The violence of Allen Tate.(writer)

Allen Tate displayed all the romantic qualities of a great artist: intellectual precocity, heavy drinking, prodigious libido, volatility in friendship, difficult views, and enough self-interest to bind the lot together. What he lacked was great art. Or so run current estimates of Tate's career as a poet, critic, and man of letters, which spanned some sixty years, up to his death in 1979.

These days Tate's name pops up occasionally in bookstores, never in cafes: he's simply not part of the contemporary discussion. Literary history and her myrmidons, the anthologists, have hacked down his poetic ranks--often to a single poem, "Ode to the Confederate Dead"--and left the rest to lie where they fell, out of print. His benchmark critical prose fares only marginally better, with Essays of Four Decades(1) reissued in a handsome, if little noticed, edition. Dusty buzzwords, such as "Fugitive" and "Agrarian" still cluster motelike about his name, but convey little beyond their faint suggestion of a bygone South.

Despite Tate's bellwether editorship of The Sewanee Review, a Bollingen Prize, a National Medal for Literature, a stint as consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress (now the Poet Laureateship), and presidency of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, few of his achievements figure in standard accounts of modern poetry.

(Tate also donned numerous professional hats, including biographer, professor, polemicist, playwright, novelist, and editor. A zealous entrepreneur of literature, he enjoyed putting a bit of stick about in literary circles, but his chief legacy remains as a poet and a critic of poetry.) What's more, the failing fortunes of the New Criticism, now deemed woefully passe and stodgy, damn him by association in the eyes of those insensible to its continued importance.

Many of the so-called New Critics--Ransom, Empson, Eliot, and Winters--wrote better poems than Tate. On what, then, can his reputation as one of America's most robust and important literary figures rest? The answer: on his influence, still a dynamic force today and a scourge to all lily-livered versifiers of mooning sentiment. For Tate, tortuous language reflected "the aesthetic consciousness, aware of its isolation" that he associated with modernity. "Frost and Stevens at the beginning, Hart Crane in the middle, and Robert Lowell towards the end of our period," he wrote,

 
   once more confirm the commonplace that good poets are both above and of 
   their age. The verbal shock, the violent metaphor, as a technique of magic, 
   forces into linguistic existence subjective meanings and insights that 
   poets can no longer discover in the common world. 

Robert Lowell recognized this volatile strain in Tate's own poetry, noting with mimetic severity that out of his