[The body of Allen Tate's poetry] is slim—as slim as Eliot's and Ransom's. He published one novel, The Fathers (1938). A remarkable work, it was never widely popular; but like Allen's best poetry, it remains in print, and I think it is destined to last.

Why did one so greatly and variously gifted write and publish so little? What he said of his friend John Ransom was not, I think true of him: that he set out deliberately to be a Minor Poet…. My observation is that as an imaginative writer Allen had a gift that was highly and intricately autobiographical. This may seem odd, in that his poetics placed a premium upon achieved anonymity, classical restraint, the primacy of craftsmanship over subject—the antithesis of the romantic subjective artist whose work is the fervent unmediated outpouring of his own sensibilities. "As a poet I have no experience," he once remarked. Yet—and perhaps the paradox is the key—almost all that Allen wrote is drawn either directly from his own situation or from that of his immediate forebears. He used to speak of himself as having conducted his education in public, and if by that statement he meant that his writings consisted of his openly enunciated response to his own experience, it is quite appropriate.

As poet and critic Allen had impeccable taste. His literary coat-of-arms might well have borne the motto nil admirari—to be astonished at and by nothing. So fastidious was his literary sensibility that he could not tolerate blemish or imperfection, and this habit of mind no doubt served to lessen, or at any rate to restrict, his response to much work that was flawed but powerful…. I believe that this fastidiousness was what inhibited him from publishing or even continuing to work for very long on anything of his own that did not seem absolutely right to him. His sensibility and his taste were whole and unified; had it been otherwise, he might have written more. Again, though, he would not have been Allen Tate. What he did write is not merely distinguished: it is unique in its distinction. (p. 270)

As a literary critic Allen, like many other poets, was active and assertive. "I never knew what I thought about anything until I had written about it," he once wrote. "To write an essay was to find out what I thought; for I did not know at the beginning how or where it would end." Clearly this is not quite true: there is too much consistency in Allen's critical judgement to be accounted for by any such haphazard procedure. It would be more accurate, perhaps, to say that he wrote his criticism to identify and formulate what he felt—that, like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and his master Eliot, he wrote about literature, and sometimes edited it for publication, in order to instruct his audience in how to read the literature which he admired and championed, including his own. My own belief is that he possessed the most brilliantly conceptual mind of his generation of poet-critics, and that, had he elected to do so, he could have produced a body of critical work such as no other critic in the English language, not even Johnson, Coleridge, or Brooks, ever evolved. (p. 272)

We shall not be able to replace Allen Tate. We have the poetry, the novel, the essays; but, as he declared of another poet, "he who dribbled couplets like a snake / Coiled to a lithe precision in the sun / Is missing." (pp. 272-73)