The Fable of the Southern Writer

VI: The Poetry of Criticism: Allen Tate

VI The Poetry of Criticism Allen Tate uring the last twenty-five years of his life Allen Tate was a literary presence both at home and abroad. He served as/a tenured professor at the University of Minnesota (retiring in 1968 as Regents' Professor), filled numerous visiting lectureships, collected several honorary degrees, received various prominent literary awards, held the presidency of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and, by no means least, continually conducted a large literary correspondence. It is a surprise when, looking at the record, one discovers that from 1953 until his death in 1979 Tate was hardly more than a nominally active poet or critic, the publication of The Forlorn Demon: Didactic and Critical Essays in 1953, when he was only fifty-four years of age, having marked the virtual end of his productive career. This is not to say that Tate ceased publication. Ten more books appeared under his name. Several of these were edited volumes , among them the distinguished T. S. Eliot, The Man and His Work: A Critical Evaluation (1966). But Tate s most important publications were collections of his own previously published writings: in J 955 The Man of Letters in the Modern World (save for the prefatory essay, the essays all belonged to the years before 1955); in 1959 Collected Essays (with one new major essay, "A Southern Mode of the Imagination," written in 1959); in 1968 the omnibus collection Essays of Four Decades; and in 1977 Collected Poems, 1919-1976 (with two short poems written after 1953). Another book published in the 19705, Memoirs and Opinions, 1926-1974, collected a few more cogent critical pieces, one being Tate s last attempt to define the myth of the South, "Faulkner's Sanctuary and the Southern Myth" (1968). Memoirs and Opinions is notable chiefly because it contains two D H5 The Poetry of Criticism chapters of an aborted "book of memories." Tate gave up on this project, he explains, because he could not bring himself "to tell what was wrong" with his friends and acquaintances "without trying to tell what was wrong with myself"—a subject, he says wryly, he felt uncertain about. A deeper reason is disguised significantly as an afterthought : "Then, too, I fell back on authority: I couldn't let myself indulge in the terrible fluidity of self-revelation."1 While Tate does not indicate specifically the authority he appealed to, he clearly suggests an aversion to the modern compulsion to self-confession. His abandonment of the autobiographical project is, to be sure, consistent with a fundamental theme in Tate's criticism: the need to subject the willful self to the authority of a culture rooted in a great moral and religious tradition. Tate's whole career had been distinguished by a desire to recover the power of such a culture as it had once existed in Western civilization. Since he believed that what remained of the Greco-Roman Christian culture—what he at times awesomely referred to as "The Tradition"—was rapidly disappearing, his desire bore the quality of desperation. In 1950 Tate conclusively ratified his support of a major tradition of authority by being confirmed in the Roman Catholic faith. As in the earlier instance of Eliot, one of his chief mentors, the act of religious conversion was implicit in the initial phase of his career; but, unlike Eliot, Tate failed to discover in the experience of conversion itself and in its aftermath a poetic and critical inspiration equal in power to that of the spiritual struggle toward conversion. The resolution of Tate's long quest for faith is reflected in three poems of the early 19505: "The Maimed Man," "The Swimmers" (possibly his greatest poem), and "The Buried Lake." But it is no more than reflected: Tate did not explicitly live his conversion in an "Ash-Wednesday." Nor did he, like Eliot, objectify his conversion by issuing a manifesto to Western civilization comparable to The Idea of a Christian Society (1939). Eliot was inclined, as Elisabeth Schneider has said in T. S. Eliot: The Pattern in the Carpet, to think about his poetry as a personal statement and to consider his criticism, marked by a doctrinaire tone and pruned at least of outward evidence of hesitation and self-doubt, as a i. Allen Tate, Memoirs andOpinions, 1926-1974 (Chicago, 1975), ix. See above, "A Fable of White and Black," 29-31, 52-53, for a fuller discussionof this book. [3.137.185.180] Project MUSE (2024...