Thoughts of a Whole Man
WHALEN, RICHARD
Thoughts of a Whole Man Collected Essays. By Allen Tate. Alan Swallow. 578 pp. $6.00. Reviewed by Richard Whalen Staff member, "Time" magazine THIS BRILLIANT collection of essays written over...
...But he delivers his sternest lectures before a mirror...
...Tate writes poetry out of the same necessity that causes him to breathe...
...Poetry, no less than science, is worthy of man's greatest effort to grasp the unique truths that it yields...
...In the criticism of life that flows naturally from his criticism of literature, Tate is uncompromising...
...Man, Tate finds, is at war with himself, split into opposing intellect and emotion...
...The man suffering from unbelief is, inevitably, himself...
...Naturally, he is concerned with the techniques of his craft...
...He has identified himself with the civilization of the Old South, yet the entire Western world is his region...
...he is trapped in the present, denied his heritage...
...It is outside the pale of polite discourse, for "religion" is never mentioned as a solution to the political ills of pluralistic America...
...wash away unnoticed while a fully realized judgment stands secure...
...It is a profitable excursion...
...That straightforward, eminently civilized approach to life and literature illuminates the pages of his Collected Essays, projecting the figure of a man who, in an age of disintegration, has preserved in himself the integrity of mind and spirit that must remain the Western ideal...
...In "Narcissus as Narcissus," he discusses the theme of his "Ode to the Confederate Dead": the "cut-off-ness of modern 'intellectual man' from the world...
...Already 15 years old, the comment (from "The New Provincialism") is still too prickly to lie down comfortably with the lies America lives by...
...In his prose, beauty becomes not a shimmering abstraction just beyond the poet's grasp, but the object at hand seen whole and complete...
...Other exquisitely drawn portraits in Tate's gallery include Hart Crane and John Peale Bishop, both taken from life...
...Reviewed by Richard Whalen Staff member, "Time" magazine THIS BRILLIANT collection of essays written over the past three decades formally establishes what has long been apparent: Allen Tate is one of the most important critics America has produced...
...Who among the great debaters of American "softness" would second that view...
...The catastrophic sterility of scientific means without human ends has caused "a deep illness of the modern mind...
...Man is isolated from a core of belief beyond scientific and political rationalization...
...Though denying the intention, Tate leads the reader into the realm of formal esthetics...
...His sense of wholeness—of integrity—impels him to draw conclusions that cannot help but discomfort those who are unable to see beyond the abstraction or feel themselves a part of anything...
...A great orgy of self-criticism, in the American manner, is now revolving around the charge that America is pointlessly affluent and far gone in self-indulgence...
...His essay on the award of the Bollingen Prize to Pound, which fired up more than one literary lynching party, is a masterpiece of discipline and detachment that generations of critics may usefully study...
...Halting at the gate of a Confederate graveyard on a late autumn afternoon, a man contemplates the Lost Cause, but the wind and the billowing leaves are the only reality he can comprehend...
...He is vital and original, yet reverent and conservative...
...Such vision requires of the beholder integrity—unity of mind and spirit and this integrity is the source of Tate's success as poet and critic...
...One might draw from Tate this remark: "Technology without Christianity is, I think, barbarism quite simply, but barbarism refined, violent and decadent, not the vigorous barbarism of the forest and the soil...
...What has maimed this man, says Tate, is his self-dividing philosophy: positivism...
...Tate, a professing Christian, preaches what he practices...
...But the lack of wholeness in modern man is the source of his critical discontent...
...Or we may begin with the literal statement and by stages develop the complications of the metaphor: at every stage we may pause to state the meaning so far apprehended, and at every stage the meaning will be coherent...
...Yet Tate (a convert to Roman Catholicism) draws from his religious belief and his intense regional identity a certainty of value and clarity of vision that set him apart...
...Some of them, within their scope, are surely definitive...
...The remotest figurative significance that we can derive does not invalidate the extensions of the literal statement...
...his society and culture reflect it...
...He ranges widely in these essays, from Dante and Donne to Crane and Pound...
...it is part of the poet's attempt to recapture a conquered province...
...His definition of tension in poetry is only one of many original concepts he has advanced: "The meaning of poetry is its 'tension,' the full organized body of all the extension and intension that we can find in it...
...His poetry, Tate writes, demands of the reader "the fullest cooperation of all his intellectual resources, all his knowledge of the world, and all the persistence and alertness that he now thinks of giving to scientific studies...
...Just as he is faithful to the art of those whom he admired, so Tate is unswervingly fair in his estimate of one whose acts he despised: Ezra Pound...
...The latter essay, first published in 1931, demonstrates that good criticism does not go stale...
...Torrents of densely footnoted "critical scholarship," served up by the bucketful by hordes of fledgling Ph.Ds...
...He enjoys a special, illuminating kinship with Poe ("the forlorn demon") and deftly draws the genius of Emily Dickinson from the shadows of her own personality...
...The comparison with science is not casual...
...But, first, he tunes his readers to his effort-frequency...
...To those not enthralled by Scientific Fact, Tate offers luminous instruction in "Tension in Poetry" and "Understanding Modern Poetry," two of his most widely acclaimed essays...
...He is that marvel rarely met in our time: a whole man, in whom intellect and sensibility, reason and belief, are serenely composed...
...Out of it has sprung the notion that "all experience can be ordered scientifically," which has in turn fathered the barbarous political "isms" of our age...
...He has lost the power to imagine how it was...
Vol. 43 • April 1960 • No. 16
