Allen Tate's work in poetry, fiction, and criticism touches American life at nearly every point of consequence and continues to exert moral pressure even when the causes it serves are already mostly lost. Many of his poems take up arms against his fated enemies: the North; the forces in the Old South that made the New South inevitable; the ideologies of positivism and naturalism, which Tate regards as vandalism. The "Collected Poems" is the definitive manual of these wars….

I find it significant that the new "Collected Poems" contains about 30 early poems more than the corresponding section of Tate's standard selection, "The Swimmers and Other Selected Poems" (1971). In a note to "The Swimmers" Tate said that by an "early" poem he meant a poem he had written before 1922, when he first read Eliot…. In his novel "The Fathers" (1938) the narrator reports that, "in my feelings of that time...