Michael Potts's Blog: Bits and Pieces: Book Reviews and Articles on Writing, Horror Fiction, and Some Philosophy - Posts Tagged "modernist-poetry"

Poems 1922-1947 by Allen Tate

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Allen Tate comes from an age when the field of English Literature had high standards, when there was a belief that aesthetic truth was a unique source of knowledge, when most poets were classically educated with knowledge of the ancient Greek and Roman poets. Tate was one of the original Southern Agrarians at Vanderbilt University, but later went his own direction. He joined the Roman Catholic Church with the great Thomistic philosopher Jacques Maritain as his sponsor. His poems are more formal than many today, some based loosely on Greek and Roman forms and others more like free verse but a more constrained free verse than is currently fashionable. Like Wallace Stephens' poetry, one has to get an "ear" for it before appreciating it. Many of the poems refer to Greek and Roman mythology and literature as was common in modernist poetry (think Ezra Pound, for instance). Tate dislikes the modern tendency to reduce humans to "economic man." Consider these lines from "To the Lacedemonians":

When the peace is a trade route figures
For the budget, reduction of population,
Life grow sullen and immense
Lust after immunity to pain.

That does seem to be an accurate portrait of contemporary Americans; consider the reaction to COVID-19 compared to the reactions to the 1957 and 1968 Asian Flue epidemics. The contemporary world desires immunity to pain, disease, and death, which clashes with the reality of the world as it is.

In his splendid poem, "Ode to the Confederate Dead," a poem that captures the "concrete universa" since it can be applied to any battlefield, to any bed in which the dead rest, we hear the poet's voice:

In the riven trough the splayed leaves
Pile up, of nature the causal sacrament
To the seasonal eternity of death...

Death and mortality are a constant theme in Tate's poetry -- not only the loss of physical life, but the constant passage of time, the changing of the seasons, the inevitability of old age, and the loss of love. In "The Paradigm," there are the striking lines,

For in the air all lovers meet
After they've hated out all their love...

This seems harsh, though it certainly reflects the lives of some people in "love-hate" relationships, as Tate's own troubled relationships attest.

Tate converted to Catholicism after he wrote many of these poems, but the pre-Catholic poems reveal a man struggling with the idea of a void after death. In "Horatian Epode to the Duchess of Malfi," there are the striking lines,

Now considerations of the void coming after
Not changed by the "strict gesture" of your death
Split the straight line of pessimism
Into two infinities.

In some ways this attitude reflects the classical view of death: pessimism, combined with making the best we can of the life we are given (though even it is subject to Fate). Tate affirms the role of myth in trying to make sense of death in "Retroduction [sic] to American History": "Antiquity breached morality with myths." Ultimately this does not change the fact that, as Tate expresses it in "Causerie", "we know our end / a packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues." His skepticism at the time is seen later in the same poem: "For miracles are faint / And resurrection is our weakest clause of religion." Yet he "waits".... "For the incredible image."

Tate's poem on reaching the age of thirty, "Fragment of a Meditation," begins:

Not yet the thirtieth year, the thirtieth
Station where time reverses his light heels
To run both ways, and makes forward back;
Whose long coordinates of birth and death
And zero i the origin of breath:
* * *
All thanks that mid-mortality is done.

Other poems focus on a sense of place, of ancestry, so lacking in the contemporary world which drives apart past and future and separates people into lonely isolates. There is much richness in these poems, richness that can easily be filed away like slivers of metal in a heap to be thrown away. One must have an eye to see and an ear to hear these poems, in which gems of light sparkle through the splendor of form.



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