I doubt that any other poet in this country is a better judge of his contemporaries than Allen Tate. He has a personal distinction that frees him from jealousy and a sense of craftsmanship that qualifies him to explain all sorts of technical matters…. Moreover, [as evidenced by his recent Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas], he goes beyond questions of technique into a frequently illuminating type of social criticism. He says in his essay on Hart Crane—certainly the best of all those dealing with the subject—that the poet tried to create a religious myth for an anti-mythical nation, with the result that his central symbol, the Bridge, has no real meaning. Edwin Arlington Robinson's long poems, he says, are dull and undramatic because "Mr. Robinson has no epos, myth or code, no supra-human truth, to tell what the terminal points of human conduct are, in this age." In Archibald MacLeish's "Conquistador," there is likewise no objective convention that would give value to the hero's personal memories of the march to Mexico…. Except for a few questionable words like "religious" and "supra-human," I think these judgments are final; they fix the landmarks by which other critics will have to steer.

And in this sense Allen Tate's new essays deny the title under which he has printed them. When they deal with modern poets, they are not at all "Reactionary Essays"; instead they point toward the future; their only political color is a belief in the desirability of generally accepted standards—that is, in a goal toward which all sorts of people are struggling. But Tate's essays also deal with poetry as an abstract idea ("Three Types of Poetry"), with religion ("Humanism and Naturalism") and with the need for recapturing the feudal virtues of the Old South. In this wider field there is more reason for his title, yet even here the essays are not so much reactionary as they are personal and symptomatic. They reflect the confusions that are caused by the author's attempt to write, simultaneously, from three different points of view.

When T. S. Eliot told us a long time ago that he was a Catholic in religion, a royalist in politics and a classicist in literature, he was announcing a debatable position, but one that was at least consistent. Tate has not this advantage. He is a Catholic by intellectual conviction (though not by communion), he is a Southern Agrarian by social background, he is a man of letters trained in the Late Romantic or Symbolist tradition—and these are three positions that cannot be reconciled anywhere short of Nirvana…. Today if Tate carried his praise of traditional religion to the logical point of joining the Church, he would be alienating himself from his own people. He would not be alienating himself from poetry, but he would be forcing himself to reject many poets whom he still admires, with a divided mind. It almost seems that his essays are being written by three persons, not in collaboration but in rivalry….

The book abounds in abstractions, in mouth-filling words such as "the South"—which bears a shadowy resemblance only to part of the real South; "Europe"—which is not France or England or Germany or the people who live in those countries; "Science"—which is separated by a thousand light years from any aims that breathing scientists pursue in their laboratories; "Religion"—which is neither Catholic nor Protestant nor yet Buddhist, though it has elements borrowed from all three; "Quantity and Quality"; "Imagination" as opposed to "the Will"; and finally "History"—which tells us how "the ideas that men lived by from about the twelfth to the seventeenth century were absolute and unquestioned," in which respect it controverts the historical records of those six centuries. All these shadow-symbols, these disembodiments, are shifted back and forward with egregious skill; one can scarcely seize their coat-tails before they vanish. Reading some of Tate's political and theological essays is like watching a game of chess played on a triangular board with ghosts for chessmen. But the result of the match is settled in advance. At a certain point the author gets tired of his symbols and sweeps them off the board with one broad gesture.

It happens at the end of his essay on "Religion and the Old South," which is the climax of the book from the standpoint of interior drama. "How," he suddenly asks, "may the Southerner take hold of his tradition? The answer is: by violence." (p. 348)