SOURCE: Donoghue, Denis. “Nuances of a Theme by Allen Tate.” The Southern Review 12, no. 5 (autumn 1976): 698-713.

In the following essay, Donoghue investigates the theme of symbolic imagination in Tate's poetry.

On April 8, 1943, in a lecture at Princeton University, Allen Tate concentrated his mind upon a major theme, the relation of the imagination to the actual world. The lecture has been published under the title “The Hovering Fly.” It was not the first nor the last occasion on which Tate addressed himself to this question: indeed, I regard it as his characteristic theme, his signature, the motif and motive of his entire work in poetry, fiction, and criticism. It is not my business to speculate upon its origin, nor upon the relation in Tate between temper and theory. Richard Blackmur once said of Tate that “his mind operates upon insight and observation as if all necessary theory had been...