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PARTISAN REVIEW
variation, becomes also a hypothesis, an as-if real. No departments. We
are familiar in the motion pictures with the abstraction of the little man
who was not there-familiar with what is not. Tate employs such con–
cepts. Note that the centaur whom Tate sees as he descends in winding
hell, note that the project of the metempirical being is accompanied by
a sadly empirical feature, the notched, amazing beard-and that this
is the most macabre of all possible commentaries, being the most inti–
mate to a man's daily existence. It suggests, in fact, no geographical
barrier between terrestial and extra-terrestial phenomena, no possibility
of our escape from the relative to the absolute. Heaven is a beard shaped
like a notched arrow!
Tate has realized that there may be no perfection which does not
include our imperfection. He is himself, let it be said, Janus-faced,
double-headed, a splitter of flea's eyebrows like William Blake, for whom
there is no certitude either of one world or that the world we live in is
not limitless. The macrocosm was bad enough, but consider the micrO'–
cosms, the many little worlds, and the falsities of our instruments of
objective measurements. The infinitely small, the infinitely great! And,
finally, once more a macabre item, that there is no sylvan door to a
rational nature and that we rattle against the bole the thing that we
lived for. Note that Tate's God is not merely dying but drying as well.
Note his God as an immanent force not believed in. Note, too, his rele–
gation of the commonsense world to the status of illusion per se. Our
own disjunctions of intuitions provide no final truth. What over-all
reality, differing from reality in its particular instances is there? Evi–
dently, none. The equal laws burning in the sky alike for Balaam and
for Balaam's ass can come into proximity only with the glassy-eyed dead,
seemingly.
To Tate, as a crucial figure, I have devoted the majority of the space
alloted. Richard Eberhart's
Poems
lack only the last boldness of lan–
guage, for they are subtle. More significant than Eberhart's calm, his
puffed-up, idealistic clouds, his nostalgia for certitude, is his realization
of self as if the self itself were an exploded star, his realization of our
material wars as our perversion of spirit, his recognition of our evil
ideology as preceding our evil machinery, of man's uncreating creation,
of the natural process which takes no cognizance of man's supernal
hope and aspirations. Our old, mystical dream of returning to space
is now realized in daily practice-what was our religion is now our long–
range artillery, an impersonal force. Consciousness it is that blights us
all. Of war in the animal sinews let us speak not, Eberhart writes, but
of that war which preceded it, the beautiful disrelation of the spiritual.
There is the true war, the everlasting, as we would have it! Conflicting
systems, those we dreamed of, are now conjoined to operate to our
despair. Truly, we are caught on the horns of a dilemma. Eberhart, a
