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 dealing with the subject—that the poet tried to create a religious myth for an anti-mythical nation, with the result that his central symbol, the Bridge, has no real meaning. Edwin Arlington Robinson's long poems, he says, are dull and undramatic because "Mr. Robinson has no epos, myth or code, no supra-human truth, to tell what the terminal points of human conduct are, in...