Many of [Tate's] early essays are stylistically awkward, full of involuted, semi-philosophical phrasings, and tentative in their critical formulations. But, though the brilliant style of Tate's later writings came slowly, these early things are still important. In these years, Tate was constantly concerned with the poetic order; but gradually, one can see a complementary theme entering his writing. This theme is an extension of Tate's continuing obsession with unity. By 1930, he was convinced that poetic order could not be divorced from the more general conceptions of metaphysical and social order. It was, possibly, twenty-five years before Tate found the larger unity to support his poetic order. Yet he constantly struggled for it. His concern with the agrarian society and the ante-bellum South must, I feel, be explained in these terms.

This is such a fundamental conception for understanding Tate's work that I have ventured to give it a title: the two faces of order. Tate's mind is one which habitually polarizes experience and then, not content to remain in dualism, attempts to mediate between the poles. The polar terms of his dialectic have shifted through the years, but the habit has persisted. And in the late 1920's and early 1930's the polarization takes, I believe, the form of a poetic order somewhat tenuously related to a social order: two faces of the same obsession with the necessity of unifying twentieth-century experience. (pp. 16-17)

In the reviews of this period …, Tate repeatedly insists that order is both an achievement of the poet's form and a cultural affair. The two are constantly joined and are almost always connected in Tate's thought. Even in the early essay, "Poetry and the Absolute," a text often used to cite the extremity of Tate's formalism, he is merely concentrating more heavily on the relation of the poet to his medium; the essay cannot be isolated from his total point of view. The charge, presented in various ways, that Tate has "isolated poetry from life," or presented a doctrine of "life for art's sake," while certainly not incomprehensible, will not stand much examination. Still less, it seems to me, will Alfred Kazin's assertion that Tate made of literature a series of "isolated ecstacies" bear scrutiny…. Tate has worshipped as many strange things as most of us, and at times his reverence for the poem is almost mystical: but his "aestheticism" has often been misunderstood. Tate's "aestheticism" is not the reduction of life to the elusive pursuit of beauty and the willed neatness of iambic discourse. The aesthetic order is, for Tate, an independent order and the one in which he is most interested. It is an order of being that cannot be reduced to other orders of being. This is not to say that it is the only order of being, or that the aesthetic order nowhere impinges on other orders of being.

The point which Tate made at great length throughout his early critical work had two facets, though it remained a single point: (1) poetry was the unification of experience within the enigmatic dynamics of form and (2) the forms of the poet's art could not be frivolous or eccentric if great poetry was to result. Form had to depend on the poet's ability to perceive human experience whole, and he could not so perceive experience unless the society offered the artist settled forms of experience (though the experience itself, like Dante's, might be chaotic).

If we emphasize one of these facets in isolation, we will get either a sterile separation of the poem from the bewildering dilemmas of life, or an irrational reverence for tradition which results, finally, in a cultural determinism. To apprehend Tate clearly, it seems to me, one must reject both the first and the second of these alternatives and realize that both aspects are joined in a total strategy which, while sometimes as mysterious as the hypostatic union itself, is nevertheless an inseparable union.

It would be an entirely different matter, one amounting to a preposterous evasion of critical responsibility, to fail to balance against this assertion of union the recognition that Tate, in his early writing and throughout his career, has elevated the problem of form above all other issues. For form is order, and it is order for which Tate has constantly searched. Yet poetic form is not isolated, and can exist only through a larger order of the imagination and order of culture. The entire question is exceedingly complicated, and many of the debates of modern criticism have similar issues as their base.

One of Tate's important early essays on these questions I have already mentioned: "Poetry and the Absolute," first published in 1927. As essays go, it is not very impressive and he has never republished it. But it is important; it establishes issues that continued to work in Tate's continual struggle with poetics…. "Poetry and the Absolute" is still likely to repay some attention as long as it is recognized for what it is: Tate's first concerted attempt to resolve a paradox which informs all of his writing on poetics. (pp. 18-20)

