For readers of a certain age—I have in mind those who, like myself, first came to modern poetry (and to the criticism written to defend and elucidate it) in the years just after the Second World War—the publication of Allen Tate's "Collected poems 1919–1976" … is an event that stirs a good many memories and associations…. [In the] first years after the war Mr. Tate already seemed a venerable survivor of several lost worlds. The Nashville of the Fugitives, the New York of the young Malcolm Cowley and Kenneth Burke and E. E. Cummings, like the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Ford Madox Ford, had receded into the mists of literary legend….

[Today] the battles of the New Criticism and the literary and political divisions they engendered are as distant from us as the Nashville of the Fugitives. They too evoke yet another lost world….

Throughout [the complex history of the New Criticism], Mr. Tate was never a writer easy to take hold of. For the New Criticism enjoined us to concentrate our attention on the poem itself—when it ventured into discussions of fiction or drama, it seemed to treat them too as poetic structures—and not to be bemused by the distractions of literary history, or indeed history of any sort. It was on the text, and not the context, that the New Criticism directed all intelligence, and yet the critical imperatives that focused so narrowly on the isolated literary object—isolated, that is, from the world that had produced it—seemed to carry with them a distinct but unacknowledged context of their own. (p. 3)

The odd thing about all this, so far as Mr. Tate's own writings were concerned, was that he had been all along a writer—as poet, critic, novelist and biographer—deeply immersed in the materials of history, and there could never be any question of separating his literary achievements from their attachment to the historical imagination. Only by means of a certain pedagogical magic and a classroom atmosphere of extreme casuistry could the author of "Ode to the Confederate Dead," of that fine novel "The Fathers" … and "Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas" be separated from the iron grip of history. It was done, of course, but the result, I think, was to blur his distinction, especially his distinction as a poet. The New Criticism may have enhanced our appreciation of his powers of literary artifice, but it diminished our understanding of the vision that such artifice was designed to serve. In this respect, the most blatant of Mr. Tate's political and historical essays often prove a better guide to the poetry than the most accomplished explications of his language and structure. (pp. 3, 36)

Returning to the poetry again on the occasion of this new "Collected Poems," one is indeed keenly aware that "time and history" is its central concern and "man's attachment to the past" its major theme, but it is a particular history that so impresses itself on our imagination—the history of a lost world carried in the mind of a Southerner, a classicist and an artist exiled to a Northern culture in which the imperatives of industrialism, philistinism and bourgeois capitalism reinforce a sense of irretrievable defeat.

The tragic dimension of Mr. Tate's poetry, which we feel most profoundly in the poems written in memory of friends—especially in "Seasons of the Soul," written in memory of John Peale Bishop, and "The Eye," written for E. E. Cummings—as well as in the better-known "Ode to the Confederate Dead," the irony of which is in its not being an ode at all, is to be found precisely in this consciousness of exile from a history that holds the poet in its power. All that can be retrieved from this history, and from the sense of defeat that is inseparable from it and which in the end is indistinguishable from the scenario of existence itself, is what the artist makes of it. Is this, perhaps, why the poems written in memory of friends who were also poets seem to carry a special power?

It is, in any case, in this sense of history—the most encompassing of Mr. Tate's lost worlds—that we find the source of both the politics that may appall us and the poetry that moves and instructs us…. This is a poetry that is formal, elegant, "metaphysical"; and coming to it today from an immersion in the newer, looser, more solipsistic modes of contemporary verse, it too conjures up a lost world—a world of flawless, well-made structures and meters that flatter and educate the ear. But it is also a poetry of knowledge, a poetry confident in its assumption that poetry has something to tell us about our experience, about history, that only poetry can tell us. Mr. Tate's very long and distinguished career is, in its way, a kind of parable on the poet's vocation, for his poetry is often wise as well as beautiful in ways that his prose is not. It is the poetry that will live. (pp. 36-7)