Allen Tate in his earliest criticism suffered somewhat from the Arnoldian confusion of art and life, which demanded too much of poetry; and we have all been involved by Eliot, Tate and our other major critics in their private darkness (or, better, in their private versions of a public darkness which has sought philosophic, anthropological and even religious answers from poetry).

In the separate appearances of the essays now included in The Forlorn Demon …, we have caught intermittent glimpses of the way out of that darkness, one way out, at least. And in this collocation of the continued raids of Mr. Tate upon the darkness we discover much about literature and language and ourselves: these essays are critical and didactic in the best sense….

In [some] essays in this volume which consider some consequences of the modern angelic imagination, Allen Tate exhibits that sense of ordered awareness and intelligence so conspicuous in his previous work. But his ordered awareness and intelligence have their full play only in the complete essay, as in … Longinus, whom Tate himself so much resembles, as Donald Stauffer once remarked….

As critic and as poet, as editor of The Sewanee Review during what may prove to have been its best years, as author of one of the best American novels between wars, The Fathers—Allen Tate has been one of our most distinguished American men of letters. He has consistently held for the highest standards of literature and argued for the thesis that the fuller forms of literature offer us the most complete versions of our experience. Thus in this volume of critical essays of a high standard Mr. Tate offers not only exemplars of the critic at work but discussions of the realm and office of the critic, and other essays which deal with the basic conflicts of our culture. In all of them we witness what R. P. Blackmur has called his "powerful, because unusually integrated, sensibility."

It is that integration of sensibility which has here been carried one step further. I will not claim that his recent conversion to Catholicism has given him that; some, indeed, will argue that his integration has won him his conversion. But one sees an obvious influence at work here and the exercise of his imagination has gained coherence in its ordering and even generates additional insight. What is evident and ultimately vital is that (to modify his own phrase) the philosophical language in which Tate visibly expounds his insight now reflects an authority which he has experienced and tested and earned as a poet, not as a passive student.

That sense of authority does not become an abstract critical dialectic, for Mr. Tate does not lose his awareness of and emphasis on the provisional nature of the critical enterprise…. In the long run he keeps faith with the work that he engages to examine, and that is the ultimate responsibility of the critic. No one is more richly aware than he of that and other responsibilities of the critic to himself, to his craft and language, to society; and his integration of sensibility has kept pace with his awareness of responsibility.