Review: A Metaphysical Athletic: Allen Tate as Critic

Author(s): George Core

Review by: George Core
Source: The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Fall, 1969), pp. 138-147
Published by: University of North Carolina Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20171689
Accessed: 11-06-2016 10:03 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of North Carolina Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
The Southern Literary Journal

This content downloaded from 155.69.24.171 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 10:03:20 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 138 THE SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

A Metaphysical Athletic:
Allen T?te as Critic

By George Core

When one is diffident, or more diffident than usual, he had

better go ahead and admit it: and on this occasion I do so at
the outset, being confronted with the fact of Mr. Tate's criticism
of the past forty-odd years and with the curious lack of under
standing (not attention) which it has received. By now it should
be clear to nearly everyone what T?te is about in his critical
pieces?what he believes literature of the first order involves
and how it should be approached by intelligent readers. Yet the
clich?s which are often attached, mechanically, like so many
ring-pins to the face of the mountain which is called the New
Criticism, simply will not bring the unwary climber to the sum
mit; and that is where much of the difficulty lies. Beyond that
one can only say that Tate's best criticism, like that of Johnson,
Coleridge, Arnold, and Eliot, is in itself literature of great
moment and must be taken accordingly.
Essays of Four Decades gives us the opportunity to reread
Allen Tate's criticism and to reconsider his importance as a
critic of literature and the twentieth-century world, but the book
does not present much new evidence for a revaluation. It in
cludes only three pieces written since the Collected Essays were

Essays of Four Decades, by Allen T?te. Chicago: Swallow Press, Inc.,

1969. $10.00.

This content downloaded from 155.69.24.171 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 10:03:20 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
REVIEWS 139

published in 1959?"The Unliteral Imagination," "Herbert

Read," and "Poetry Modern and Unmodern"?and two written
earlier which were not chosen for the 1959 collection?"The
Present Function of Criticism" and "Modern Poetry." But Four
Decades is a far more handsome and usable book than its near
cousin and predecessor, which was poorly printed and shoddily
bound. The present collection has a useful arrangement of con
tents; the occasions of the essays are often explained in foot
notes; and the pieces are dated. I quarrel only with the fact that
Mr. T?te does not include his "Faulkner's Sanctuary and the
Southern Myth" (Virginia Quarterly, Summer 1968) and his
essay on John Crowe Ransom (to whom Four Decades is dedi
cated) ?"Gentlemen in a Dustcoat" (Sewanee Review, Summer
1968). One might ask instead for his obituary on Faulkner or for
his recollections of the Fugitive.
Allen T?te is that rare phenomenon?the man of letters in
the modern world, and nobody is more aware of the anomaly
of the position during the twentieth century than he. That he
has consistently upheld and personified the profession of letters
goes without saying: Andrew Lytle remarked it upon meeting
T?te in the Twenties and many others have before and since,
including Herbert Read, John Hall Wheelock, and Eliseo Vivas.
It is a role, a way of life, not often seen in any time; and in this
country it begins with Poe and then reappears in varying ways
in James, Pound, Eliot, and Ransom. Other contemporary names
could doubtless be added to this list. During the course of Tate's
career the man who best represents the role, even more than
Eliot or Read or Ransom, is an Englishman who spent much
of his last years in the United States?Ford Madox Ford.
In 1936 Ford praised Allen T?te for having "a sort of lapi
dary sureness and hardness" as a poet, and he might have well
said the same thing of Tate's criticism, which has a diamond
like brilliance and density. It is cut and polished almost flaw
lessly, and therefore the reader must find it difficult to see with
in and to get at the essential nature of that brilliance. T?te is
not a systematic critic, although he says he writes "programma
tic" essays (programmatic for his purposes as poet) ; he is not
a new critic in the strict sense of the term (as he has insisted

This content downloaded from 155.69.24.171 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 10:03:20 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 140 THE SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

