Allen Tate and the Metaphysics of Metaphor

"But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly."

—Allen Tate, "The Hovering Fly," 117

I. The Challenge of the Chicago Criticism

John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate both claimed that poetry is a form of knowledge. It is the knowledge of life as a whole, a kind of knowledge independent of and irreducible to other kinds of knowledge. Such views are implicit in early and evocative statements like Ransom's claim that the metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century "had the courage of its metaphors" (The World's Body 137), as well as in Ransom's responses to the Chicago critics, but Tate was more insistent than Ransom in these "knowledge" claims, and focused them on the importance of metaphor. Among all the disputants in the collision between the Chicago critics and the New Critics, Allen Tate was the most diligent in asserting Aristotle's broad claims for the importance of poetry and metaphor in human life and cognition. Tate's reward was respectful attention among those who sympathized with his metaphysical concerns, which they discerned not only in his criticism but also in his social and political views. Among everyone else, Tate was rewarded with incomprehension, and a considerable measure of ridicule for daring to declare without fully being able to articulate just how literature could be a form of knowledge. I will show how well grounded Tate's views actually were, especially in the Aristotelian tradition the Chicago critics claimed to represent. Although Tate's views may be rejected by those with differing philosophical commitments, they cannot be dismissed as unworthy of serious consideration without doing a serious injustice both to his intentions and his achievement.

For most of his career, Ransom traced his basic views on poetry's place in human life back to Aristotle, but his own thinking was more deeply rooted in Kant, and he was not fully prepared to respond when the Aristotelian basis of the New Critical ideas was brushed aside by the neo-Aristotelians of the Chicago school. Although their understanding of ancient literary theory reflected some of the distortions of their critical antagonists, Tate and Ransom were right about Aristotle. In fact, their readings of Aristotle and Longinus were profound and revelatory, though deeply inconvenient to the theoretical tendencies of their day. For most of his critical career, Tate was seeking, and even postulating, Aristotelian approaches to metaphor that were largely invisible to twentieth-century criticism globally, because of that era's own metaphysical and epistemological tendencies, and locally, because of an obstructive and diversionary neo-Aristotelianism. Although Tate has been faulted for his deficiencies as a theoretician, those deficiencies, such as they were, became visible chiefly as Tate brought to perennial and fundamental questions deeply insightful, if necessarily partial answers, in an intellectual milieu adverse to their reception.

The "global" issues I mean are the philosophical trends within which an appreciation of New Critical views had to emerge. When English pro-fessors, like those I shall discuss below, transported to the pages of the Sewanee Review notions of Aristotle gleaned from the translations of Richard McKeon and the commentaries of R.S. Crane in The English Journal, they had to traverse a long and uncertain path of academic philosophy, where lurked the newly-awakened dragons of the pragmatic and the analytic schools. These philosophical influences are evident in the eagerness of the Chicago critics to represent themselves as "inductive" and "analytical." While these words conveyed nothing meaningful about their criticism, they served well as apotropaic devices meant to shield the bearers from the fiery breath of Popper, Russell, Whitehead, and the early Wittgenstein. Similarly, a facile polarization of Plato and Aristotle, as standard bearers of a metaphysically antiquated idealism, on the one hand, and of a rigorous, inductive particularism, on the other, was the Chicago critics' sincere view of their subject as well as the necessary camouflage of travelers bearing valuable baggage by a hostile road.

A lively awareness of pragmatic and analytic (or positivist) thought is evident in the work of Tate...