I should like to propose two revisions of the customary valuation put upon the poetry of Allen Tate. First, it has become increasingly evident with each new work that Mr. Tate is a fugitive from the Fugitives. The Fugitives were that talented group of Southern writers who, finding the Northern poetic climate of the early twenties too exacerbatingly modern, reaffirmed their allegiances with “tradition,” a term they took some care to define. While we commonly think of the Southerners as a group, and while in a loose personal sense this may be so, it is my belief that in a veiled but not altogether deceptive fashion Mr. Tate has been seeking to free himself from the claims of group loyalty, claims which at one time had threatened the temper of his own sensibility. For Tate, with an artistic humility strangely discordant with his critical arrogance, had publicly avowed his apprenticeship to his Southern master, John Crowe Ransom, and to his European one, T. S. Eliot. These poet-critics were the maîtres of the Southern group and a common devotion created additional pressures for orthodoxy.

Curiously enough, Tate's first symptomatic departure from his “tradition” came in what would seem, on the surface, to be the apotheosis of his conformance to it. It came in his translation of Pervigilium Veneris (1934), that neglected little classic never happily Englished, upon which he chose to exercise his powers, not so much as a Latinist, but as a poet of classical affiliations. Yet I think his choice of this delicately tinted but uninnocently erotic poem was perhaps motivated by the fact that, as Professor Mackail points out, it represents

the first clear note of the new romanticism which transformed classical into mediaeval literature. … Nothing could be less like either a folk-song or an official ode. It touches the last refinement of simplicity. In the delicately running, softly swaying verses, that ring and glitter and return on themselves in interlacing patterns, there is germinally the essence and inner spirit of the whole romantic movement. All the motives of the old classical poetry survive, yet all have undergone a new birth.

The Pervigilium Veneris is Allen Tate's valedictory, from a safe distance, to the Fugitives, to the South, to the “classical” tradition, to his masters. The quickest way to get over the goodbyes is to say them in a strange language.

My second proposal flows from the historic process I have just described and is, at the same time and paradoxically, anterior to the whole development. I believe that Tate is a poet of romantic sensibility who has tried with varying success to compress his talents into a chastely classical form and that, in inverse degrees to his willingness or ability to do so, his best poetry has been written. Where his romanticism gets the better of him, or, to shift the metaphor, finds the classicist nodding, there we get the most enduring, vital and original poetry Tate is capable of writing. The Pervigilium was playing romanticism with the rules; with the publication of “The Winter Sea” it became clear that Tate was playing his own way.

In short, we have been assessing Tate too long in terms of his origins (the genetic fallacy) and his prose judgment (the doctrinal fallacy). It is time we began to follow the lead of the poems.

II.

In Tate's Selected Poems (1937) it is possible to group together the work of the early 'twenties on several grounds. “Obituary,” “Death of Little Boys,” “Horatian Epode to the Duchess of Malfi,” “The Subway,” “Ditty,” “Retroduction to American History,” and “Mr. Pope,” all bear the imprint of the Eliot of “Prufrock” in the characteristic quatrain (or aggregation of joined quatrains) with the typically anti-climactic, sometimes parenthetical usage of the fourth line. Similarly, the vocabulary is often derived from Eliot: “You have no more chance than an infusorian / Lodged in a hollow molar of an eohippus. / Come, now, no prattle of remergence with the ontos on.” All, without a single exception, whether the subject be Webster, Pope, the death of little boys, or their sleeping, reveal a bitter, angry and passionate rejection of the present, of contemporaneity where “you, so crazy and inviolate” are “hurled religiously / Upon your business of humility / Into the iron forestries of hell; / … Dazed, while the worldless heavens bulge and reel/ In the cold revery of an idiot.”

It is a present in which even “little boys grown patient at last, weary / Surrender their eyes immeasurably to the night,” and other “Little boys no longer sight the plover / Streaked in the sky,” while “men, who fail … will plunge, mile after mile of men, to crush this lucent madness of the face, / Go home and put their heads upon the pillow. Turn whatever shift the darkness cleaves, / Tuck in their eyes, and cover / The flying dark with sleep like falling leaves.” I hope it is excusable to resort to the kind of mosaic I have just composed in order to point a paradox: Allen Tate, at the start of his career in the early 'twenties, was affirming his allegiances with the classical past in the unsigned editorials of The Fugitive and, at the same time, betraying in every poem he was writing a frankly nihilistic temper which, in its alternating violence and absolution, was a romanticism of a somewhat more fiery brand than his criticism might have endorsed.

