SOURCE: Schwartz, Delmore. “The Poetry of Allen Tate.” The Southern Review 5, no. 3 (winter 1940): 419-38.

In the following essay, Schwartz discusses Tate as an honest poet and investigates the relationship between his essays and poetry.

An honest man is one incapable of deceiving others. An honest poet, however, is one incapable of self-deception, at least in his poetry. This requires much difficult labor. One of the essential facts about Allen Tate's writing is the tireless effort and strained labor to be honest as a writer. The effort, the strain, the labor, and the honesty are, in a sense, a dominant quality of the very surface of his verse. I say: in a sense, because strictly what we know as the surface is a certain unique harshness of diction and meter, and an equally curious violence of imagery and sentiment. It is only when we have grasped the writing as...