all along) ; he is not by any means a literary historian. He is,

quite simply, what the occasion demands?and is at the same
time always himself.
For the most part T?te has (by his own account) been able
to limit his criticism to subjects which are of genuine interest to
him, and usually he has written on poets whom he could use,
at the same time justifying, however consciously or unconscious
ly, his own poetic procedures. This is also true in similar ways
with the other subjects he has wrestled with. T?te has there
fore been able to bring a special concentration to bear upon
the work at hand, a special urgency and authority. Moreover, he
has the enormous advantage of a classical education, a far-rang
ing mind, and an incisive wit. (I often get the uncomfortable
feeling when reading T?te that he sprang into the world, like
Athena from the head of Zeus, with a fully-formed intelligence
and style. Skeptics should read "Emily Dickinson" which he
wrote in part at the old age of twenty-nine.) T?te also "enjoys
the power of received philosophy," as R. P. Blackmur puts it; and
he is possessed of an imagination which is both literal and his
torical. So much for the preliminaries.
Herbert Read calls T?te a "metaphysical athlete" who
cleanly uses the tools of his trade: "The action is graceful, nerv
ously rhythmic, but long sustained." It is a classical poise and
balance which has the quality of Yeats's Major Robert Gregory,
the natural ease?"all that he did done perfectly." Indeed one
can become so beguiled by watching Mr. Tate's acrobatics as
to forget the sleight of hand which he often performs. One
aspect of his typical address to the audience is facetious self
mockery: "The Angelic Imagination" begins, "With some em
barrassment I assume the part of amateur theologian and turn
to a little-known figure, Edgar Allan Poe, another theologian
only less ignorant than myself." Another complementary manner
is a certain sense of futility which will be overcome, slyly but
firmly, in the course of an essay: when T?te announces at the
end of the same piece that "Poe as God sits silent in the dark
ness," we assent to the argument?and to the idea that Poe is
a forlorn demon looking at his own image and nothing else.

This content downloaded from 155.69.24.171 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 10:03:20 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
REVIEWS 141

Mr. T?te would have us follow the way of the symbolic

imagination as represented triumphantly by Dante, not the
angelic as seen in Poe; for as he says,

The reach of our imaginative enlargement is per

haps no longer than the ladder of analogy, at the
top of which we may see all, if we still wish to see
anything, that we have brought up with us from
the bottom, where lies the sensible world.

Therefore the imagination has first got to be literal before it

can conduct "an action through analogy, of the human to the
divine, of the natural to the supernatural, of the low to the
high, of time to eternity." It must begin with something so simple
as the hovering of a fly or the turning of a lathe, and the critic
who will discover the paradigmatic essence of a great literary
work starts and ends with the concrete examples of the artist's
generative themes. Thus T?te quotes James approvingly: "No
theory is kind to us that cheats us of seeing." We begin by look
ing at the actual world as the artistic imagination dramatically
embodies it for us, and through the pressure of analogy the
actual world and literature become one and "achieve a dynamic
and precarious unity of experience," redeemed by knowledge.
Analogy brings the life-giving dimension to form by making
the technical abstraction concrete in the rendered experience,
in characteristic and believable human behavior. Through analo
gy the artist not only relates one experience to another, one
character to another, and one theme to another, but he con
trols and shapes the materials of his art and brings order. Hence,
as T?te says, poetry "is the art of apprehending and concentrat
ing our experience in the mysterious limitations of form."
Allen Tate's subjects are varied, but there are obvious re
current interests, and I note them here, giving a representative
essay for each: the South and Southern literature ("A Southern
Mode of the Imagination"), metaphysical and modern poetry
("The Point of Dying: Donne's 'Virtuous Men' "), the im
portance of poetry and criticism?or the poet and the critic?
in the modern world ("To Whom is the Poet Responsible?"),
critics past and present ("Longinus and the New Criticism").
It is significant, I find, that the subject on which T?te once

This content downloaded from 155.69.24.171 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 10:03:20 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 142 THE SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

planned to write a book, and to which he has devoted three

essays, Poe, is a Southern writer, and that, furthermore, the
subject he has treated most fully is the Southern literary tradi
tion. The reason is natural enough and need not detain us for
long, although T?te has from time to time disavowed his in
tense interest in the South, even as he has said he is not a new
critic while at once defending the New Criticism. The fact is
that Allen T?te, no less than Ransom or Davidson or Lytle or
Warren, has always thoroughly identified himself with the
South, and that much of his finest writing has sprung directly
from that unflinching personal and regional awareness of time,
place, and selfhood. It is a matter of some importance that T?te
has turned to autobiography and is now writing his memoirs,
after having begun his career with biography. This is true of
other Fugitives and Agrarians, and it derives ultimately, one
suspects, from a continuing interest in the way history connects
past and present. There is also the larger and more complicated
matter of myth.
There are three myths which T?te has used metaphorically
to define the South. The first is the obvious one?that the Old
South was a medieval society patterned after the feudal auto
cracies of the Middle Ages; the second pattern of likeness he
remarked, some thirty years after writing "Religion and the Old
South," in "A Southern Mode of the Imagination," is the parallel
with Sparta?and, more clearly, republican Rome; the third,
mentioned casually in the obituary on Faulkner in 1962, is still
farther back in history?the Greco-Trojan myth. This last paral
lel takes us a good deal further than the first two, at least to the
extent that we have often encountered the others. T?te develops
the analogy in "Sanctuary and the Southern Myth," a major
statement about Faulkner and Southern letters, even though it
repeats things the author has said elsewhere. T?te sees Faulk
ner's principal subject, and that of his contemporaries, as the
Greco-Trojan myth.
The "older" culture of Troy-South was wiped out
by the "upstart" culture of Greece-North. Sunt
lacrimae rerum; and the Yankees were therefore to
blame for everything?until? as I have pointed out,
the time of the first World War.