Perhaps the gauge of Tate's youthful romanticism may be best explored in his much-admired “Death of Little Boys” published in the Nation in 1925 when he was twenty-six years old:

When little boys grown patient at last, weary,
Surrender their eyes immeasurably to the night,
The event will rage terrific as the sea;
Their bodies fill a crumbling room with light.
Then you will touch at the bedside, torn in two,
Gold curls now intricate with gray
As the windowpane extends a fear to you
From one peeled aster drenched with the wind all day.
And over his chest the covers in an ultimate dream
Will mount to the teeth, ascend the eyes, press back
The locks—while round his sturdy belly gleam
The suspended breaths, white spars above the wreck:
Till all the guests, come in to look, turn down
Their palms, and delirium assails the cliff
Of Norway where you ponder, and your little town
Reels like a sailor in his rotten skiff.
The bleak sunshine shrieks its chipped music then
Out to the milkweed amid the fields of wheat.
There is a calm for you where men and women
Unroll the chill precision of moving feet.

The only “classical” element in this adventuresome poem is the plural in the title and the first line. The generalizing character of “boys” extends or is intended to extend an individual experience of death to a universal statement of it. But apart from this gesture (a successful one) there is no concession anywhere in the poem (unless it be in the rather diversified quatrains) to any poem I am familiar with in the “tradition” of English literature up to 1925. The poem is a consideration of the problem of identity or, more philosophically, the problem of permanence and change. The “you” of the second paragraph is not merely rhetorical address which seeks to involve the reader with the death of little boys, but it achieves exactly that. The bedside is “torn in two” by the “event” of death, which, let us note, does not destroy the little boys but rather the room which crumbles with light. (The room, of course, may be everything which is contained in it.) The “gold curls” are “now deftly intricate with gray” because of the blinding vision of death in which “you” (the onlooker, father, or little boy grown up) must participate because you too feel the fear extended by the windowpane (night or death to which the little boys have in Stanza One surrendered their eyes). The emotional affects throughout are persistently ascribed to the landscape.

In Stanza Three the death is individualized in the singular pronouns (abandoning the universal), in the magnificently concrete, yet symbolic detail of the “sturdy belly” round which “gleam the suspended breaths” of the dead boy, or rather boy-in-man, and “you” (like another Hamlet, a questioning, dubious intellect) pondering on your cliff feel delirium (death, shifting identity) assailing it (just as, in a similar transfer of affects, it was the room and not the body which crumbled in Stanza One), and your little town (something built, made, the ego, perhaps) “reels like a sailor in his rotten skiff.” Here the image of the dead boy as a wreck and the little town (the ego) about-to-be-wrecked converge in the sea symbolism. It is at this point (the crisis of the poem) that the fusion of meanings is consummated and the question of permanence (identity) arises like a lonely phoenix from the wreck of little boys (your wreck, of course). The last stanza is an anticlimax, and is so intended. The “bleak sunshine,” the discordant shriek of its “chipped music,” reaches out to the level of external quotidian existence (milkweed, etc.) where there are no more “events terrific as the sea” but only an ironic calm whose inevitable “precision of moving feet” implies an ultimately similar dissolution of the almost-wrecked ego.

Perhaps this explication will have seemed forced. In that event, I suggest returning to the sea metaphor introduced in Stanza One, picked up and developed in Three and consummated in the harsh despair of “reels,” “drunk,” and “rotten,” to say nothing of the flimsy, useless phonetic fluff of “skiff.” By that route, it seems to me, almost the same reading may be developed as the one I have got by the long way. Little boys die in men before men die. Man is torn in two by his past (his little boyhood) and his present. The agency of childhood is mysterious and terrifying in the personality of the man (the aster is man “peeled”—revealed—by his youth). The certainty of identity (integration of personality) is seriously threatened in Stanza Four. In Five there is a sick rebound: the world and its dull, mechanic inevitability must be met again. The let-down in diction, the clarity of the last stanza as opposed to the complexity of the others, is Tate's cold and disdainful bow to the outer world, to the nowness he will not recognize. This, then, is the kind of poetry Tate was writing when he was raging with youthful hauteur against the nouveaux-arrivés “experimentalists.” To recapitulate: “Death of Little Boys” is a very good poem; it is revelatory of Tate's “original” temperamental bent (if learning had not already disguised the interior man); it is certainly as “experimental” as any poem I know of written at that time, including the “romantic” experimentalism of Tate's friend, Hart Crane.

The following five years, 1925-30, are crucial to the direction of Tate's growth. Some residence in England and France during that time leave superficial traces in his work. If Tate ever thought of himself as an exile (and at least one poem, “Message from Abroad,” bears witness that he did) it was certainly not the kind of willed exile represented by Joyce's categorical imperatives for the artist, “Silence, exile and cunning,” nor by Henry James's ambassadorial rapprochements, nor by Eliot's British repatriation. Europe merely reinforces for Tate the feeling he started out with in Kentucky. He is exiled not from a place, but from a condition. The present (and Europe is just as contemporaneous as the South) exiles him from the past. He is cut off through no fault of his own from a more meaningful condition of living. He will begin to try in these years to find, focus, and define the character of that past and so, perhaps, to possess it. Like many young men of his time, but with greater tenacity and intellectual resourcefulness, he takes Eliot as his guide to the map of that dark country. It is now that Tate begins to deny the authority of his own sensibility as poet. It is his first misstep, but, happily, not a disastrous one.

