fleeing to water” on a hot day, and the grown man looking back across forty years to that same water and fleeing to the clear springs of his own childhood. The boy's natural, sensuous desire to take off his clothes and jump in the cool water furnishes the analogy for the man's more complex need. Already that complexity expresses itself as allusion; the shadows of grapevines on water recall the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus. Pirates seize a young man and try to bind him, thinking that they can ransom him for a great price, but the bonds fall away, fragrant wine runs through the ship, grapevines sprout from the masts, and the young man, who is the god Dionysus, changes into a lion. The terrified sailors leap into the sea, where they are transformed to dolphins. In Tate's poem, the allusion sets up the tremor of an anticipated epiphany: something divine is going to come from the Negro bound by the lynching mob. When Tate remembers the mullein along the Kentucky creek banks, he thinks of it being “Soft as Nausicaa's palm,” a reminder of the beautiful comic scene in the Odyssey when Odysseus, an old man naked and crusted with salt from his ordeal at sea, meets the young virgin who lets him bathe in the fresh water of the river and gives him her brother's clothes to wear. The old man remembering his own beginning, needing the aid of the virgin, Tate also remembers the analogies provided by the beginning of the Western tradition, with its clear springs in Homer.

This first complex image of the July day leads to an invocation:

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.

(1977: 132)

In part, the “fountain, bosom source undying-dead” is experience carried to the heart, the “bosom source,” which is already associated with the clear springs of Kentucky water. Tate's childhood is dead in being irrecoverably past, but it is undying as memory. The poetic action of fleeing toward water, modified by the imagery of renewal and transformation, yields another level of meaning related to baptism; the “fountain, bosom source undying-dead” also means the source of sacraments, the wound in the side of the dead Christ. The invocation moves through the paradox of memory to the paradox of the undying-dead Jesus, and by doing so it lets the Kentucky water, the “common thing,” begin to take on the significance of the death of Christ. This full meaning is as yet potential in the poem; the action must bring it out, and Tate asks to be allowed to recreate it by regaining “the eye that turned and fled.”

There is no easy return in Tate's poem to an Edenic childhood of the sort celebrated by Wordsworth or Dylan Thomas, but neither is there the same melancholy resignation before time.⁴ The attempt to get back to the clear springs meets the same interruption as the attempt to go swimming that day, but it therefore takes on a present significance. The lynching mob coming back from its deed passes the boys, who got off the road the first time, and who now walk on the hog-track beside the creek; the detail is important because the horsemen now block the light as they pass:

          it was as night
Momently and I feared: eleven same
Jesus-Christers unmembered and unmade,
Whose Corpse had died again in dirty shame.

There is a momentary eclipse of the sun when he dies, and the men who carried out the lynching cause it. The lynching repeats the crucifixion, one wants to say; it is an event in personal, historical experience which makes the previous event vividly real in the present. But Tate has a passage in his essay on Dante that makes this interpretation inadequate. Citing a letter that St. Catherine of Siena wrote about the beheading of an unjustly condemned young Sienese whom she had befriended, Tate writes that “St. Catherine had the courage of genius which permitted her to smell the Blood of Christ in Niccolo Tuldo's blood clotted on her dress: she smelled the two bloods not alternately but at one instant, in a single act compounded of spiritual insight and physical perception” (1970: 431-2). Tate's vision joining the hanged man of his youth with the Christ of his mature insight does not take place with the immediate genius of the saint, but through the action of memory.⁵ Although that single act uniting perception and spirit is properly speaking beyond the poem's limits, the poem makes it possible. Instead of the swimming hole, Tate finds the body “Whose ragged shirt soaked up the viscous flow / Of blood in which It lay discomfited” (1977: 134). Instead of swimming, he undergoes a symbolic drowning:

The bank then levelling in a speckled glade,
We stopped to breathe above the swimming hole;
I gazed at its reticulated shade
Recoiling in blue fear, and felt it roll
Over my ears and eyes and lift my hair
Like seaweed tossing on a sunk atoll.

The dead Negro remains himself, but in death, he also becomes for the perceiver the undying-dead body of Christ, into whose death the Christian drowns in baptism.

Like the Divine Comedy, “The Swimmers” ends with the poet who is also the central character of the poem gazing at the human image. The Negro's body has been dragged to the courthouse square by its feet. Tate stares at it:

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.

For good reasons on the level of the literal action, the head is now faceless. Without features, it has become even more fully the divine Corpse: “Is not St. Catherine telling us,” Tate asks in “The Symbolic Imagination,” “that the Blood of Christ must be perpetually recreated as a brute fact? … The Blood has got to be shed, if only because that is the first condition of its appearance; it must move towards the condition of human action, where we may smell it, touch it, and taste it again” (1970: 432). In the lynching, the blood has been shed, but unlike St. Catherine, the lynching mob fails to recognize what Tate calls a “proximate incarnation of the Word,” and perhaps the reason for this failure is what we have seen as Tate's great disembodied adversary—the tendency toward abstraction, the sundering of intellect and will from feeling. The Protestant “Jesus-Christers” who kill the Negro are “unmembered and unmade” by the deed, since they separate themselves by abstraction from the black man. What Tate does is to complete the meaning of the lynching. In effect, he corrects both the speculative deficiency in the Old South (which led to the New South) and the reductive allegory of such sixteenth-century writers as Spenser. The action of the poem makes it clear that the lynch-mob reduces the Negro's body to a simple allegory of “Defiance Revenged”; his faceless corpse is supposed to represent summary justice. But in Tate's gazing upon the scene as a complex reflection of many levels of actual being—historical, political, moral, and spiritual—more and more meanings emerge, until the implications of the lynching take in the full terror and redemption of the human form's presence as the sacramental Body.

