POETRY CHRONICLE
nerve, an absence of that intellectual toughness which enabled Yeats to
write cleverly and lon'g and well; Eberhart's loose lyrical substance is
too powerless to create the necessary structure-texture tension. Both
Eberhart and Miss Herschberger, outstanding poets in their ways, reveal
the dangerous breadth of the chasm in modern sensibility.
Tate's
Collected Poems, 1922-1947
requires much more space than
is left for an adequate discussion of an importance, both critical and
poetic, which has never been fully gauged. The fact that Tate is a leader
of a corps of critic-poets who have risen out of an intensely felt need,
in a time of disorder, to defend our perilously-placed culture helps to
explain his poetry, its tone, and the form it takes. Early in his career
Tate decided that "Poetry does not dispense with tradition; it probes
the deficiencies of a tradition," and he is, ironically, a propagandist
in verse, much of his work being a variation on a theme in "Dover
Beach." His poetry, though, like Theodore Spencer's, conative
in
origin,
transcends both the latter's and Blackmur's by the superior quality of
his creative sensibility, having often a fine texture to go with his struc–
ture; so successful has he been that some passages (e.g., the opening of
"The 'Mediterranean") have become touchstones for our time. Since it
is a willed poetry, it is difficult to sustain, his achievements being mainly
fragmentary, twisting off into overwrought lines and lumpy self-conscious
passages. Nevertheless, Tate is, like Jonson, a poet's poet and a critic's
poet, functioning as guide and assimilator of sensibility; there is a rightness
about his best work, reminding us that he is not only one of the finest
poets of our age, but that he probably corresponds to what Delmore
Schwartz has called T. S. Eliot, a culture-hero. The publication now
of his collected poems comes as a testimony to integrity and order in
our time of brilliant and weak failure.
WiUiam Elton
THE GUILTY AND THE LIVING
THE QUESTION OF GERMAN GUILT.
By
Karl Jaspers. Translated
by
E. B. Ashton. Die!. $2.00.
Heine long ago observed that the Germans were pre-eminent
in philosophy because they had nothing else to do. The nonexistence
of a political society in Germany compelled its best intellects to seek
other fields, leaving public affairs in the hands of bureaucratic admin-
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