In 1925 in “Retroduction to American History” Tate found it possible to arraign the present in these terms:

Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates
A cornice on the Third National Bank. Vocabulary
Becomes confusion, decoration a blight;
                                                                                                                        … scholarship pares
The nails of Catullus, sniffs his sheets, restores
His “passionate underwear”; morality disciplines the other
Person; every son-of-a-bitch is Christ, at least Rousseau.

But there the cataloguing of deprivations and evils, wrought upon the poet by his environment, seems uncontrolled: there is a false and heavy-handed exaggeration in the view of historical scholarship (a method Tate despises) which is seen to restore Catullus' “passionate underwear”; there is an inchoate imprecision of epithet to “Every son-of-a-bitch is Christ, at least Rousseau.” Yet an interesting premonition of the way in which Tate was later to define the past, a definition differing in subtle details from Eliot's, occurs in a Websterian passage later in this long poem: “A corpse is your bedfellow, your great-grandfather dines / With you this evening on / a cavalry horse. Intellect / Connives with heredity, creates fate as Euclid geometry / By definition.” Nevertheless, the poem's end is more temperate than the violent castigations of the earlier sections might lead one to expect:

                                                                                                                                                      Heredity
Proposes love, love exacts language, and we lack
Language. When shall we speak again? When shall
The sparrow dusting the gutter sing? When shall
This drift with silence meet the sun? When shall
                                                                                                                                                      I wake?

Thus the past (heredity) begets love, love (containing the past) as an enduring, positive force demands to be communicated, but the means (language) is recalcitrant. Our past need not be sought; it is in the “sunlit bones” in our house. But how to establish this knowledge, this good, as an objective reality? Tate then, at the beginning, had a certain advantage over Eliot, an advantage deriving from the relative homogeneity of Southern culture as opposed to the crude mixture of frontier strains and Back Bay manqué which were, no doubt, the conditional and never-accepted “heredity” of the St. Louis of the latter's boyhood and adolescence.

But if such hope were possible in 1925, by 1927 the chances for solving the problem of communication, for removing the obstructive features of the material present, seem more slender. A delicate shadow of despair begins to invade the poems. In a nostalgic and deliberately archaic tone the poet asks his friend Edmund Wilson, the critic, “a Syracusan, domiciled at Rome” to “be still” lest he, “the city priest / Urging crab-like the busy quest” find suddenly that both East and West escape him and that he toils “more than the rest of us / For the idiot king of a savage court.” The final quatrain, sustaining the intimate, epistolary Horatianism of the poem, describes somewhat sentimentally but with an effective hopelessness the character of the urban present:

Once we had marveled countrywise,
My friend. You know that light was brief.
Mile after mile the cities rise
Where brisk Adonis tied the sheaf.

“You know that light was brief.” How just, how recriminatory, how resigned, in short, to the inevitable encroachment of the industrial Leviathan which modern economy symbolizes for Tate! The friendly address is merely the occasion for a wider generalization about the nature of American society, a society where the classical tradition (bound up as it was with the leisured way of life of gentlemen who could be philosophers and farmers at the same time) flared briefly, especially in New England (Wilson) and the South (Tate) only to be extinguished by “mile after mile” of an urban, unillumined industrial culture.

This poem, then, may be thought of as key to a period when Tate was trying to think out his dilemma, instead of merely feeling his way out of it, as in the powerful early poems. That these years initiated his most prolific critical activity is quite in line with the evidence of the poems themselves. “Fragment of a Meditation” (1928), as the title implies, continues this self-examination in an attempt to gather up “all the venom of the night— / Th' equilibrium of the thirtieth age.” The attempt is to abandon the vexation, the fury, the sense of loss of young manhood and to come to terms, somehow, with one's heritage heretofore seen as inoperative because of the problem of communication. The poet must find the language to communicate that past. And Tate does find it. He finds it in the forensic, yet casually idiomatic speech of his ancestors and of their own best survival in Southern cultural remains. (It was at about this time that Tate in an essay seeking to explain the curious aridity of the literary production of the great antebellum years of the South pointed out that its best energies and talents went into politics and the law, the latter the passport to the former.)

“It was a time of tributes.” Tate pays them: to Calhoun “who divined / How the great western's star's last race will run / Unbridled round our personal defect/ Grinding its ash with engines of its mind. / ‘Too Southern and too simple’”; to Poe, “the poet against the world; he dreamed the soul / Of the wide world and prodigies to come; / Exemplar of dignity, a gentleman / Who raised the black flag of the nether mind; Hated in life, of all; in death praised.” Still,

Perhaps at the age of thirty-one shall see
In the wide world the prodigies to come:
The long-gestating Christ, the Agnulus
Of time got in the belly of abstraction
By Ambition, a bull of pious use.

