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spiring to be disorderly, the interesting fact that there may be men
dwelling, symbolically, at the antipodes of each other. We pick this state–
ment, it is true, out of the most inscrutable imagery.
The Winter Sea
is
hauntingly difficult because of the diverse schemata of which ft seems
the inevitable, distinguished result, an awareness both of traditional
idealism and that the discordant vision suggested by the complexities of
modem thought cannot be dismissed as worthless trivialities. These,
too, have their amazing consequence in thought and action. A thinker
less astute than Tate could dismiss them, airily. Tate, a man of air, can–
not. Tate's poems are, for all their seeming frustrated whimsicality, for–
mal, the result of the most formal thinking. Each is like a rule or state–
ment of relations as expressed in a formula or by symbols--crows or
centaurs-and rigorous as good abstraction always is. The mind, from
this point of view, may be made up of additions and negations, in end–
less play. A fact which William James noted. Because Tate is not only
an intellectual poet but also emotional, in a high-charged atmosphere,
his algebra gone wild may create new, the most amazing perspectives,
to startle us out of our ordinary assumptions. He has read the old sign–
posts from which our life has moved away, but he persists, at whatever
cost, in his inquiry. What then? The fact of our knowledge of the orig–
inating power as ourselves does not change the fact that man would be
embarrassed by the absence of his symbolic life, however unreal to all
but ourselves, even ourselves transcendent. Our propensity for self-decep–
tion continues to play, like our angelology, an important, perhaps the
most important role. Tate, the truth-seeker of no imperial truth possible
or given, explores the richness of contraries and propositions which, each
taken to be true, would nullify each other except for their continued
presence as a subject of conflict.
Converse assumptions nullify not only Tate's search for certitude
but that of other poets. There are oblique allusions to these-ghosts of
Alexander Pope and other poets haunting the winter sea, et cetera-but
for what purpose? Tate's triumph is to explode, at every glittering point,
the euphemistic convention, the immoral maxim, the accepted falsehood.
Certitude may be only an antipathy to the ideal of progress, from Tate's
point of view. And by progress, I am speaking in terms of the voyage,
not the goal, in terms of action, not of rest. There is a broad possibility,
haunting to this poet as a marble statue to the poetaster, that the search
is everything and not the object searched for, not the fixed attitude.
Tate holds suspect even the most refined uses of language. Is every noun
accompanied by its corresponding entity in space, its reality? Where is
essence? w·here is substance? I s centaur for Tate the time-worn, exalted
, image of super-reality, eliciting our vague agreement as a matter of con–
vention, or is it merely a noun, a word to which there is no correspond–
ing entity that we know of, like perhaps the word God? The centaur of
Tate's cosmos, transhifting as that cosmos is, Dante plus an infinite
