SOURCE: Zabel, Morton Dauwen. “A Critics Poetry.” Poetry 33, no. 5 (February 1929): 281-84.

In the following mixed review of Mr. Pope and Other Poems, Zabel argues that most of Tate's poetry is obscured by “texture of allusions and intricate phraseology.”

Allen Tate's poetry shares many of the perversities and stylistic mannerisms of what was called, a few years ago, the cerebral school. The reader, confronted by a texture of allusions and intricate phraseology, is soon willing to accuse the poet of disguising a poverty of emotion and a shoddiness of concept with deliberate obscurity. Occasionally, when the fabulous imagery wears thin, we stand face to face with ideas as commonplace as those in “For a Dead Citizen:”

He was the finest of our happy men, He had all joys, he never thought of death; He fiddled sometimes with his mind, and then Shook off the tremor like a nervous wren...