But the aftermath to this briefly sustained and ironic wish is an illusionless defeat powerfully articulated in the sonorous vowel-pattern of the massive, Dryden-like closing:

The Bull smoothly rolls his powerful tongue.

“Fragment of Meditation” breaks down precisely at the point where the moving loyalties to the past are exhausted and the satire against modern anti-miraculism takes over. Too many hypostatizations begin to do the work of the concrete particulars which are active in the early sections of the poem. We get instead “Agnulus,” “Ambition,” “Pasiphae,” “Lamb,” and “Holy Runt,” in the space of a few lines. The irony is heavy, not cutting. One suspects that the split in the poem reflects a split in the poet's own spectrum of belief. He is positive, concrete and eloquent in his tribute to a past he believes in and lives; he is negative, allusive, literary in his view of the present which he distrusts and detemporizes. This is the obverse of the sin Tate in his criticism lays at the door of the scientific historians who seek to “detemporize” or neutralize the past which he prefers to view as a series of discrete particulars. Thus, Tate's satire on irreligion seems an act of fashionable piety, expressive of an outer malaise of spirit which was then becoming a stylish mood, one which the poet sought to incorporate into his own inner terror. It was as if an instructed but unbaptized cannibal child were seeking to eat his evangelized father who had given up the habit of dining on his relatives.

In different keys and with considerable invention and melody these years are devoted to a fuller exploration of the dilemma I have just outlined. Tate ponders in various settings the question he asks in “Message from Abroad,” dated Paris, November, 1929:

What years of other times, what centuries
Broken, divided up and claimed? A few
Here and there to the taste …
                                                                                                                        to keep us
Fearless, not worried as the hare, scurrying
Without memory.

The sense of the past is here seen as a humanizing force. But it is “those others,” ages “Not by poetry and statues timed,” which he is bent on finding, for they are “lost” in the individual subconscious biography. Now an image is introduced which was to recur in various forms in Tate's poetry for the next fifteen years: it is a father-image, an ancestor-image, if you will, and it haunts the poet's imagination in concrete, visible shape:

And the man red-faced and tall seen, leaning
In the day of his strength
Not as a pine, but the stiff form
Against the west pillar,
Hearing the ox-cart in the street—
His shadow gliding, a long nigger
Gliding at his feet.

This is an exact and personal diction. The last two lines with the encroaching shadow represented as a “long nigger” is appropriate to the physical context of the Southern man the poet is painting from memory and from love; the repetition of “gliding” in the last line completes the suggestion of time (a shadow) engulfing the individual, but with a tenderness which softens the impact of the last irrevocable line (shorter than any in the stanza).

But the image is “drowned deep,” cannot be seen at all in exile, “Down Saint-Michel by the quays,” and the failure to realize the individual image is extended to include the whole of that society which it represents:

I cannot see you
The incorruptibles,
Yours was a secret fate …
Your anger is out of date—

In the last three lines the symbol of a personal loss again dramatizes the elegiac theme of a lost past:

The man red-faced and tall
Will cast no shadow
From the province of the drowned.

Perhaps the most ambitious poem of this period, one which summarizes Tate's intellectual situation in the early 'thirties is “Causerie” (1925-31). The tone is again forensic but the vigor of the indictment is sustained throughout. Unlike his practice in “Meditation” Tate here depends on a rugged, irregular blank verse manipulated with great flexibility in terms of caesura to effect a swelling and urgent rhetoric. The poet is the prosecutor; yet he is himself among the accused:

I've done no rape, arson, incest, no murder,
Yet cannot sleep …

Through another means he asks the question of “Message from Abroad”:

Where is your house, in which room stands your bed?

In ironic answer comes a swift, Elizabethan-in-texture arraignment of the fate suffered by the South:

                                                                      Have you a daughter,
Daughters are the seed of occupations …
Let her not read history lest knowledge
Of her fathers instruct her to be a noted bawd.

The argument proceeds by a kind of rhetorical casuality (note the force of “For” in the passage connecting with the above):

                                                                                                    For miracles are faint
And resurrection is our weakest point of religion.

Later, the moral confusion of modern life is attributed to a loss of absolutes:

In an age of abstract experience, fornication
Is self-expression, adjunct to Christian euphoria,
And whores become delinquents; delinquents, patients;
Patients, wards of society. Whores, by that rule,
Are precious.

The result is “a race of politic pimps” without “The antique courtesy of your myths.” What Tate regrets is the loss of the principle of evil, a loss of which Wallace Stevens was to say fifteen years later: “the death of Satan was a tragedy / For the imagination. …” But, and I think this is a distinction which illuminates Tate's special quality as a moralist, he does not, like Stevens, relate this loss to its effect on art, but rather to its effect on conduct. This is a didactic poetry of such high order that the didacticism is (as in Blake) through the purest rhetorical fusion indistinguishable from the poetry. The control is sure and adult. The entirety of the loss is acknowledged; there is no longer an effort to reclaim the lost from “the province of the drowned.” The poet is operating on a higher level of social “reality,” but there is no acceptance—yet.

III.

In the long view, the years 1930-35 seem to have served as an intellectual and emotional marking-time for Tate. During this time he was active in prose composition. There is evidence of a good deal of reading especially in the metaphysical poets. There is much experiment in form—odes, elegies, pastorals, several fine metaphysical love poems (the only love poems composed up to this time). The titles reflect quite transparently some of the literary preoccupations: “The Mediterranean,” for example, considered by some one of Tate's finest poems, is Coleridgean in form, and Arnoldian in symbolism. The Mediterranean is the sea of faith (as is another body of water in “Dover Beach”): “Atlantis howls but is no longer steep.” The poem ends with a vision of the fecund and luxurious exhaustion of the South—the South conceived of as the inheritor of classical culture by a kind of mystical primogeniture, a notion Tate argues well in his essays: “the tired land where tasseling corn, / Fat beans, grapes sweeter than muscadine / Rot on the vine: in that land were we born.”

“Aeneas at Washington” is another poem deriving from this nexus of speculation. The South is again conceived of as Europe, especially as it is the inheritor of Rome. Aeneas, of course, is the poet himself; like the antique poet, he is an exile. He sees “all things apart.” The reference is to one of Tate's most abiding critical values: to see the past as a series of distinct concrete particulars. The poem closes on a note of frustration and perplexity:

                                                                      Stuck in the wet mire
Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city
I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.

This poem as well as “The Mediterranean” and “To the Lacedemonians” betrays a weakness common to some poems of this period in that the poet's critical “ideas” or “philosophic metaphors” are visibly operative in the poems. The “ideas” are not sufficiently complicated by symbols of emotional opacity or sensuous richness to raise the language into that realm of verbal intensity where Tate's best poetry moves. Nevertheless, “To the Lacedemonians” is interesting in that it provides an independent exercise of one of Tate's favorite and, indeed, plausible hypotheses about the moral character of the antebellum South—the theory that it was a society destined to ruin by the very excess of its virtues: “Vain chivalry of the personal will!”—a theory he was later to crystallize with great poetic splendour in the “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” a poem worked on concurrently with it.²

The stately language of “Aeneas” and “To the Lacedemonians” reflects the influence of St. J. Perse, perhaps assimilated through Eliot's translation of Perse's Anabasis in 1930. Indeed, Tate calls an elegy of this period “The Anabasis,” the title serving as an equivalent for death. However, the poem's delicate archaism of language, largely got through inversion and metric distortions which affect customary pronunciation, is quite unrelated to Perse's epic tone.

“The Meaning of Life” (1934) described as a “monologue” and “The Meaning of Death” (1935) subtitled “An After-Dinner Speech” are discourses on time as it affects the security of personal values. Both poems are noteworthy for their reliance on cave symbolism, a type of symbol which Tate employs extensively and which stems from his deep consideration of Plato's parable of the cave. The closing line of “The Meaning of Death”—“We are the eyelids of defeated caves”—was to receive expanded statement in some of the later poems. (See for example, Sonnet IV of More Sonnets at Christmas which is centred in a cave metaphor.) It is a line which dramatizes the feeling of the poems of 1930-35 as one of a grave and bitter defeat in the search for absolutes.

IV.

However, there is a certain strain in Tate's sensibility given sporadic but eloquent expression during these years which must be considered both for its own sake and for its foreshadowing by a decade the atmosphere of his very best work. It is the vein of introspective, subjective judgment, a mood which, in part, shares the content of the more purely ideological pieces I have just examined. But it is precisely the distinction between introspection and speculation which makes it possible to distinguish the poems of 1930-35 into two groups.

The Sonnets at Christmas (1934) illuminate the fact that Tate's earlier romantic agony had not been put down as thoroughly as the critic in him might have supposed. Sonnet I established the background for the poet's examination of conscience and memory. Sonnet II provides a particular instance of the past, an instance of personal guilt which, in a beautiful, concrete progress, relying for its imagery on the physical accoutrements of a Southern country house, builds up to a rebellion of the ego against the burdens pushed upon it by the id:

Ah, Christ I love you, rings to the wild sky
And I must think a little of the past:
When I was ten I told a stinking lie
That got a black boy whipped; but now at last
The going years, with an accurate glow,
Reverse like balls englished upon green baize—
Let them return, let the round trumpets blow
The ancient crackle of the Christ's deep gaze.
Deafened and blind, with senses yet unfound,
Am I, untutored of the after-wit
Of knowledge, knowing a nightmare has no sound;
Therefore with idle hands and head I sit
In late December before the fire's daze
Punished by crimes of which I would be quit.

Tate had accomplished this kind of interior dramatization as persuasively, although on the level of external drama, in “The Oath” (1931), a skillful Browning-via-Pound monologue with a similar context—a country house on a cold night with the trophies of ancestors on the walls. Where better to consider the metaphysics of “Who are the dead? Who are the living and the dead?”

But it is in the “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” a poem whose final shape took a decade to solidify, that we have the best example in those years of the fruitful union of “philosophic metaphor” and personal, subjective experience. To make a detailed exegesis of the poem would be superfluous in view of the meticulous job of dissection the poet has performed in “Narcissus as Narcissus,” a long essay in which every facet of the poem's genesis, intent and mechanics is considered with scrupulous objectivity.

The “Ode,” Tate tells us, is about solipsism. But the attempt to connect solipsism (Narcissism) with the Confederate dead cannot be made “logically or even historically … the proof of the connection must lie, if anywhere, in the experienced conflict which is the poem itself.” Still, one wonders whether the position Tate ascribes to Narcissus (the poet) is not remarkably like that he elsewhere ascribes to Thomas Hardy, the “philosophic” writer. Tate supposes that the keys to Hardy's poems are large abstractions or “philosophic metaphors” like “Necessity” and “Chance” or their Victorian equivalents “Mechanism” and Spencer's “Unknowable.” These ideas, Tate argues, invade the poems' determining content but not structure. Hardy is at his best when “least philosophical” for “his ‘philosophy’ tends to be a little beyond the range of his feelings. …” Thus,

Hardy's “advanced” position is only another way of saying that he had come very early to be both inside and outside his background which was to be the material of his art: an ambivalent point of view that in its infinite variations from any formula that we may state for it, is the center of the ironic consciousness.

But is not Narcissus both inside and outside his “background” (solipsism, the Confederate dead) as much as was Hardy with his advanced Darwinian teleology in relation to Wessex folkways and primitivism? A similar ambivalence, I think, generates in Tate the “ironic consciousness” signal to the mood of the “Ode.”

It should be clear, then, that the components of the “Ode” as idea are not too remote from the concerns of Tate's poems and essays of the thirties, concerns which persist, indeed, as a major striation through all his work. I should like to add to Tate's discussion of the “Ode” some observations suggested by a comparison of the first published version (1927) with the final version of 1936.

First, there is, contrary to what we like to think of as axiomatic to creation, an expansion of material rather than a suppression of it. Apparently, there are other useful economies available to the poet beside cutting. Not only are many fine lines added to the body of the poem, but the subjective “wind-leaves” refrain, running through as a thread of opposition to the questions of the main theme, is entirely new. When there is suppression, it is of an entirely different order: the emendations so work as to suppress those details of a metaphor which tend to loosen its thrust. Compare, for example, “… the silence which / Engulfs you like a mummy in time, whose niche lacks aperture,” with the final “… the silence which / Smothers you, a mummy in time.”

Another large class of revisions is the substitution of concrete imagery for more allusive, literary abstraction. Consider, for example, the gain in decisiveness achieved by the substitution of “Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall” for the earlier Eliot-like wistfulness of “Here at this stile, once more, you know it all.” In short, the aim is more consistently to render the experience rather than to make statements about it. Instead of “We have not sung; we shall not ever sing,” we get “We shall say only the leaves whispering;” instead of “It has only a beginning and an end” we are given “Night is the beginning and the end.” Perhaps the most valuable change of this sort is the magnificent substitution (about the serpent) of “Sentinel of the grave who counts us all,” for the inconclusive “See what he knows—he knows us all.”

If we add to these changes considerable simplification in punctuation (the over-punctuated first version hindered the flow of the soliloquy); devices like transposing the attributes of a simile from one term to the other; countless revisions in single words (“arrogant circumstance” for “immodest circumstance,” “lurks” for “waits,” “Shut gate” for “turnstile”) all of which favor the stronger word; the change of tense from past to future (“You will curse the setting sun” from “You have cursed the setting sun”) implying an oracular prescience in the revelations the poet is making; strengthening of an occasional key word (like “blood”) by creating a new line to expand the emotion and to point it with an end rhyme (“flood”)—it becomes clear that the version of 1936 represents a great fund of technical knowledge garnered during the decade of its making. Nevertheless, in spite of this consolidation of skill, it is not until almost ten years later that Tate comes into his proper functioning as a total rather than a split poetic personality.

V.

