Allen Tate in his earliest criticism suffered somewhat from the Arnoldian confusion of art and life, which demanded too much of poetry; and we have all been involved by Eliot, Tate and our other major critics in their private darkness (or, better, in their private versions of a public darkness which has sought philosophic, anthropological and even religious answers from poetry).

In the separate appearances of the essays now included in The Forlorn Demon …, we have caught intermittent glimpses of the way out of that darkness, one way out, at least. And in this collocation of the continued raids of Mr. Tate upon the darkness we discover much about literature and language and ourselves: these essays are critical and didactic in the best sense….

In [some] essays in this volume which consider some consequences of the modern angelic imagination, Allen Tate exhibits that sense of ordered awareness and...