THE UNRECONSTRUCTED ALLEN TATE
signs," "contextual" or "reflexive" symbols, "iconic signs," etc. are an
effort to describe within the limits of their terminology very much the
same reality which Tate tries to point to with his. The big gulf between
Tate and his enemy is rhetorical and, I think, moral. He detests their
language: and let us admit that in its application to art the positivist
language is usually dreary and inappropriate-inappropriate because it
gives a false seeming of scientific precision
in
a field where a small drop
of insight and sensibility is worth more than the entire pool of "laboratory
knowledge" that has so far been stored. Tate rejects even more flatly
the moral judgments and values which are usually associated with this
language in the persons of the positivists. They, or most of them, are not
seriously interested in poetry, and Tate is. They, or many of them,
believe that the progressive application of scientific method is the way
of salvation. Tate does not.
Tate's formalist aesthetics (for it is an aesthetics, in spite of his
disavowal) is in a number of ways rather close to Kant's. Kant's "pleas–
ure in the sensuous presentation of an object," apart from "the idea
of the existence of the object" and from all interest or desire, his "form
of purposiveness without the idea of purpose," and his other paradoxes
can be related without too much strain to Tate's conception of the poetic
attitude and the poetic product. And Tate's account runs into the
same important trouble: it is hard to get from it an objective evaluation
of "significance," of importance.
If
a poem is "genuine," and therefore "complete," if it is an integral
fusion of its elements, each adequate to all the rest, then presumably
it
is "perfect," unique, .and thus incommensurable with every other
genuine poem, which is also perfect and unique. Comparative judgments
can be made only between a genuine (that is, perfect) poem, and other
works which to one or another degree are incomplete, imperfect, not
fused-that is, which fail in one or more respects to
be
poems.
But what if the elements are themselves inferior? What
if
the idea
is banal or second-rate, or the emotion shallow (or even vicious), and
yet the words and images and rhythm altogether adequate, and wholly
fused with the second-rate idea or the shallow emotion? On what ob–
jective basis can Tate (or Kant before' him) rate such a poem as less
than
genuine (perfect), and therefore inferior to some other poem?
It
is
hard to figure out.
On
the Limits of Poetry
collects the essays of twenty years, pre–
sumably those which Tate believes to be most worth preserving. Among
them
there is no single essay on any of the very greatest poets-none on
Shakespeare or Dante or Homer or Lucretius or Goethe or even Milton
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