The twenty-two poems and sequence of ten sonnets in this book represent less a new phase of Mr. Tate's work than a conscious attack on problems defined in his first collection, Mr. Pope, of 1928. Any concern arising from the volume's immediate reference to its predecessor is rendered gratuitous by Mr. Tate's anticipation of it. By making that reference implicit and organic he joins the small group of contemporary poets who have realized, at whatever cost of popular approval with its preference for familiar repetitions or facile “growths,” the meaning of unity. Both in arrangement and in foreword he emphasizes the continuity of a project: “The books of a poet are finally one book; this author is writing to that end.” This ideal appears in placing “Ignis Fatuus,” the final poem of the earlier volume, as an introduction to this. Two aids toward an intelligent approach to the book are thereby achieved. Mr. Tate recalls a program of ideas, apparently of early formulation, to which he has adhered with exceptional consistency; and he establishes as the aim of that program the schematization of experience and historical consciousness by a principle of order.

If the irony of his earlier pieces is insufficient to justify the somewhat premature self-reproof of the poem's opening phrase, “In the twilight of my audacity,” the serious admission of both moral and historical responsibility in the last stanza should explain it:

To the green tissue of the subterranean
Worm I have come back, two-handed from
The chase, and empty. I have pondered it
Carefully, and asked: What is the riot
When the pigeon moults his ease
Or exile utters the creed of memory?

This succeeds as nearly as any contemporary poem in being a poet's definition of his position. Neither the predicament of conscience, nor the task it faces, is novel. Both are central to the thought of modern poetry. But in its statement of a mature position, “Ignis Fatuus” is decidedly more specific than the pathos of MacLeish's L'an trentiesme or Aiken's interminable ruminations in scruple. It is in the concretizing intelligence which he has applied to poetic intuition that Mr. Tate has met his difficulties; but it is certainly the operation of that intelligence through poetic logic and form that ranks him among the very small number of serious poets who have emerged during the past decade.

His ordeal as poet comes precisely in this articulation of detached critical intelligence with lyric sensibility. The test is not rendered easier by the regional and hereditary loyalties to which he has found himself allied. His first ten years of poetic expression were given to solving a problem larger than, yet implicit in, his private experience. It is fundamentally the problem of identity. Its perplexities have left their mark throughout Mr. Pope, except for the seven or eight poems which evade the dangers of a tentative critical irresolution by making native probity the source of conception and not a discipline externally applied. Elsewhere the collision of poetic impulse with calculating perception has produced poems of disrupted thought like the “Horation Epode,” “Retroduction to American History,” and the “Sonnet on Beauty,” which shift irresolutely from decision to acute perplexity. This impact is by no means novel to philosophical poetry, however much it contradicts the popular idea of the “normal” processes of lyric utterance. It is inevitably a complicating—even a paralyzing—experience in the poet's mind. It frequently produces the vis inertiae which permits the poetic idea to crystallize only when it conceals or denies the ordeal entailed in its formulation.

The problem of Mr. Tate's early verse was the merging not merely of a critical with a lyric intelligence, but of private intuition in a deflated and sceptical age with idealism inherited from a rich and heroic past. This problem is fundamentally different in realization from Eliot's. On a plane of sometimes simpler disparities it vexed the life, and threatened the art, of men as different as Crashaw, Dryden, Goethe, Emerson, and Rimbaud. The direction of poetry in the ages occupied by these men, as in that of Mr. Tate, was from conviction and its appropriate eloquence, to rational apprehension and its proper detachment. Their individual direction as poets, however, like Mr. Tate's, was almost exactly opposite: from the agony (or worse, the indifference) of disillusionment toward the reinvestiture, on rational bases, of inherited forms and ideals. These poets are “major” in the sense that they resisted the stress of negation and decadence in their times. For the same reason Mr. Tate is working toward a permanent claim to the adjective. The fact that he survived the years in which he was almost forcibly dislocated from his orbit of personal identity by the rigor of self-consciousness is alone an augury that the poems in this book will ultimately bring him to the mature and unmistaken serenity which is not a product of emotional (“lyric”) hypnosis or automatic writing, but of issues resolved by a controlling intelligence.

It will not be violating the excellences of the present poems to surmise that Mr. Tate's greatest task at present is to realize fully the style whereby the emerging and progressive tenets of his certitude will be conveyed. In a recent essay on Johnson he has argued for the “settled” mind as a basis of taste and style. Discussion on this point could be extensive. I hope merely that Mr. Tate will not permit the corporate verbal usage and dignity of a tradition to reduce or vitiate the tone of those earlier poems which embody a less reflective, but more actively creative, energy. He has successfully achieved character in his style. It must be maintained, but not at the cost of an initial curiosity and imaginative vigor. Two or three of his contemporaries have won it only through the abject sacrifice of vitality in poetic vision and tone. “Mother and Son,” “The Traveler,” the “Sonnets of the Blood,” and especially the profoundly beautiful “Emblems” are sufficiently reassuring on this score. (One may accept “Causerie” and “Last Days of Alice” as tenuous survivals of early exercise in the theoretic, perhaps immaterial to the present volume and better omitted from it.)

The revision of the “Ode to the Confederate Dead” presents a more complex matter. Undoubtedly strengthened in its formal conception, this superb poem has, it seems to me, lost some of its personal vigor in what may be described as a conventionalizing of images and specific words. (I particularly regret the loss of “barter” for “yield” in the second line; of “Against the sinkage of death”; and the blunting of several terminal verses.) Recalling his remarks on Eliot in 1926, I gather that Mr. Tate holds no brief for “a static society,” or for the submission of personal meaning and symbols to its standards. His “settled” mind must be accepted, therefore, not as the hereditary regional consciousness of the South, with its ordained forms, but as the certitude of private definitions. Mr. Tate is so clearly an example of the sustained and uncoerced intelligence that transcends (or, indeed, justifies) a regional loyalty that a historical responsibility should at no cost be allowed to impair his creative independence. But the direction of his work, and particularly the richly achieved poems of this second book, render advice impudent and hope irrelevant. One is left with a sense of acute indebtedness to a poet who dignifies so significantly the contemporary annals of his art.