About 1910, when Mr. Allen Tate was a small boy in Virginia, there was preparing, chiefly in London, the most finely coordinated gathering of literary energies to make use of the English tongue at least since Wordsworth’s time. It prepared the opportunities on which his career as academic literary statesman in America has depended; and if the career, now documented by Collected Essays (Alan Swallow, $6.00), seems inappropriately abstract in substance and administrative in tone, that is to be attributed as much to time, distance and circumstance as to temperament. A more generous temperament (I do not speak of Mr. Tate’s person but of the voice his writing makes us hear; nobody’s style is ever really the man) would have made less headway on a continent where the life of the mind is something to be administered.
Here, on these shores, and sheltered by this ivy, the last Scholastics prefer to ask whether Prufrock be poetry at all, whether poetry be knowledge at all, whether criticism have a function, whether any of them be admissible to the curriculum. In such a milieu it is by skill in dialectics that one prospers, and perhaps does incidental good. Thus we note of Mr. Tate’s very clear prose that its clarity emerges less from the illuminated fact than from the explicated diagram: not an Eliot showing us Marvell as we had not been able to see Marvell before, but an Abelard of the lectern distinguishing four kinds of partial poetry— political poetry for the sake of the cause; picturesque poetry for the sake of the home town; didactic poetry for the sake of the parish; even a generalized personal poetry for the sake of the reassurance and safety of numbers
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