This content downloaded from 155.69.24.171 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 10:03:20 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 REVIEWS 143

This myth, inadequate as it may appear to the

non-Southern reader, has permitted a generation
of Southern novelists to understand and to drama
tize (that is, depict in action) much of the Southern
historical reality.
Needless to say The Fathers is, among other things, one of the
most powerful fictive embodiments of this myth so transformed.
This view of the South provides the foundation for Tate's
many trenchant observations on its literature. As Hugh Holman
has remarked, "almost every idea which has proved fruitful for
the serious critic [of Southern literature] is at least adumbrated"
in the Collected Essays of 1959. T?te has said that "myth should
be in conviction immediate, direct, overwhelming" and that it
is "a dramatic projection of heroic action . . . upon the reality
of the common life of a society." The society which embodies
such a mythology is regional and religious, traditional and uni
fied, primitive or highly refined, "extroverted" and unselfcon
scious. The last traditional society in this country was largely
extinguished by the Civil War, and in entering the modern
world and becoming a part of the United States after the First
World War, it became aware of its peculiarly historical predica
ment in a way that had escaped it previously, and the agency
of self-consciousness was accomplished tbrough the determined
work of many brilliant writers, of whom Allen T?te is of course
one.

In seeking to define the strange brilliance of the Southern

renascence T?te is at once probing his own artistic conscience
with the intense historical, aesthetic, and moral judgment which
is typical of him. Since the Old South provides T?te with the
concrete model for a traditional Christian society, it is only
natural that he fully understands the fictive works which have
sprung from the consciousness of writers who like himself have
painfully recognized that society's passing. T?te is perfectly
aware of the failings of the Old South, yet it remains his chief
model for the whole life?and one much closer in time and more
palpable than, say, Yeats's Byzantium, which is largely an his
torical and mythopoeic reconstruction by one man. Hence Tate's
connections with the South?by inheritance, kinship, custom,
and manner?have furnished him with what Blackmur has

This content downloaded from 155.69.24.171 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 10:03:20 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 144 THE SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

deemed a central allegiance. Out of the tension between Tate's

personal allegiance and his awareness of what he has called "a
deep illness of the modern mind" has come the enkindling sub
ject of his work as a whole: Andrew Lytle has said that it is
"simply what is left of Christendom."
Again and again one encounters this historic and mythic
perspective in Tate's criticism. As Blackmur noted in 1934, T?te
writes as though we are now living in a largely post-Christian
age; and he has said: "We are a Christian civilization or we are
nothing." The felt presence of that view is such as to give his
criticism a special weight and force. This belief has it informs
Tate's prose has something in common with Eliot's religious
position, but it is not so pressing and doctrinaire. Essays so dog
matic as Eliot's "Thoughts after Lambeth" have been excluded
from Tate's collections. (Here I am thinking of "Christ and
the Unicorn," Sewanee Review, Spring 1955). The vision is
historical and moral, and is tempered by irony and wit.
What of Allen Tate's specific tactics, his technique, as a
critic?
The answer to this is more difficult than with Cleanth
Brooks, who looks to ambiguity, irony, and paradox in his early
work as the principal means of reading a poem; or with Robert
Penn Warren, who likes to use a characteristic major work of
an author as a paradigm to illiminate his work as a whole; or
with R. P. Blackmur, whose strategy involves the unique form
of the work at hand; or with John Crowe Ransom, who is chief
ly interested in the local texture of poetry, the indeterminate
quality of its language and metaphor; or with Francis Fergusson,
whose principal mode of attack involves the analogy of action.
I call up these names (and others could be added) because the
work of one man frequently complements, subtly but unmistak
ably, the criticism of others in this group. T?te himself has said
as much in his new preface.
The criticism of Allen T?te is the most comprehensive of
the men I have named; I pause in saying this because it is a
large statement?yet it remains true. That criticism has been
more consistent in the high level of its quality than has the
criticism of any other critic of our time who has written at fre