The basic proposition of the essay is that poetic creation involves the poet's attempt to create an absolute, that is a static, order. This type of absolute is fundamentally different from the search for certainty in other approaches to experience, such as speculative philosophy. Philosophy may present metaphysical absolutes, such as Plato's Forms or Hegel's Absolute idea; these seek to describe an essential and ontological order of the universe. But the poetic absolute is created, not ontological; it is a matter of form: experience is formed into an achieved and permanent order. Thus, Tate says that the function of the poem is neither to express the poet's inner processes, nor to approximate the world-order. The function of the poem is to eliminate the helter-skelter, to banish the contingent, for the mind has "an irresistible need for absolute experience," for some ground of certainty which constantly retreats from mere philosophical speculation. The argument is undoubtedly shaky and could not bear a great deal of examination. If that "irresistible need" is removed the whole argument is shattered beyond mending. And though it is possible to sympathize with Tate's purpose, it seems to me that there is very little he could do if someone were to insist that the "irresistible need" is merely the peculiar way in which his mind functions. (pp. 20-1)

The dilemma which seems to lie at the heart of Tate's poetic theory is a reflection of his larger stance. In one version, it is the strain between culture and art. In another version, it is the strain between content and form. In still another, the alternatives of positivism and formalism present themselves. I know no neat vocabulary which will express the dilemma. It is at once a version of several of the problems to which we have been introduced in our textbooks of elementary philosophy: we have here the problem of the One and the Many, but also the ego-centric predicament, the mind-body problem, and several of those other edifying sources of confusion. Therefore, I will not label the paradox simply, but shall call it several things according to the direction in which Mr. Tate seems to approach it. What we must keep in mind is that one side of the dilemma is that approach to experience which tends to lose itself in the world; the other side tends to vanish into the self. One side dissipates into method; the other into an isolated form. The paradox is real enough, if difficult to name. (pp. 64-5)

A poetic unity is what Tate desires; a poetry of tension, held mysteriously between opposing perils. But how do we recognize such a poetry when we find it? How, if our society and history is such as Tate describes, is such a poetry ever written? The answer must be that the existence and apprehension of such a quality is mysterious. Mr. Tate offers us a criterion, but he does not tell us how to use it. Perhaps it is an accident of our culture or our personal history if we are able to use it at all. For it is only through that higher unity of truth that the poet may meet his responsibilities to his culture, that he may work the complete body of experience into his medium. The poet may not meet his responsibilities by advocating social platforms, or by retreating into the mistiness of a "poetic vision." He is responsible in time to bear witness to the unchanging source of truth which is beyond time, and he can do this only through the mastery of his medium. He will not master the medium unless he has a view of the world which allows him to do so.

Even with the higher unity of truth, there are likely those who feel that Tate's demands are still mysterious, that he gives too little instruction in their uses and applicability. A religious conversion seems to be the answer but that is a step which will be difficult for many. I cannot say how satisfactory Tate's judgments will be for others, though I have already indicated some of their defects and virtues. Perhaps our final disagreement or agreement on these matters will depend on a certain secret empathy at least as mysterious as some of Tate's judgments.

I suggest that Tate's position is not satisfactory, because it is not a "position." Tate, I believe, would agree, and would say further that a position will be of little use to us in these matters, because no position will stretch far enough to cover all the dark places of our experience. He may be condemned for this if we wish to do so. Yet no man in our time has devoted himself more single-mindedly to the problems of the humane intelligence in inhumane times. He has not solved those problems, but we must ask: "who has?" He has done something which is perhaps as valuable at the same time that it is irritating: he has kept the problems before us. If we realize that they exist and that they are grave, we shall probably have at least some chance to understand not only literature, but our experience as well. We may understand them only dimly, and we shall undoubtedly feel the pressures of this permanent war of the nerves, and we may curse the fact that Tate, or someone else, has not given us a better light with which to look at the situation. On the other hand, if we do not realize that the problems which Tate has raised exist, then our understanding will not be even partial. We will undoubtedly find ourselves permanent occupants, with Cratylus, of a darkness which cannot be illumined. (pp. 79-80)

There is a sense of desperation, in the best sense, surrounding everything Allen Tate writes, and he has written on many occasions for many purposes. He is capable of extravagance but not triviality. Few have so consistently forced their readers to face the last alternatives. "The true province of the man of letters is nothing less (as it is nothing more) than culture itself." The vigor and honesty with which he has surveyed his province give Tate the right to the title of the essay from which the statement comes: The Man of Letters in the Modern World. (pp. 198-99)