To speak of Allen Tate and the personal epic—that peculiarly modern form which views historical material entirely through the glass of a private sensibility, fragmenting it into the elements of a series of lyrics rather than presenting it whole, as narrative—is to find oneself in difficulties at the start. Tate as critic has questioned the validity of the genre in Ezra Pound's Cantos and has rejected it in Hart Crane's The Bridge…. Yet Tate has followed his own advice only as a prose writer. In poetry, he has made his deepest, most artistically complex judgments on the past and the present, and has reached out toward the long poem in "Seasons of the Soul" and the unfinished terzinas, through exactly that lyric concentration on the self which, in theory, he questions.

The paradox deepens when one grasps the importance of action and narrative in Tate's philosophy, as set forth in the central essays "The Symbolic Imagination: The Mirrors of Dante" and "The Angelic Imagination: Poe as God." Following Jacques Maritain, Tate argues that the crucial fault of post-Cartesian thought is "angelism"—the aspiration to a direct, nonsensory knowledge of the essences of things—which Thomistic philosophy reserves to the angels. (p. 714)

"The Angelic Imagination" which Tate sees in modern science, and in the romanticism of Poe and Crane, creates "hypertrophies" of feeling, will, and intellect, by claiming to deal with essences. The hypertrophy of the intellect is its claim to complete objectivity, "whereby it declares itself independent of the human situation in the quest of essential knowledge." A hypertrophy of the will is implicit for Tate, both in scientific control over nature and in the alchimie du verbe of the symbolists…. Tate's later philosophy preserves Eliot's idea of the dissociation of sensibility, but makes it the symptom of a still deeper disorder, angelism. Neurotic-romantic man, of whom we are all in some degree incarnations, is both more conscious and more prey to the unconscious than his classical and healthy counterpart; his disconnected thought and his fantasies, concomitantly enlarged, threaten his ability to act in terms of reality. (pp. 715-16)

Upon [the] opposition of the symbolic and the angelic rests Tate's dislike of the modern world, his tendency—like Pound and Eliot—to make utopias of the more active, less individualistic cultures of the past. But Tate's utopia is a more ambiguous one than Pound's, because it is also his personal past…. It is Tate's curse—but perhaps ultimately his blessing—that idealization of the past does not free him from his central moral anxiety, but brings it back to him with redoubled force. In writing of the heroic past in a personal, postsymbolist mode, Tate acknowledges his double consciousness as an "angelic" man in love with the vision of a world where his own conflicts are transcended. But unable to experience such a world, outwardly or inwardly, he is therefore not utterly certain that it exists.

Tate has, of course, tried to draw the distinction between past and present with a more impersonal assurance, notably in the early poems "Retroduction to American History" and "Causerie." But these poems seem unsatisfyingly simplistic, even arrogant, when compared with those in which Tate feels detached from what he condemns. When Tate uses Eliot's method of ironic parallelism through literary allusion, the allusion often becomes a mere token of the goodness of the old days; unlike Eliot, Tate does not allow the moral problems and complexities of the earlier work to become part of his own poem. (pp. 716-17)

[If] one is looking for a great poetry of history, the most dangerous result of … polemical adulation of the past is that it tends to reduce the stature of the moral issues that the past struggled, and mostly failed, to resolve—as when Tate asserts, in his "Retroduction," that the problems of the Oresteia are "less subtle than you think," and important mainly as a contrast to the present—"Heredity // Proposes love, love exacts language, and we lack // Language."

In the "Ode to the Confederate Dead," by contrast, an open self-preoccupation leads to a more complex and troubled view of the past. Tate has written, in "Narcissus as Narcissus," that the poem is about "solipsism," which he defines as "a … doctrine which says that we create the world in the act of perceiving it"; but "solipsism," in the poem, seems to expand to include any thought or feeling that cannot lead, or be related, to outward action. The speaker wishes to celebrate the Confederate Dead, but he can do nothing but stand still outside a gate and reflect. For the future author of "The Angelic Imagination," such a situation is not only, as it was for Matthew Arnold, artistically dubious; it is paradoxically explosive and fraught with psychic peril. (pp. 717-18)

On an emotional level, ["Ode to the Confederate Dead"] reveals a double attitude toward the past: it is too remote yet devouringly close, adored but subliminally resented. And even intellectually, the poem expresses unwilling doubts about the past: to be "hurried beyond decision" seems enviable to one trapped in "mute speculation," but it cannot solve the most ultimate human problems the poem touches on, those of free will and justification. (p. 720)

In Tate's earlier poems we observe a progression from a satire bitterly confident in past ideals to a fear that all history is chaotic, irredeemable. World War II seems to have confirmed Tate in this more inclusive pessimism; like Robert Lowell, he condemned both sides, and the atmosphere of hatred, propaganda, and overwhelming military technology seemed to him the triumph of abstract experience over particular humaneness. In "Seasons of the Soul" and the related "Winter Mask," the sense of historical entrapment thus becomes more inclusive, but the real area of conflict, fear, and hope becomes more personal: "Why it is man hates / His own salvation, / Prefers the way to hell." (p. 721)

The three sections Tate has published from his unfinished poem in terza rima—though only "The Swimmers" is directly historical—are both a recapitulation and a profound resolution of the problems underlying Tate's poetry of history. They are a kind of personal Divine Comedy, in the sense that a religious experience has allowed Tate to journey wholly into the feared realm of dreams, traumas, twilight half-hallucinations, as Dante journeyed into hell, without the fear of being trapped there, unable to return to the outside world. They also follow the Dante described in "The Symbolic Imagination," who brings with him all the levels of his own experience, in particular the sexual, to be incorporated and reinterpreted even in his highest moments of religious insight.