This content downloaded from 155.69.24.171 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 10:03:20 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
REVIEWS 145

quent intervals over a long period. The reason it has, I submit,

is that T?te as critic has never victimized himself or his readers
with mere technique. His tactics for a given occasion arise out
of his insight into the work at hand: they are not brought to the
poem or play or novel with an extra-literary purpose. One finds
this easy to recognize in reading Tate's "theoretical" essays?
"Tension in Poetry," "Three Types of Poetry," "Techniques of
Fiction," "The Angelic Imagination," and "The Symbolic Imagi
nation"?and comparing them with the last three chapters of
The Well Wrought Urn or any one of several essays in The
World's Body. T?te, more than any other new critic, has steered
away from critical autotelism. In so doing he has proceeded
towards literature as a form of expression more complete than
that offered by any other discipline or mode of discourse. In
arguing this position he has, however, too often involved him
self in elaborate operations against the enemies of art?positivism,
social science, semantics, and the other myopias which have
slowly eroded classical education and have at once caused, or
been caused by, education of the modern dispensation. He has
smitten these enemies of culture and civilization, much as Arnold
and Eliot did in their separate ways. But he has not been so
involved in these preoccupations as his friend Eliot, who once
complained that Arnold couldn't find time for literature because
he was too busy cleaning up the country.
In addressing the question too long evaded, let me say that
what T?te characteristically does as critic is to select a passage
in the work under consideration, and show us, by and through
it, the elements of that fiction which are typically overlooked
(or avoided) by other critics, regardless of their persuasions. The
trick here is to find the precise passage?one that illuminates the
text as a whole but does not blind the reader with its dazzling
virtues. For Madame Bovary he chooses the scene in which Emma
contemplates suicide but is thwarted by the coincidence of the
hour; for poetry of the highest order?of the "creative spirit"?
he selects quotations from Shakespeare, Donne, and Dante; for
the same kind of poetry, poetry exhibiting an equipoise of ten
sions, he chooses these poets and adds others, notably Yeats and
Eliot. This is Tate's forte?not long and detailed exegesis of

This content downloaded from 155.69.24.171 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 10:03:20 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 146 THE SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

whole poems or short stories or novels (although some of his

commentaries are indeed brilliant?the readings of "Ode to a
Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and his analyses in
The House of Fiction). What he had done in part is improve
upon Eliot's practice of quotation (which he, in turn, got from
Arnold and Pound). But there is more involved, and T?te
generally has a sharper historical perspective and is less in
clined to pursue abstractions. He also has not been so strenuous
in attacking poets he disliked and could not use for his own
purposes?or in defending those he liked and could use.
The issue between form and value, or technique and sub
stance, is joined by Mr. T?te in his criticism by his constant
practice of examining the subiect not only against the standard
of his own taste and judgment but against the standards of others
?and, equally important, in terms of its time. T?te always
knows a technical convention when he sees one, just as he knows
a departure from, or a modification of, that convention. Ulti
mately the technical convention springs from the author's atti
tude towards his age, and the age's way of looking at the world?
the social convention: hence we get the metaphysical conceit,
a subtle poetic equivalent of the Euphuistic sentence which de
rived from an elaborate pattern of courtly behavior. The con
ceit was also forced into being by the fragmentation of the
Elizabethan world picture, as T?te has shrewdly observed. The
guarded style and the verbal shock of modern poetry similarly
arose in this century out of the failure of such conventions, both
social and artistic. Allen T?te constantly discovers the inform
ing conventions of the artist and therefore enlarges the light of
our seeing beyond the page in front of us.
In his prefaces Mr. T?te says that he "should like to think
that criticism has been written, and may be again, from a mere
point of view" which is essentially mysterious, both to the
critic and his readers. He has also remarked that he is "on record
as a casual essayist of whom little consistency can be expected"
and that, moreover, he is "writing, in the end, opinion, and
neither aesthetics nor poetry in prose." In reading these obser
vations I am reminded of Mr. Ransom's subtleties of self-de
flation, which like Tate's can often catch the reader unaware;

This content downloaded from 155.69.24.171 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 10:03:20 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
REVIEWS 147

for the mere point of view and the mere opinion are everything,
and the style, although it meets Tate's standard of being as
plain as the nose on one's face, is often poetic in its tone and
cadences, in the rightness of its language and nuance.
In his criticism Allen T?te over and again meets the ex
acting test of R. P. Blackmur: "To combine conceptual honesty
and the act of vision is the constant athletic feat of the artist. ...
The test of success is enduring interest; and there, in enduring
interest, lies the writer's whole authority and his sole moral
strength." In short, Mr. Tate's athletic ability as critic has only
improved as time has gone on, even though it must be said
that his finest criticism was written in the early Fifties. He con
tinues to walk over the yawning abyss of the modern world
along a tightrope which grows increasingly perilous and which,
unlike the road Bunyan's pilgrim travelled, seems to have no
end. Those who follow may be sure in their guide, but unfor
tunately they will find the way is more demanding than Tate's
apparently effortless performance indicates. Few will safely cross,
and many will be lost, even as I probably have been in the course
of my own acrobatics. (As E. B. White has said, "A writer, like an
acrobat, must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him.")
But this in no way affects Allen Tate's certain progress as he
seeks a more civilized world.

This content downloaded from 155.69.24.171 on Sat, 11 Jun 2016 10:03:20 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms