In the following essay, Dupree regards the theme of failed civilization, especially that of the Southern Confederacy, as central to Tate's poetry.

In the following essay, Feder elucidates the influence of classical myths and literature on Tate's poetry.

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

In the following essay, Koch differentiates Tate from the Fugitive poets and views him as a “poet of romantic sensibility who has tried with varying success to compress his talents into a chastely classical form.”

In the following essay, Arbery determines the influence of Dante on Tate's work.

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

In the following essay, Squires explores the significance of three of Tate's poems: “The Maimed Man,” “The Swimmers,” and “The Buried Lake.”

In the following essay, Rubin discusses how Tate's background as a Southerner and Agrarian poet informed the imagery and subject matter of “Ode to the Confederate Dead.”

In the following essay, Wiltshire asserts that Tate's “radical understanding of tradition, whereby the past must die and be transformed in order to enter into the life of the present, places Tate in a direct lineage with his predecessor, Vergil.”

In the following essay, Bishop provides a reading of several of Tate's early poems, maintaining that it was his ability “to incorporate the tone of his age into the rhythms of his poetry that made his work so promising for the future.”

In the following essay, Gretlund provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of “Ode to the Confederate Dead.”

In the following essay, which was originally published in 1948 in Furioso, Nemerov provides a stylistic examination of Tate's verse, focusing on a “major duality in his poetry.”

In the following essay, Folks considers the unifying stylistic and thematic elements of the “Maimed Man” trilogy, focusing on the autobiographical aspects of the poems.

In the following essay, True discusses Tate's importance as a poet.

In the following essay, Berland explores the role of violence in Tate's poetry and finds parallels between his verse and that of John Webster.

In the following essay, Johnson emphasizes the role of reason in Tate's poetry.

In the following essay, Bernetta examines the theme of damnation in Tate's poetry.

[Tate grounds] his quite various speculations on art, letters, society, manners, morals, and human behavior … on a total view of man; that is to say, on religion, and specifically the view of man given in the classical-Christian tradition. Thus, Tate can set forth an ethics, an aesthetics, a concept of proper social order, and an idea of history that are thoroughly consonant with one another. Tate's writings do not, to be sure, give off the reek of the conscious system builder. But from any th...

In the following essay, Newitz delineates the defining characteristics of Tate's poetry.

To speak of Allen Tate and the personal epic—that peculiarly modern form which views historical material entirely through the glass of a private sensibility, fragmenting it into the elements of a series of lyrics rather than presenting it whole, as narrative—is to find oneself in difficulties at the start. Tate as critic has questioned the validity of the genre in Ezra Pound's Cantos and has rejected it in Hart Crane's The Bridge…. Yet Tate has followed his own advice only...

Tate has always been less a technical literary critic than an essayist using literature as the frame of reference within which he criticizes the mind and life of his time in the light of his convictions about the proper ends of man. He speaks as a twentieth-century humanist intellectual, isolated and virtually unheard in the barbaric society whose larger deformities it is his concern to examine and minister to. (p. 108) [We must see him as the man of letters], as flanked dangerously by two opposed chimeras ...

Many of [Tate's] early essays are stylistically awkward, full of involuted, semi-philosophical phrasings, and tentative in their critical formulations. But, though the brilliant style of Tate's later writings came slowly, these early things are still important. In these years, Tate was constantly concerned with the poetic order; but gradually, one can see a complementary theme entering his writing. This theme is an extension of Tate's continuing obsession with unity. By 1930, he was con...

Mr. Tate is, as critic, essentially a polemicist, an aggressive and sometimes truculent warrior who for more than twenty years has conducted a skillful defensive action. Believing that the best defense is an offense, he has given no quarter to any in whom he detects, under whatever disguise, allegiance to the Enemy—the reigning tyrant, Positivism. Though I do not come to praise Tate, I am not attempting to bury him, for the corpus of his criticism [displayed in On the Limits of Poetry, Selected Essay...

Any consideration of the pastoral mode today involves us in questions of very awkward accommodation. As a matter of fact, there are two traditions not susceptible of extension into modern literature, at least not in any pure manner. These are the epic and the pastoral…. Both epic and pastoral conceive of human character as being perfectly revealed in action. Homer and Theocritus clearly believed that was so; we do not. It is questionable whether even Virgil could quite believe Homer's credo, a...

In the following review, Brooks praises the topicality and richness of the poems in The Winter Sea, contending that the collection “deserves to be read by every one seriously interested in modern poetry.”

"The man of letters," a phrase frequently employed by Mr. Tate, gives us, I believe, the key to his criticism…. [Its] ordinary use in French or English is as a synonym for "writer" or "literary man" or "scholar." But for Mr. Tate the man of letters has a responsibility and a dignity that we do not ordinarily associate with the activities of the writer. And in spite of our critic's instinctive modesty and courtesy, it is not difficult to p...

Most readers have long known that Tate has produced some of the finest poetry of his generation. This is true even of unsympathetic readers inclined to complain that the corpus is uneven in quality (as it is) and unfulfilled in promise (as it is not). Most consider the single novel [The Fathers] a distinguished achievement, though few have recognized that it constitutes the great watershed in Tate's life as an artist, bringing into significant conjunction the insights, tendencies, and techniques of h...

In the following positive review of Poems: 1928-1931, Zabel traces Tate's poetic development.

In the thirties (and it did not end with the thirties) I greatly admired Tate for the sonorous and noble effects in much of his poetry, which I wanted to make a part of my own. Moreover, certain rhythms or, perhaps more accurately, turns of phrase seemed to me so finely and inevitably poetic that all that could be done was to try to echo them…. (p. 234) The following is what I started by saying when I [reviewed Tate's Poems 1920–1945: A Selection (published in England) in 1948] (I had j...

In the following review, Morse notes the lack of development in Tate's poetry, but underlines the strengths of the poems collected in Selected Poems.

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 fin...

To save criticism from the scientists, Tate disengaged literature itself from society and men, and held up the inviolate literary experience as the only measure of human knowledge. Literature in this view was not only the supreme end; it was also the only end worthy of man's ambition. Critics who saw in works of literature "not the specific formal properties but only the amount and range of human life brought to the reader" were vulgar expressionists. Critics who studied literature as &...

Despite [his] imposing record, Tate has not proved an original, seminal critic for his generation, as have Eliot, Richards, Edmund Wilson, and Kenneth Burke. His earlier work, both in the Fugitive articles and in his free-lance period in New York, was directly dependent on Eliot. When Eliot's influence waned, the original stimulus of Ransom reasserted itself, now strongly aided by that of Brooks and Warren, who were synthesizing the new critical doctrines. Finally, when he became a convert to Roman C...

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.”

For readers of a certain age—I have in mind those who, like myself, first came to modern poetry (and to the criticism written to defend and elucidate it) in the years just after the Second World War—the publication of Allen Tate's "Collected Poems 1919–1976" … is an event that stirs a good many memories and associations. Scarcely 20 years had passed since the appearance of his first books in 1928—the year of both "Mr. Pope and Other Poems"...

For readers of a certain age—I have in mind those who, like myself, first came to modern poetry (and to the criticism written to defend and elucidate it) in the years just after the Second World War—the publication of Allen Tate's "Collected poems 1919–1976" … is an event that stirs a good many memories and associations…. [In the] first years after the war Mr. Tate already seemed a venerable survivor of several lost worlds. The Nashville of the Fugitiv...

I doubt that any other poet in this country is a better judge of his contemporaries than Allen Tate. He has a personal distinction that frees him from jealousy and a sense of craftsmanship that qualifies him to explain all sorts of technical matters…. Moreover, [as evidenced by his recent Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas], he goes beyond questions of technique into a frequently illuminating type of social criticism. He says in his essay on Hart Crane—certainly the best of all those deali...

Allen Tate published in 1938 a splendid novel that places the social and aesthetic vision in a living circumstance. The setting of The Fathers is Virginia and Georgetown at the breaking up of the Union. The story is told through the elderly Lacy Buchan's recollections of his boyhood. His father, Major Lewis Buchan, sums up the antebellum Southern social order. George Posey, who marries Lacy's sister Susan, reflects the modern temperament; as a destructive presence in the Buchan family, he is a...

[The body of Allen Tate's poetry] is slim—as slim as Eliot's and Ransom's. He published one novel, The Fathers (1938). A remarkable work, it was never widely popular; but like Allen's best poetry, it remains in print, and I think it is destined to last. Why did one so greatly and variously gifted write and publish so little? What he said of his friend John Ransom was not, I think true of him: that he set out deliberately to be a Minor Poet…. My observation is that a...

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 ...

Mr. Allen Tate is a religious determinist, and apart from his intellectual honesty (he constantly makes a point of giving his own case away), a very astute one. If the reader [of The Forlorn Demon: Didactic and Critical Essays] is a little jaded with the taste of dogmatic tabasco sauce on modern literature, he will have no relief here…. Mr. Tate continually refers to his prejudices, and the modern liberal's attempt to escape from prejudice is nailed into its coffin with three resounding whacks...