PARTISAN REVIEW
spirit I shall call here .... a positive Platonism, a cheerful confidence
in the limitless power of man to impose practical abstractions upon his
experience. Romantic irony is a negative Platonism, a self-pitying disil–
lusionment with the positive optimism of the other program: the ro–
mantic tries to build up a set of fictitious 'explanations,' by means of
rhetoric. . . . "
Positivism cannot understand (nor its spirit produce) genuine poetry,
because poetry is the creation, not of the practical will, but of the imagi–
nation. Poetry presents, not for action, but for "knowledge," "the
imaginative whole of life," which "is wholeness of vision at a particular
moment of experience; it yields us the quality of experience." Poetry's
distinction "is its complete knowledge, die full body of experience that
it offers us." "When the will and its formulas are put back into an
implicit relation with the whole of our experience, we get the true
knowledge which is poetry.
It
is the kind of knowledge which is really
essential to the world, the true content of its phenomena, that which
is subject to no change, and therefore is known with equal truth for all
time," Verbally, then, Tate's doctrine is certainly the extreme contrary
of that of positivism (in the technical sense), which restricts "knowledge"
to explicit statements capable of operational interpretation.
Approaching somewhat differently, Tate finds a genuine poem to
be an indissoluble fusion of idea, words, emotion, rhythm, image. Each
element is exactly adequate to every other; there is neither excess nor
defect. This is the ideal, seldom reached. When it is, Tate recognizes
that there is very little that criticism can do, other than to "remove
obstacles" from recognition. "This integral character of the work of
art forever resists practical formlllation." "The quality of poetic vision
.... is not susceptible of logical demonstration. We may prepare our
minds for its reception by the logical elimination of error.... Let us not
argue about it. It is here for those who have eyes to see." When, how–
ever, the poetry fails, when the idea is not adequately grounded in
the words, the emotion not bodied in the image, or any other dispropor–
tion exists among the elements, then analytic criticism can expose the
causes of failure. Probably the best passages in Tate's criticism are
those where, with a tact and sensibility that are both acute and con–
vincing, he undertakes such exposures. By showing us just where Keats
or Hardy or Shelley or Cowley or Crane or Robinson have gone wrong,
he trains us also in sensing more keenly the right.
The content of Tate's theory of poetry is not quite so different
as he imagines from that of the "positivists." They, too, seek to distin–
guish poetry from science; and their laborious explorations into "aesthetic
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