Tate has always been less a technical literary critic than an essayist using literature as the frame of reference within which he criticizes the mind and life of his time in the light of his convictions about the proper ends of man. He speaks as a twentieth-century humanist intellectual, isolated and virtually unheard in the barbaric society whose larger deformities it is his concern to examine and minister to. (p. 108)

[We must see him as the man of letters], as flanked dangerously by two opposed chimeras of certainty, two opposed forces of the chaotic modern world [positivism and romanticism] that he perceives and must try to survive in. The first of them … Tate has unmistakably kept clear of. But the second has sometimes been harder for him to recognize. (p. 112)

Tate has continually declared his mistrust of quasi-religions of art, especially that of Matthew Arnold, whom he apparently regards as their official sponsor for our century. Yet these declarations have had the interesting quality of perhaps partly conscious and vividly relevant self-criticism. For Tate himself can be understood as a maker of art into religion…. Professor Francis Roellinger showed some years ago that Arnold's theory of poetry, which Tate had so vigorously attacked in his essay on "Literature as Knowledge" for giving poetry's case away to the sciences, was in the last analysis "not very much different from Mr. Tate's." And Monroe Spears, former editor of Sewanee Review and an admirer of Tate, has found that the knowledge supposedly constituted by poetry looked strangely like "the contemplation or vision or revelation of absolute truth sought usually in philosophy and religion." Tate, he says, seemed at times to be "making art a substitute for religion," which results not in a doctrine of art for art's sake, but of "life for art's sake" [see excerpt above].

The characterization is right and useful. But I should prefer it "art for life's sake" to enforce the Arnoldian likeness that, for all his denials, has been implicit in Tate's view of poetry. The difference from Arnold is one first of tone: where Arnold is respectable, journalistic, and traditionally humane, Tate is tragic, cryptic, mystic; and second of verbal technicalities: where Arnold distinguishes "idea" from mere fact, Tate distinguished "knowledge." And both alike attribute to poetry the higher thing distinguished…. [An early Tate essay called "Poetry and the Absolute"] is a useful specimen of the beginnings of Tate's actual romanticism of thought, and helps to explain why in the end, beyond the deep and unforgettable individuality of his rage, his work would finally exhibit a romantic enthusiasm like Coleridge's supported by a romantic moralism like Arnold's.

At many points in his essays one could almost imagine that Tate had consciously set out to complete the work that the romanticisms of Arnold and Coleridge left unfinished. Arnold's attempted exaltation of poetry as increasingly the "consolation and stay" of "the spirit of our race," Tate perfects by returning to poetry the rights to "knowledge" that Arnold was supposed to have signed away to the sciences in such essays as the one on "Literature and Science." And when in "The Man of Letters in the Modern World," Tate asks of "the letter of the poem, the letter of the politician's speech, the letter of the law," "Is there in this language genuine knowledge of our human community—or the lack of it—that we have not had before?" he does for the imagination what Coleridge, its most famous philosophic partisan, was ultimately unable to do. He performs an act of recognition of the imagination as the unifying power not only of artistic creation, but also of man's total life as a spiritual and social being.

Tate has glorified in similar fashion the activity of the critic. Criticism, he has written, expressing through metaphors of mystic intensity an Arnoldian emphasis on the importance of the critical faculty, occupies a "middle position between imagination and philosophy," which makes it "perpetually impossible. Like a man literary criticism is nothing in itself; criticism, like man, embraces pure experience or exalts pure rationality at the price of abdication from its dual nature." Or, to put it another way—and I assume the obviousness of the image Tate has here provided of the man of letters' difficult sojourn between two chimeras of modernist certainty—at the price of the freedom, as well as of the sanity, which is implicit in the idea of an uncommitted and skeptical intelligence.

Since it is as critic, as a voice of "reason" amid the modern madness, or a voice whose reason is as a madness to its surroundings, that the artist becomes the man of letters, I think Tate's conception of criticism and the critic is of special importance in this interpretation of him as an unmistakable if reluctant romantic. Tate has pictured the ideal criticism in a chaotic time as the expression of a "whole" and traditionally formed mind intellectually detached from the present. And I suppose for him its exemplar, besides the "skeptical and searching" Mr. Ransom of Tate's relative youth, would be T. S. Eliot. Such a criticism does the work neither of "reason" nor of feeling and intuition, but of "intelligence," which involves both. At its best, he had told us in his note on "The Critic's Business," it is no more nor less than "the ordering of original insights and … passing them on, through provisional frames of reference, to other persons secondhand:" It should be noted that this detached critical intelligence holds off explicitly from all limiting critical dogmas and methodologies, and implicitly too from the larger dogmas, social and spiritual, that would seek to compel literature into becoming an instrument of something else. This recalls Arnold's continual emphasis on the necessary "disinterestedness" of criticism. But from literature considered as an art the critical intelligence must move into the broader human issues; for literary standards, Tate has observed, "in order to be effectively literary, must be more than literary." And this should recall not only T. S. Eliot, but also Arnold again, who believed that criticism dealt with the best that has been thought and known in the world, and that literature is a "criticism of life," which is much more than a matter of the aesthetics of literature.