The dominant symbols of the sequence are light and darkness, and water. Water … is an ambivalent element, powerful to save, but also to destroy those distorted or in error. Light, as in "The Symbolic Imagination," is the invisible power of God that makes itself known to us only in making known external reality.

The concluding passage of "The Maimed Man" declares the theme: in the "small half-hell" of "love disordered" and of a childhood haunted by familial "shades," the speaker has dangerously "played swimmer of night"—night being defined as the dream, the Platonic cave, and, for the first time explicitly, as the Freudian wish to return to the womb. He now prays to be admitted to the higher, or regenerative, meaning of water…. It is hard not to associate [his] infinite regression of dreams with terrifying images of solipsism in Tate's earlier work. Yet the journey ends in a reconciliation of water with "noonday," and of the "shadowy womb" with a transcendent Mother. (pp. 725-26)

Though ["The Swimmers"] describes a lynching, it is not a political poem in any ordinary sense; the lynching becomes a generalized symbol of original sin, of the evil lurking in communal, as well as individual, dreams. (p. 727)

The antithesis of light and sound used in "The Maimed Man" and, with beautiful unobtrusiveness, in "The Swimmers," [is in "The Buried Lake"] made clear: while light places man in the outward world, sound (music and poetry) springs from the pulse, man's deepest sense of inner being, and projects it outward. Here lies the dreaded solipsism; yet Tate now affirms that the two senses can correspond, like the Way and the way back. For dreams and the power to tell them are both operations of the light upon unconsciousness—the "buried lake" not perceivable by the senses ("not seen even by me") until they themeselves act upon it—therefore, the dream is said to be dreamt at Santa Lucia's "command."…

If this reading is correct, the "secret plan" that saves the dreamer from anxiety is an appropriate one; in the compartmentalized realm of art, he asserts his masculine control, and impregnates…. What is at issue … goes beyond the psychoanalytic; it is the romantic idea of the emanation, the idea that the artist's self-sufficient imagination produces an ideal image, at once beloved object of knowledge, and regenerated world, which he can then find or create in reality. (p. 728)

["The Buried Lake"] ends with an assessment of the claims, personal and artistic, to be made for the dreamer's experience. There is still a hint of the darkening shadow of history: in an "off season," the poet's "leaf" has yet to unfold the "formal cherry," whether that means a finished masterpiece, a wholehearted religious conversion, or happiness in life. Tate's invocation of "Cape jasmine, wild azalea, eglantine" reminds one of Eliot's nostalgia for the "bent goldenrod" at the end of Ash-Wednesday. But where Eliot held that the renewal of the love of life on a purely generative level should be seen as the enemy of further spiritual progress, Tate sticks with his interior flora. He insists on the completeness and order of the experience within its natural embodiments, and on the necessary onward movement of life, hesitant, earthly, and unpredictable…. Yet he stresses, too, the reality of the "invisible … mass" of implications that the natural experience throws off, caught in a mirror world of art or religion but not, therefore, angelic. If the ending makes Tate's religious conversion somewhat less complete than Eliot's, it does not lessen his sense of fulfillment as a human being: "I knew that I had known enduring love."

Tate's poetry of history is concerned throughout with the relation of an individual to an idealized past and to a present that, in his view, shares his defects without recognizing them as such. The stance of much of the prose and poetry is that the individual is deeply unworthy, and should desire only to bring himself closer, as in "Emblems," to the destiny and the standards of the ancestors. But in some poems—"Mother and Son," perhaps the "Ode," and certainly the second part of "Seasons of the Soul"—there is an undercurrent of contrary feeling: a bitter suspicion that the domination of the past, rather than the deficiencies of modern thought, is responsible for the sense of suffocation and unreality in present experience. The essays, for all their traditionalism, surely express a similar impulse in stressing the need to accept the body and the actual, living world. Given this obsessive ambivalent concern with the problem of tradition and individuation, it is hardly surprising that regressive ideas come up so frequently in the psychoanalytic overtones of the poetry. The two contexts of feeling are so profoundly related that any argument as to which was the symbol, which the primary psychic concern, would be most useless and academic.

These problems, when all is said, are universal human ones, not invented by the special concerns of the defeated South, or the Spengler-haunted 1920s. I would suggest that Allen Tate has come to treat them more universally in the process of treating them more personally; and has, thus, come to envision resolutions which, being psychological and religious, are largely independent of history. One result, understandably, is a less idealistic view of the southern past: its elements of morbid romanticism and destructiveness are fully acknowledged in the terzinas. At the same time, the modern perspective of psychoanalysis, which would once have been satirized, is partially incorporated—in particular, its idea of the conscious reliving of early and traumatic experience as a way of release from the solipsism of neurotic repetition. Yet the terzinas, more than any of Tate's earlier work, demonstrate the guiding and expansive possibilities of tradition. Not only does a conversion to Catholicism "reduce the toll" of self-exploration, but the poems are literally and intentionally imitative: Dante provides not only a few symbols (as in "Seasons of the Soul"), but the form itself and many of the most striking qualities of diction. In his late and best period, by committing himself to a personal epic written in homage to a dramatic one, Tate converts his Furies into Eumenides; he draws sustenance from both sides of an ambivalence which, at the time of the "Ode," seemed virtually paralytic. (pp. 731-32)