"The man of letters," a phrase frequently employed by Mr. Tate, gives us, I believe, the key to his criticism…. [Its] ordinary use in French or English is as a synonym for "writer" or "literary man" or "scholar." But for Mr. Tate the man of letters has a responsibility and a dignity that we do not ordinarily associate with the activities of the writer. And in spite of our critic's instinctive modesty and courtesy, it is not difficult to perceive that he thinks of himself as a man of letters. For this reason, the phrase serves as an index of the seriousness with which Mr. Tate takes his profession; and when we consider it in conjunction with the sense he has of the modern world, it also gives us the measure of the desperate courage that is required of a man who makes of the profession of letters the demands Mr. Tate does. This in turn gives us the measure of his stature and the means to define his place in contemporary literature.

What does the activity of the man of letters consist of? In the first essay of [The Forlorn Demon], entitled "The Man of Letters in the Modern World," we are given the answer to our question. Mr. Tate suggests that we define the man of letters by what we need him to do. His immediate responsibility, "at our own critical moment," is for the vitality of language. It is his task to distinguish the difference between mere communication and the rediscovery of the human condtion in the living arts. This responsibility puts on the man of letters the burden of inventing standards by which this difference may be known and a sufficient minority of persons may be instructed. It ought to be clear from this succinct statement alone that Allen Tate is going far beyond what T. S. Eliot conceives to be the task of the poet. For Eliot would have it that the duty of the poet is to preserve and develop the language. But both preservation and development are for Eliot controlled by the need for expression, through the objective correlative, of feelings and emotions. Even when Mr. Tate conceives the immediate task of the man of letters at our own critical moment, he is thinking of that task in objective and not in subjective terms. Sentiments and emotions are no doubt important constituents of the world in which we live, but they cannot give us the key to the whole.

The restricted "immediate responsibility" of the man of letters is conceived by Mr. Tate in the context of a larger and more permanent responsibility which is defined by him as follows: The man of letters "must create for his age an image of man, and he must propagate standards by which other men may test that image, and distinguish the false from the true." (pp. 131-32)

If this is how Mr. Tate conceives the task of the man of letters I do not believe it would take much argument to demonstrate that what he is expected to do today, as things are for us, at our critical moment, is a desperately quixotic and probably anachronistic service. (p. 134)

Ours, it has been frequently observed, is an age of criticism. Our critics are, one and all, endowed with considerable talent.

And they have added to this talent wondrous skills to achieve brilliant discriminations; they are endowed with subtle tools of analysis, they have at their command the insights of the sciences and the pseudo-sciences of today, and those who are put through the academic processing machinery—and most of them are in an age in which education is universal—possess more than enough historical erudition for their purposes. But it must also be observed that our critics are for the most part philosophically pauperized and are, hence, devoid of a coherent sense of the place of man in society, the place of society in history, and the relation of history to the universe. It is no wonder, therefore, that they should have only the most trivial notions of the use of literature…. None of these critics ask of themselves the simple question: How does it happen that art, that seems to be, and in a sense is, the most expendable of activities in human society, is one of the two most ineradicable, most indispensable modes of experience? Our critics cannot ask this question because, for the most part, they work in a philosophical vacuum. And they do because they lack a guiding body of convictions—of prejudices, in Edmund Burke's sense of the word—with reference to which the work of art is seen as an indispensable and unsubstitutable factor in the creation and maintenance of the human element in the animal, man. (pp. 137-38)

[Neither] conservative nor liberal critics seem to have a sense of the way in which art affects the lives of men. And the reason is simply that they do not base their criticism, whether new or old, whether historical or non-historical, whether sociological or psychoanalytic, on a tenable notion of the destiny of man. If you press them, all they can give you is a more or less dressed-up version of man as an animal essentially motivated by the pleasure principle…. For such men the role of art in human life cannot be central. Philosophically, ours is a bankrupt generation.

In contrast Mr. Tate is saying that art is important because human life is not capable of achieving what virtue or perfection it may achieve unless it is guided by an effective notion of the destiny of man. The poet makes his essential and indispensable contribution when he gives us "the image of man as he is in his time, which without the man of letters would not otherwise be known." Thus it is not an exaggeration to say that Mr. Tate's fundamental concern as a man of letters is with the values men live by and the ends they serve. In the essay on Dante, what he explicitly proposes to do is 'to look at a single image in the Paradiso [the image of light], and to glance at some of its configurations with other images."… But when Mr. Tate is through with his analysis what he has given us is a contrast between the medieval imagination, which does not try to transcend the mediation of image and discourse, and "the angelic imagination" which "tries to disintegrate or to circumvent the image in the illusory pursuit of essence." What is suggested is a conception of man and, in sketch at least, a philosophy of history. (pp. 138-39)

[In the first of the two essays on Poe, Mr. Tate] demonstrates that Poe possessed the angelic imagination and used it without qualms and for this reason Poe is "the transition figure in modern literature," since he is the man who discovered our great subject, "the disintegration of personality, but kept it in a language that had developed in a tradition of unity and order."… In the second essay, Mr. Tate makes clear why he is fascinated by this man of the nineteenth century. He writes, "in the history of the moral imagination in the nineteenth century Poe occupies a special place. No other writer in England or the United States, or, so far as I know, in France, went so far as Poe in his vision of dehumanized man."…

One can disagree with Mr. Tate as regards details…. But I do not believe the reflective man can disagree with him as regards the substance of the issue. There are, in this quarrel, three possible positions. One can look forward to a totally secularized future, made glorious by science as it extends its sway; one can, with Mr. Tate, look back on a past in which men, for all their sins, never seriously proposed a purely secular conception of human destiny; or one can deny these alternatives on the ground that the more things change the more they are the same. I take it that this denial of the alternatives is given the lie by the facts and that the disagreement between Mr. Tate and the positivists is as to the proper evaluation of the facts and what they seem to portend. Science has indeed made a difference: it has encouraged a swarm of false philosophies which claim its authority and whose business is to destroy the once solid metaphysics in the light of which we defined our destiny…. It becomes more and more clear that the positivist mind … will do its termite work, and there is precious little that any one can do to stop it from destroying our culture. I suspect that the muffled despair the reader discerns below the surface of this book springs from the fact that Mr. Tate knows that the things he loves are doomed. Bet Mr. Tate is no man to take the threat lying down. At the heart of his criticism, informing it throughout and giving it remarkable consistency and force, is his protest against the meaning of the present and of the probable future. (pp. 139-40)