PARTISAN REVIEW
great many pretty knots, like Edmund Wilson and R. P. Blackmur before
him, over the problem of belief and symbolism in Yeats's verse. It would
be so much simpler if we could all come to agree that Yeats
was
from
first to last what Baudelaire called a
mystificateur.
In this he was per–
verse, irrational and dishonest:
it
is a matter for the moralist. We can
condone such an attitude only as the result of an unfortunate psycho–
logical condition-from which, incidentally, most of the important
European poets of the past hundred years have also suffered. We must
keep in mind the excessive strain upon the poet of sustaining a belief
in the superiority of imaginative symbols in an unimaginative culture.
The attitude of mystification becomes an almost necessary self-protective
armor. Despite his occasional assertions of his belief in their living
actuality, Yeats's fairies, spooks and reincarned beings are for us today
no more than what his father, in writing about Blake, called part of
"the machinery of poetry." And the poetry remains.
William Troy
THE UNRECONSTRUCTED ALLEN TATE
ON THE LIM ITS OF POETRY. By Allen Tate. Swallow Press & William
Morrow. $4.00.
This book, Allen Tate explains, was put together from three
earlier books which collected essays written over a period of twenty years.
The subjects of the essays now included are individual poets, problems
of poetics or criticism, and wider questions of religion, provincialism
and tradition. In bulk and range, this new volwne fairly represents, then,
Allen Tate's product as an active critic.
We seem almost called upon to make a summary judgment. What
does Allen Tate stand for? Not in terms of a list of preferences from
occasional reviews, or of isolated opinions from this or that analytic
essay, but what over-all, what that ties together his works of twenty
years into one work? Though I believe Tate to be mistaken in many of
his theoretical views, even a little silly in some of them, and though I
do not share all of his literary tastes, I would nevertheless answer this
question: he stands, simply, for the best. I have no sympathy with his
myth of the Confederacy, but perhaps he has somewhat infected me
with it: I find that I want to designate as "honorable" this twenty
years' record. In his critical writings, Tate has never been disloyal to
himself, to his chosen code and values. In our time and place, this
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