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cerned, however, with the death of myth and the imaginative result of
a conception of world processes which, because depersonalized, is often
held to be inimical to imagination. How the value-mongers tremble on
their high thrones! The death cry of myth, so dear to the hearts of the
value-mongers, is accompanied, however, by the birth cry of an art which
integrates new world views, difficult only to those who would reject
adventure, like anthropology, like geography from the world of art.
Our poets, like thinking men, are prone now to move in a realm
of relativities, frictions, corrosive processes, without certitude, without an
ideal of the Platonic demi-sphere of archetypes as over-arching the vast
mistake of a perpetual fluctuation. Not all are mooning in rose gardens
among marble statues. Empiricism, evolutionism, psychology, these im–
portant insights have not only shaken confidence in the logical structure
of human reason as a source for the provision of an absolute truth, but
have proved it largely erroneous. The Polynesian taboo is cousin ger–
mane to the Platonic archetype. The over-reality which was so lately a
swan song becomes conspicuous, finally, by its absence from the modern
context. For such relativists, the only absolute is that provided by a far
from absolute man, a shady character. They can find no security in the
mouthing of time-worn convictions. Did the Greeks really have a word
for it? Our most distinguished poets are thrown, more and more, upon
the resources, not of traditionary attitudes and despairs but of modern
investigation, the physical whirlwind which is as old and older than the
hills. The arid fact is that the more we comprehend the vast fluctuatior.
of experience suggested by empiricism, the less likely it seems that we
shall ever be able to reach, in our experience, the ultimate ground of
being and becoming, or even a science of ultimates. All is trial and
error. Each poet must seek, in his own hazardous way, as was always the
case among the adventuresome, the integration of an experience which
defies integration, since so many of the old signposts walk off lurchingly
into the mist themselves. As science progresses, it describes, similarly, less
and less of a tangible reality. But does this progress of science from
elephant as elephant to elephant as light beams-roughly speaking–
leave the poet with only the alternative of Mother Church's bosom or
some such closed system of eternal dogma? There is a broad possibility
that science may also have its symbolic uses, just like the old saints who
ran after their heads after decapitation. Imagination does not cease.
Allen Tate's
The Winter Sea
is the work of a mature poet and one
of singular complexity, forbidding only to the aggrieved fundamentalist.
Tate, like the author of
Alice in Wonderland,
makes a fantasy of
mathematics, of logic. He is not careless.
The Winter Sea
is worthy, on
all scores, of our prolonged exploration and discovery. It does not ex–
haust itself, being something more than a personal document of birds
noted and lovers met. Tate proposes, in fact, a complexus of the most
extreme mystic and most extreme skeptic views, a double order con-
