To save criticism from the scientists, Tate disengaged literature itself from society and men, and held up the inviolate literary experience as the only measure of human knowledge. Literature in this view was not only the supreme end; it was also the only end worthy of man's ambition. Critics who saw in works of literature "not the specific formal properties but only the amount and range of human life brought to the reader" were vulgar expressionists. Critics who studied literature as "expressive of substances" beyond itself were only historical scholars aping the positivism of science and remote from the crucial spiritual values to be derived from literature. Thus only Formalist criticism remained, to elucidate those "high forms of literature [which] offer us the only complete, and thus the most responsible, versions of our experience."

What one saw in Tate's system was a fantastic inversion of the Marxist system; and in him the extremities met as in no other critic of the time. The Marxist critic could study a work of art only in terms of its social relations; Tate would study literature—that is, only poetry of a certain intensity and difficulty—precisely because it had no social relations at all. A form like the novel could be despised because it was so much like history. Could anything be more illuminating of the contemporary mind in criticism? As fanatical as the Marxists, Tate never admitted for a moment that one could study both the specific formal properties of literature and its relation to civilization. The Marxists would have only the history, and he would have only the literature. "The true paradox," as Blackmur once wrote, "is that in securing its own ends thought cannot help defeating itself at every crisis. To think straight you must overshoot your mark." And how Tate overshot the mark! Overshot even Matthew Arnold's wistful faith that poetry could be "a criticism of life"! In his reaction against "our limitation of the whole human problem to the narrow scope of the political program," he gave literature so self-sufficient and austere a character that almost everything that went into the making of literature and its significance for men was driven out. The Marxists made life and literature indistinguishable; Tate made life indistinguishable in literature. In a desperate effort to save literature from science and criticism from mere history or impressionism, he transformed the experience of literature into what I. A. Richards had called a set of "isolated ecstasies." The positivism was removed, the history forgotten, all extraneous vulgarities of circumstance disengaged. Only the poem remained, and its incommunicable significance; and before it the critic worshiped as at a mystic shrine, since in it was all human knowledge and all spiritual insight.

Here, at last, was the tragicomic climax to the long and often unconscious history of American pragmatism. (pp. 441-42)

What one saw in his work was a rage, so profound and superior a hatred of science and positivism, not to say democracy, that it was almost too deep for words. There was, of course, a certain irony in his position, since the very textual analysis he defended was an aping of scientific method and rigor. But Tate never saw that, as he never saw how presumptuously his plantation aristocrat's philosophy represented the subordinate classes in the South. In his biographies of Jefferson Davis and Stone wall Jackson, in critical works suggestively titled Reason in Madness and Reactionary Essays, there was fashioned a literary apotheosis of the South, the negation of whose ambiguous splendors in modern experience he explored with pyrotechnical bitterness in his poems. It was an affirmation so much more Royalist than the King's, so much more hierarchical than any hierarch's, that the view of American society which emerged was as false to the South as it was a travesty of its own idealism.

Yet there was method in this apotheosis, and a kind of tragic satisfaction to be derived from it. For everything Tate wrote proved the abundance of his talent and his own modern and sophisticated powerlessness to use it. His orthodoxy was so palpably a convenience, a foothold, a margin of security, that it made a joke of the historic legends it ran after, and belied them. This was the perfect manufactured traditionalism, the apex of desire: it called for faith, but it had no faith; it called for order, which it could find only in poetry; it summoned men to the tasks of philosophy as if philosophy were a dignity of mind rather than the relation of ideas to the human situation…. How transparent a makeshift this traditionalism was stood revealed on every page of Tate's books; yet he never gave himself away more clearly than when he wrote in Reactionary Essays that while slavery was wrong, it was wrong because the master gave everything to the slave and got nothing in return; that the "moral" wrong of slavery meant nothing, since "societies can bear an amazing amoung of corruption and still produce high cultures." High cultures! Here lay the ultimate significance of Tate's plea for moral philosophy, for discipline, for hierarchy. It was in the quest of high cultures that the modern poet lived at last; alone with his poem, alone with its ecstasy, with drawn in its exclusive and superior knowledge; weighing the poem in all the contentment of textual analysis, dreaming in embittered resignation of a time when there had been order, order, order in the world. (pp. 442-44)