We can measure the range of this progress by a study of The Winter Sea (1944). Although containing less than a dozen poems, it yet projects an almost complete break with Tate's earlier work in the forthright abandoning of the tendency to allow “philosophic metaphors” about tradition to determine the structure and content of the poems. It is possible that his fine historical novel of the antebellum South, The Fathers (1938), had served Tate as a sieve for draining off this long-nourished interest into the more flexible formal unit of experience of the story. The Fathers, like “The Ode,” is about those who were destroyed through what Hart Crane in a letter to Tate calls “an excess of chivalry.” The only echo of the past to be found in the diverse emphasis of the poems in The Winter Sea is the concern with childhood guilt noted in “Sonnets at Christmas.” This theme now advances into a more elevated symbolic use in “More Sonnets at Christmas” and in “Seasons of the Soul.”

It would not be over-emphasizing the personal situation revealed by this volume to say that it releases in Tate the full force of the romantic strain which had seemed successfully inhibited during the preceding years. Still, the didactic impulse and conscious moral aim is too habitual to suffer serious diminution and courses along, a parallel stream of intention, with the revitalized romanticism. Tate's own critical prescription for this mode of moral inquiry is certainly met by his achievement in “Jubilo,” in “Ode to Our Young Proconsuls of the Air,” and in “Eclogue of the Liberal and the Poet.” “The moral intelligence,” he had written in 1940, “gets into poetry … not as moral abstractions, but as form, coherence of image, and metaphor, control of tone and rhythm, the union of these features.” Tate's essays in the satire are vigorous, witty and, as in classical satire, full of honest prejudices. A prejudice, let it be noted in passing, is different from a willed belief. “Jubilo,” using as refrain a phrase from a Negro popular song, is a tongue-in-cheek celebration of boys who “caress the machines they ride.” The mock-heroic epic, while not at all a model, makes itself felt in “Ode to Our Young Proconsuls” in the deliberately heightened mock-allegorical language which raises the invective to dramatic irony.

“False Nightmare,” a telling although not altogether just indictment of Whitmanism, is sure to be quoted by Tate's enemies as evidence of his “reactionary” views. It is a bitter poem but, carefully read, as reactionary as Jeremiah.

We become aware, then, that in Tate's recent poetry the traditional influences (whether of structure, idea, or both) operate only as qualities, not as models. Thus, one is barely conscious of the Dante influence in the impressive “Seasons of the Soul,” but it is there in the deeply religio-ethical purpose of the poem as well as in the implied descent of the poet into his own hell. In the same poem the influence of the Pervigilium Veneris is felt in the erotic elements as well as in the subtle use of refrain. “Seasons of the Soul” can, I think, be thought of as the summation of Tate's present position. It is an instructive guide to his technical practice; it is a map to his present values, even though it merely poses a problem. But it is by the way in which a problem is framed that the nature of its solution is implied. Let us examine the frame.

The scheme of the poem is simple: the four seasons correspond to the four elements of the ancients. Thus the chronicle is of the four ages of man in relation to the four aspects of the universe he inhabits. More specifically, however, it is modern man whose spiritual biography Mr. Tate records. Summer is the first season; the background is now:

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—

This suggests another summer (the summer of childhood which is identified with the summer of classical antiquity in its clarity and innocence) when “The summer had no reason; / Then, like a primal cause / It had its timeless day.”

In Autumn, technically the most interesting section, the surrealist device of a dream is employed to enable the poet to prophesy, as it were, a vision of his own old age which is revealed to him as a trap. He is caught in a deep well, an empty house (the house of the past) peopled only by ghosts, his ancestors, who refuse to recognize him. The house of the past is not real, “The door was false—no key / Or lock … yet I could see / I had been born to it / For miles of running brought / Me back where I began.” The failure of parents to recognize a son is another way of stating the problem of identity. We have seen how in his earliest writing this question engaged Tate. Now the dilemma is extended to the profoundest sort of personal epistemology: If your progenitors do not know you, if you are cut off from communication with your contemporaries (“I was down a well”), if, in short, there is no objective recognition of your identity, who are you? Along with this return to a study of his past, Tate also reverts to the more sensuous and concrete imagery of the early “romantic” poems, an imagery determined by inner, emotional connections and not by logical ones. I think especially of the father-mother imagery of Section II and the sea imagery of Section III.

From the frustration of this cyclical returning upon himself, the poet in “Winter,” a strikingly beautiful section, pleads with Venus to return to her element. Christianity (“the drying God above / Hanged in his windy steeple”) is dead and “No longer bears for us / The living wound of love.” There is every reason to suppose that we must take this as Tate's mature view of the religious problem, a problem which he could not resolve with such brutal finality in the middle years. In “More Sonnets at Christmas,” composed a little before “Seasons of the Soul,” he had implied the dismissal:

Ten years is time enough to be dismayed
By mummy Christ, head crammed between his knees.