As Robert Dupree points out, “Tate's daring evocation of crucifixion imagery is made convincing by the incidental details, like the sheriff's unintended irony in uttering ‘Goddamn’ or the ‘butting horse-fly’ that pauses on the ear of the corpse” (222). These very details show the extent to which Tate has realized the idiom of Dante's imagination in his own voice and his own time. He was allowed to “touch the hem / Of him who spreads his triptych like a fan.” Louise Cowan, remarking on this passage in “The Maimed Man,” writes that Tate was “a poet who did not merely touch Dante's hem but put on his garment to cover the nakedness of the modern” (382). Tate never uses the garment of romantic will. The action of “The Swimmers,” in particular, involves all the central tensions of Southern history, including the harsh racism of the New South. Tate does not ignore what is problematic, he does not turn against the South in a confessional agony of renunciation, he does not obliterate the details in an illusory pursuit of essence. His use of terza rima is itself symbolic of that Catholic completion of the South that he had long seen as necessary, and it is Tate's particular genius to use the Dantean form to reflect upon the South's capitulation to “the cold dream of the copperhead.”⁶ If the past, held in memory, is that homeland of clear springs to which the exile longs to return, it is accessible only at the price of its full personal and poetic ransom. Since nobody else will, Tate has to claim that corpse in the courthouse square.

Notes

1. Although Bloom does not specify which Southerners he means, it is safe to infer that he has in mind the group responsible for I'll Take My Stand and Who Owns America? Part of his argument—the “hidden” part, as it were—is no doubt that the most important of these Southerners (Tate, Ransom and Warren) influenced the way that poetry was taught in American universities for over thirty years. If they were “remarkably successful” in promoting their views of the South, as Bloom says, it was because students encountered the South through the literature that these men wrote or wrote about, especially through such compelling, imaginative visions as those of Faulkner and Warren. Attacking the Southerners, in other words, is Bloom's way of renewing the Socratic quarrel with the poets, a quarrel he addresses in the interpretive essay that accompanies his translation of Plato's Republic.

2. Dupree (4) interprets Tate's poem “To the Romantic Traditionists” as referring “specifically, though not at all exclusively, to the modern southern idealist, the sentimental traditionist of the twentieth century who romanticizes history.”

3. This view has come under attack by those who defend Shelley and the traditions of “visionary” poetry, especially Harold Bloom (382). Criticizing Tate's stance as typically American, Bloom writes that this school of criticism underestimates the “powers of mind” possessed by Shelley and the poets of his tradition. But the point is not that “visionary” poets are unintelligent; they direct powerful intelligence upon the natural order in the attempt to seize its essence, an attempt that involves interiorizing the image, then trying to turn toward its usurped source in the self. Tate understands this attempt as angelic; Voegelin would call it gnostic.

4. The relation of Tate to Wordsworth's central myth of the loss of the “visionary gleam,” the great statement of which is the “Intimations of Immortality” ode, needs closer examination than it has received. Part of Tate's attempt as a poet was to work his way out from under the Romantic pattern of failure, which was very different from Dante's.

5. See Dupree's seminal chapter on “Memoria,” in which he explores the relations between St. Augustine's treatment of memory in the Confessions, the Augustinian treatment of tripartite division of the soul (memory, understanding and will) in The Trinity, and Dante's vision in the Divine Comedy. According to Dupree (190), Tate follows the Augustinian understanding of memory that also informs Dante's work: “Memory is not simply nostalgia; for Augustine it is synonymous with the divine, the transcendent presence within, the inner teacher.”

6. The complexity of Tate's imagination shows in his choice of this particular serpent. Historically, the “Copperheads” were Northern sympathizers with the South during the Civil War.

Works Cited

Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

———, trans. The Republic of Plato. N. Y.: Basic Books, 1968.

Bloom, Harold. Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism. New York: Norton, 1970.

Core, George and M. D. Bradford, eds. The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought. New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1971.

Cowan, Louise S. “Allen Tate and the Garment of Dante,” The Sewanee Review 80 (1972): 377-82.

Dupree, Robert S. Allen Tate and the Augustinian Imagination: A Study of the Poetry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983.

Fain, John Tyree and Thomas Daniel Young, eds. The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate. Athens: U. of Georgia Press, 1974.

Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980.

Squires, Radcliffe. Allen Tate: A Literary Biography. New York: Pegasus, 1971.

Tate, Allen. “Random Thoughts on the Twenties.” Minnesota Review I (1960).

———. Essays of Four Decades. New York: William Morrow, 1970.

———. Collected Poems: 1919-1976. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1977.