I am suggesting that the critical "intelligence" hypostatized by Tate, with the breadth of work that he assigns it, requires and desires, as the romantic mind does, both freedom and certainty. The word "intelligence" presumes to justify the man of letters' keeping free of commitment to any of the formulas of the modern world, whose fragmentation and dehumanization, measured against his vision of the coherent and traditional society, reveal no enabling pattern for full human realization. But it presumes also to reassure by suggesting a sufficient wholeness and certainty of mind—what in much lesser contexts might be called "good sense"—to save him from capsizing in a gust of reaction.

But in spite of the reasonable-sounding rhetoric, the actual position of Tate's man of letters looks untenably paradoxical. Let me quote something strikingly relevant to the point at issue that Tate wrote nearly a generation ago in the essay on "Confusion and Poetry." He had then discovered the New Humanists caught in a telling intellectual dilemma: they desired authority at the same time they desired "freedom from the traditional sources of moral judgment, as these come down to us in living institutions like the church." Their solution, he wrote, was to make "a vague mixture of Classical and Christian authors" into their missing traditional or institutional authority. A solution, is it not, like Tate's own humane critical "intelligence," like Arnold's quest for the best that has been thought and known, and eventually even like Wordsworth's and Coleridge's intuition, which bypasses the discursive books to go straight to infants, peasants, and mountains, Truth's natural vessels? His solution is a romantic solution, and the end it looks toward is the angelized intellect of Poe, where without either nature or light "thought" is its own object, its own substance, its own structure. Some words of Tate's own, abducted into my special context here, supply exactly the suggestive application I wish to make about Tate's position as the man of letters who does not live intellectually anywhere in the modern world. Here are the disturbing last sentences of "Our Cousin, Mr. Poe":

Mr. Poe tells us in one of his simpler poems that from boyhood he had "a demon in my view." Nobody then—my great-grandfather, my mother, three generations—believed him. It is time we did. I confess that his voice is so near that I recoil a little, lest he, Montressor, lead me into the cellar, address me as Fortunato, and wall me up alive. I should join his melancholy troupe of the undead, whose voices are surely as low and harsh as the grating teeth of storks. He is so close to me that I am sometimes tempted to enter the mists of pre-American genealogy to find out whether he may not actually be my cousin.

Let us come back into the element of our discourse and direct the force of these metaphors upon the man of letters as a free-floating humanistic intelligence scrutinizing, in the capacity of critic, the discontinuous, dehumanized modern world. What is this intelligence that he would exercise? And how would we know it from a possibly Satanic intelligence? And when it acted critically, would we not be implicitly committed in advance to accepting whatever "insights" came from it labeled as products of a free, unmethodological and undogmatized mind? What is an "insight"? How is it different from a logical conclusion or an empirical observation? And how could we tell it from a whim, an error, a lie?

These are rhetorical questions. But they represent, I think, very real problems, unless we are going to take Tate's critical discourse as merely a lifework of idle rhetoric. The man of letters makes assertions about important matters—about literature, yes, but also about values generally, about life, about "reality." He engages with philosophical questions by his own choice, and if we take any stock in the answers he gives, "provisional" or not, we must care how well they meet the tests of experience, of logic, or even of received dogmas. To care may be our only protection, for all we know, against a philosophic madness, or a Poeish descent into the romantic maelstrom, or a hopeless entombment by Montressor as critic.

It seems, actually, that Tate has become his own Montressor, that in the end he has lain down almost willingly where he never wanted to—in darkness, with his cousin Mr. Poe. But there is another act in this drama of the mind of the man of letters in the modern world. Capitulation to the intellectual anarchy of romanticism would indeed mean, by the man of letters' own standards, a kind of tragedy of the mind—or, at the very least, a death. But Tate became a convert, a few years ago, to Christianity; and I think we may understand that conversion as a kind of resurrection. (pp. 118-26)

In the criticism there is still the mystic fervor, but it is now, presumably, regulated by the structures of the Church and sanctioned by the histories of its saints, and need no longer justify itself with the old humanistic slogans of certainty or the ejaculatory jargon of the romantic intuitionist. And the reactionary rage that has given us some of the most memorable literary essays of our times is still fiercely operative. But now it has a more definite work to do, something in the nature almost of holy war. (p. 128)

I think one must take the view that where Tate has finally arrived on his pilgrimage has not been precisely a destination in the sense of an ending. Instead of putting down burdens he has taken up new ones. For, as in the case of Eliot, the place where he has chosen to lay his final allegiance has itself become the origin of a new creative progress. Soon, probably, they will be speaking of the work of the fifties as the beginning of his third period. (p. 129)