73 CHAPTER III Allen Tate Came Onto the Literary Scene in the Mid- 1920S. Very Early He Discovered T.S.Eliot and His Admiration
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73 CHAPTER III Allen Tate came onto the literary scene in the mid- 1920s. Very early he discovered T.S.Eliot and his admiration for Eliot's work intensified. It was he who attracted his Teacher - John Crowe Ransom's attention towards the presence of Modernists on the literary scene. Tate's work echoes Eliot's poetry and criticism. Yet Tate did not imitate; what he agreed and admired he took into his own substance and made it his own. Tate and his contemporaries of the early 192 0s looked bacK at their country, the South, as a country with considerable historical consciousness with more feeling for tradition than existed anywhere else in the nation, There had been a civil war over a half—century before. And as the South had been badly beaten, the southern leaders decided to follow the path of the conqueror. The leaders called for a new South of cities and factories. But the time and place could not make the Southern writers like Tate willing to ape the ways of the industrial East. Rather there was revulsion against the necessity of having to do so in order to live in such a time and place. As the South re—entered the world, with the war of 1914—1918 these writers glanced backward and then emerged a literature conscious of the past in the present. It is called the Southern Renascence. 74 Tate and his companions cried out against the industrial, commercial civilization, the worship of getting and spending and the degradation of religion and tradition. It is remarkable that in such a situation Allen Tate had the courage to commit himself to becoming a *Man of Letters'. In 1926, he and John Crowe Ransom planned to do something about the Southern situation. They brought out a book entitled I'll Take My stand in which Tate, Ransom and others professed the Agrarian way of life. The first paragraph of the introduction written by Ransom states, "All the articles bear in the same sense upon the book's title subject: all tend to support a Southern way of life as against what may be called the American or prevailing way; and all as much as agree that the best terms in which to represent the distinction are contained in the phrase. Agrarian versus Industrial".^ Louis D. Rubin, Jr., has clarified the Agrarian motive in his article on Tate: "In an Agrarian community aesthetic activity would not be secondary to Economics... Nature, religion and art would be honored activities of daily life, and not something superfluous and outmoded, to be indulged when business permitted. Knowledge letters, learning, taste, the integrated and rich fullness of emotion and 75 intellect - would be "carried to the heart", as Tate said in the 'Confederate Ode, ' and not an unassimilated, discordant conglomerate of fragments..."^ In the same essay Mr. Rubin, Jr., has also quoted Allen Tate's Phi Beta Kappa address at the University of Minnesota : "the man of letters must not be committed to the illiberal specializations that the nineteenth century has proliferated into the modern world : specializations in which means are divorced from ends, action from sensibility, matter from mind, society from the individuals religion from moral agency, love from lust, poetry from thought, communion from experience, and mankind in the community from men in the crowd. There is no end to this list of dissociations because there is no end, yet in sight, to the fragmenting of the western mind."^ These comments reflect the influence of T.S. Eliot's remarks on the dissociation of sensibility in the Twentieth Century. War, rootlessness, godlessness, bestiality — the pestilences of modern man were the concern of poets like Eliot and Tate; Eliot recommended the deliberate and disciplined cultivation of spiritual values through religion for the modern man. He staunchly believed that only through God can civilization survive. Tate and the Southerners were saying the same through Agrarianism. The 76 role of religion in Agrarian life was stressed upon in the book 'I'll Take My stand'. T.S. Eliot expressed his sympathy with the South Agrarian Movement in his book 'After Strange Gods.'^ The demand for a conscious quest for the order and unity of a spiritual existence runs throughout Tate's poetry and criticism. Even his famous definition of Tension in poetry reflects the same philosophy: "the meaning of poetry is its 'tension', the full organized body of all the extention and intention that we can find in it. The remotest figurative significance that we can derive does not invalidate the extentions of the literal statement. Or we may begin with the literal statement and by stages develooej the complications of the metaphor:at every stage we may pause to state the meaning so far apprehended and at every stage the meaning will be coherent."