The violence of this image, its quasi-obscenity, even, is the measure of the distance Tate traveled in the ten dismaying years from the time when the question of anti-miraculism disturbed him. It is clear enough now that, as Tate once flippantly remarked, the question of Mr. Eliot's submission to the Thirty-nine Articles was never to be a live option in his own poetry.

But the pagan values are dead, too (“All the sea-gods are dead”). There is sex: The pacing animal who turns “The venereal awl / In the livid wound of love.” Again, a strange surrealist image connects the general with the poet's particular plight: In a grove under the sea the poet seizes the branch of a madrepore from which drips a “speaking blood / From the livid wound of love”:

We are the men who died
Of self-inflicted woe,
Lovers whose stratagem
Led to their suicide
I touched my sanguine hair
And felt it drip above
Their brother who, like them,
Was maimed and did not bear
The living wound of love.

The “living wound” of love would seem to be suggested by the famous Proem to De Rerum Naturae in which Lucretius, looking on a war-torn Italy, calls upon Venus (as a fertility-principle) to inflict upon Mars the eternal wound of love (aeterno volnere amoris) and thus win peace and increase for the Romans. For Tate the “eternal wound” becomes the “living wound” and I take the implication to be that Love, growing from a “livid” wound into the “living” wound is the only possible power which can rescue man from his otherwise maimed existence. The passionate and suppliant address to Venus makes clear that she is the complex erotic symbol around which cluster the poet's hopes for various kinds of regeneration:

All the sea-gods are dead
You, Venus, come home
To your salt maidenhead.

This reading, I think, is confirmed by the next section “Spring,” a liturgical chant (still within the frame of the ten-line iambic trimeter stanza) to the Mother of Silences, a figure who simultaneously suggests the principle of the Virgin (the Mother, Life) and the principle of Death (the Mystery); the figure, significantly, never speaks. The symbol has a certain obscurity not altogether relieved by the following passage:

Come, mother, and lean
At the window with your son
And gaze through its light frame
These fifteen centuries
Upon the shirking scene
Where men, blind, go lame:

Now the mother appears to be Saint Monica as she appears in Book IX of St. Augustine's Confessions. Mother and son stand alone “leaning in a certain window, from which the garden of the house we occupied at Ostia could be seen”; cataloguing a set of earthly conditions, which, could they be “silenced,” would enable them to arrive at an apprehension of the “hereafter.” Soon after, Monica dies and leaves Augustine with a living wound “from having that most sweet and dear habit of living together suddenly broken off.” Thus the Mother of Silences is a particular mother (St. Monica), the Virgin, the Mystery, and through Augustine's unmentioned wound, she is identified further with the principle of Love. Love, then, is the luminous agency common to all the referents of the symbol. Yet, in the end, one feels that the hope of regeneration through Love is reluctantly abandoned and death is sought as the only certain “kindness” to which men can aspire.

“Seasons of the Soul” will stand as a major event in Tate's career as a poet. It is lyrical, sensuous and tragic. It is, for whatever meaning that chameleon term may still carry, romantic. In “Tension in Poetry,” an interesting essay written some years ago, Tate distinguishes the metaphysical from the romantic poet in the following way:

The metaphysical poet as a rationalist begins at or near the extensive or denotative end of the line. The romantic or Symbolist poet at the other, intensive end; and each by a straining feat of the imagination tries to push his meaning as far as he can toward the opposite end, so as to occupy the entire scale. …

But there is to be recommended a “poetry of the center,” that is, a “poetry of tension in which the strategy is diffused into the unitary effect.” I am not sure after several rereadings how this strategy is implemented. Indeed, the concept of “tension” has been used by some critics, although not by Mr. Tate, to get around critical problems more taxing to unravel than to designate as illustrative of “tension.”

However, if there is a poetry of tension and if there is a living practitioner of this awesome and marvelous feat of poetic balance between the classic and the romantic, the metaphysical and the Symbolist among us, surely it is Tate himself. But it has become increasingly evident that the idea of the poet as the daring young man on the flying trapeze is giving way to a less perilous but more fruitful enterprise: the paradoxical roles of suppliant and teacher have lost their separate identities in a profound and humble appreciation of what de Unamuno calls “the tragic sense of life.” In “Winter Mask to the Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1943) Tate writes:

I asked the master Yeats
Whose great style could not tell
Why it is man hates
His own salvation,
Prefers the way to hell,
And finds his last safety
In the self-made curse that bore
Him towards damnation:
The drowned undrowned by the sea,
The sea worth living for.

Notes

1. This essay is an abridgement of an article originally written for Modern American Poetry (Focus Five). It appears here prior to the Focus version by courtesy of the editor of Focus and its publisher Dennis Dobson Ltd., London.

2. The “Ode” was begun in 1926 and not completed to Tate's satisfaction until 1936.