Afternoon with Allen Tate

Quite a few people this side of the Grolier bookshop, not otherwise philistines, have recently admitted that they don't read poetry the way they used to. Too difficult, they argue; takes too much patience. There's too much of it, and most of it isn't applicable to our lives, anyway. Rather see a Fellini movie or listen to a rock orgy on the radio.

Allen Tate's life and work are a challenge to people who have stopped reading poems and an inspiration to those who have not. His creative voice, at times distinctly Southern, speaks of much more than a single region of the country. He speaks with quiet authority, from powerful inner pressure, not to please crowds or win notoriety, though his eighteen published volumes of poetry, criticism, biography and fiction have brought him many honors.

As a poet, Tate looks at the modern man who has been cut off from his past and whose heart has been overwhelmed by his mind. As a man, he has always striven to be the kind of poet who does not forget his past and who speaks from heart and mind with equal feeling.

At seventy-one, his poetic voice is strong and his speaking voice mellow, as if he just sipped a special elixir--tea and honey, perhaps. Sitting in Robert Fitzgerald's office before his afternoon reading at Boylston auditorium. Tate looks every bit the Southern gentleman--debonair, impeccably dressed, a hint of Basil Ransom, years after The Bostonians, but with the high forehead and thin, tapered fingers reserved for artists and poets.

His vitality belies a long career whose roots are with Edgar Allen Poe and Rudyard Kipling, whose growth shows the influence of John Crowe Ransom and T.S. Eliot and whose maturity, in turn, affected Theodore Roethke and John Berryman. It is somehow easier to believe Tate has had three children in the past four years than to realize Robert E. Lee and James Meredith could figure in his imagination simultaneously.

"We used to play Civil War," he says, reminiscing about his childhood in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky, "but we could never find anybody willing to be a Yankee. We'd shoot at imaginary enemies."

He leans forward a little as he shares other memories. "My Mother had two pictures on the wall facing her bed. One was a beautiful steel engraving of Robert E. Lee, which I still have, and the other was a photograph of her father. To her, they were just alike, her heroes.

"I remember when I first went to New York after graduating from Vanderbilt, my mother, who was unreconstructed, said, 'I don't want you to go up there. You'll marry one of those Yankee girls. I'd much rather you married an English or a French girl'...The feeling was very strong. My older brother used to say that my mother didn't know that slavery had been abolished."

Loyalty to the South he'd inherited and devotion to the South he invisioned were crucial to Tate's intellectual development. As an undergraduate at Vanderbilt after the first World War, he became part of a group of literati called the Fugitives, including John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren, deeply dedicated to Southern regionalism, but "fleeing from nothing faster than the high caste Brahmins of the Old South."

"The Fugitive meetings were rather informal," Tate remembers. "They didn't start out as meetings for reading our poems: they were just philosophical discussions, aesthetics, that sort of thing. Gradually, people began to bring poems to read, and when a large group of poems had accumulated, we decided to publish a little magazine.

"The Nashville papers ridiculed the first issue when it was published, and the Chancellor of the University refused to subscribe to it. I think Radcliffe Squires (Tate's biographer) makes a rather amusing remark about that. He says, 'Looking at the first issue, one wonders why anybody expected anything of these people.'"

Nevertheless, the nucleus of the group's members (John Ransom, Donald Davidson, "Red" Warren, and Tate) not only improved on their initial, poetic promise, but by 1930 had sketched a credo for the South, with the anthology I'll Take My Stand, urging agrarianism over industrialism and warning the South against becoming a replica of the North. "The culture of the soil," wrote Ransom, "is the best and most sensitive of vocations."

"It's amusing to remember that I'll Take My Stand was attacked more violently in the South than it was in the North," Tate recalls. "The Southerners asked questions like, 'Can these people really milk cows?' That was how they saw agrarianism.

"Still, I rather think that I'll Take My Stand could be read with profit today. We didn't set out to be prophets, but we prophesied many of the evils that have overwhelmed us today--urbanism, pollution, the anonymity of the ghetto, the decline of the religious community."

Although Tate is sceptical about the poet-activist ("Our friend Shelley thought if he put those tracts he wrote in toy boats in Hyde Park, and people read them, a great revolution would take place!"), he does include social criticism as part of his responsibility as man and poet. For him, I'll Take My Stand was as much a defense of poetry as a defense of the South.

"Poetry seems to come out of the Hebraic Christian tradition of humanism," he explains. "The humanistic tradition is destroyed in the big, industrial technological civilizations. In certain islands, the great universities like Harvard and certain Southern universities, we still have it, but it's not the prevailing culture any longer. In that sense, the anthology was a defense of poetry."

Tate's artistic demands on himself are even more stringent than his social demands. His early training was rigorous. "In his Advanced Composition class. Mr. Ransom would assign all of Shakespeare's sonnets for us to study," Tate remembers. "Then we'd have to write a Shakespearean sonnet of our own, then an Italian sonnet, and so on."

Poetic models continued to figure in Tate's development for some time. "I didn't read any of T.S. Eliot till 1920," he explains, "though I'd read some of Pound. When I read Eliot, I couldn't write anything for a long time. Critics have pointed out that I'd written Eliotic poems before I read Eliot. That often happens in a certain period; people begin to do the same thing independently. But Eliot was so much more mature, you see, and I was just a boy. He rather overwhelmed me. So for awhile, I had to avoid that sort of influence.

"But we have to take off from somebody. A completely original poet would be an idiot. I had a young student at Minnesota years ago whom I asked, 'What poets do you read?' He answered, 'I don't read anybody, because I don't want to be influenced.'"

Although Tate's early work can, on occasion, be derivative or hesitant ("It begins in uncertainty," said one critic, "and attains meaning only during composition"), his more mature poems are unquestionably written in his own voice--elegant, allusive, densely packed like semi-precious stones inside a glass paperweight. His later poems show a solidity, a self-confidence, not always removed from stubborness.

"It isn't really a question of not wanting to be part of a new mode of poetry," he explains, examining himself beside Warren. Lowell, and Berryman. "I just couldn't do it. That highly personal, confessional, loose form; Mr. Warren, particularly. Well, of course, all poetry is personal. T.S. Eliot was highly personal, but not in any direct sense. But Robert Lowell is personal in a very direct and spontaneous way; he's sort of making a public confession. I always think the confession should be in the confessional, should be private."

Since Tate never raises his voice or flaunts his feelings, a superficial reading of his poems can be bewildering, if not discouraging. A careful reading offers the rewards of getting to know someone who is terribly shy, but very wise.

"It seems to me that formal versification is absolutely necessary to poetry," he observes, "because it's the assurance to the reader that the poet is at least in temporary command of the disorder out there and of the disorder inside himself. Without that order, poetry begins to go off in all directions at once; it dissolves.

"Formal versification is not artificial, any more than our walking down the street taking the same step is artificial. Formal versification is as fundamental as any other rhythm that the whole human organism participates in."

If reading Tate's poems we are struck first by the formality of the versification, listening to them, we finally begin to feel the inner rhythm, the naturalness of it, in spite of, no because of, the great care with which it was planned.

For all their intricacies, the poems, as Tate reads them, are as accessible as music: the ironic knell of "Jubilo," the vaguely erotic syncopation of "Shadow and Shade," the echoes of "The Swimmers" which seem to fall in terzarima without apparent effort.

Later, when we read them over to ourselves we may stumble again over the epigraphs from Dante, the classical allusions, the dramatic connections only hinted at, not explained. But even then, the sound of the poems read aloud comes back to us, as natural as breathing and as necessary as song.