^ ThiS| contains a stance against facile revolts from traditional forms of culture, illiberal specialization and the dissociation of sensibility. Allen Tate's poetry can be termed as disciplined, intellectual and difficult poetry. He expected the fullest cooperation of his reader's all intellectual resources, all his knowledge of the world and all the persistence and alert/ness that the modern reader would think of giving to 77 scientific studies. Hence the concentrated use of image and metaphor. He and his companions have insisted in their poetry and criticism that the image possesses a priority over the abstract idea. In Louis D, Rubin, Jr.'s words, "They have taken over the pioneering work done by the Imagists and gone further. They have been instrumental in reviving contemporary interest in the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century constructed that poetry is with complex imagery and metaphor."^ In his essay "Poetry Modern and Unmodern", Tate has mentioned that he himself first experienced the shock to the twentieth century sensibility out of which modernism developed, through reading James Thomson, the author of The City of Dreadful Night.^ Thomson's inflated rhetoric and echolalia merely adumbratad the center of psychic and moral interest that was later articulated by poets like Yeats and Eliot. Concerning his own poetry Tate has further stated: "It remained (for me) to find the right language and to establish a center from which it could be spoken; for the poet is never wholly aware of his subject until his language is able to speak it, and to render it to the entire human being, to both the sensibility and the intellect, at that focus of awareness at which he does not know whether he is thinking or feeling."^ 78 According to Brooks, to bridge the gap between reason and emotion in the modern man has been the special task of the great twentieth poets like Yeats, Eliot and Tate.^ Moreover, Tate's preoccupation with history and time in his poetry is closely related also to John Crow Ransom's characteristic problem : of man living under the dispensation of science — modern man suffering from a dissociation of sensibility. Cleanth Brooks has quoted a few more remarks of Tate and one can clearly see how Tate was very deeply influenced by T.S. Eliot's theory of impersonality in art. The first view he quotes is about artistic detachment: "The flesh is the scourge of intellect, but art takes no sides, and so the result is simply spirit and body juxtaposed. "•'•° The second remark is about the impersonality of art: "Art is a grim dominion, and personalities have no place in it."''"^ Tate had clearly realized that a poem is something made, not simply something uttered. Thus, knowing modernity and the sources of its power Allen Tate was determined in his early twenties what strategies could serve his purpose in addressing the audience he intended. That tactic was, according to M.E. Bradford "highly conscious, dramatic and impersonal — a procedure calculated (after Eliot, ....) to, circumvent the 79 modern reader's resistance to poetry in general and to traditionalist poetry in particular, "•'^^ Like Eliot, he had realised that the modern reader can be influenced by dramatic presentation of a mind in motion to participate in attitudes or emotions he would not ordinarily tolerate if they were thrust upon him with direct assertion. With Tate, as with Eliot, there is a temptation to identify the speaker in the verse with its maker. The reader has to realize that Tate speaks through a mask, adopts a character (persona) to make that created summary self available to the reader's independent judgement. Subjective lyric association or pure imagism were the poetic modes in vogue when Tate began his career. Both were consequences of the entire aesthetic impasse toward which the entire craft had been moving since the European Renaissance. Tate and his Fugitive friends recognized that no serious poet could employ either. Yet these very modes did define the expectations of any audience as they were so conditioned in the matter of reading or hearing of the verse. There was only one way out of this trap - a procedure followed by some of the best poets since the seventeenth century. M.E. Bradford calls it "a method for registering and figuring forth the recalcitrant particularity of "the world's body". •'•^ Tate 80 refracted what he observed of the external complex of the contingencies through telling language. It is the poetry of experience. In short, good poetry according to Tate consisted of coherence of imagery, the relation of multiple and ambiguous meanings to the central motive, every phrase capable of undergoing logical examination without any possibility of the whole being resolved into pure thought. In other words, it was experience emotional and cognitive at the same time.