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PARTISAN REVIEW
users of the King's English aren't able to put it together again-at least
in terms of poetry. One often grows a little bored with the excuses and
the explanations. But Mr. T ate's implicit thesis carries unusual con–
viction. Here I must qualify my earlier cavil. Had Mr. Tate only given
us another reason why the center doesn't hold, he would merely have
taken his place at an already overcrowded symposium table whose dis–
cussion has gone on too long. Instead he begins with art-in this case
with Poe-and breaks down Poe's note of anguish into its component
elements, and proves them to be the elements from which our own
shard of a world is made. It is an arresting demonstration from which
a deep perspective opens.
But to return to Maritain's
Dream of Descartes
to which Mr. Tate
acknowledges his indebtedness : it is the Cartesian dualism, transfonn–
ing man's body into a mechanism and his soul into an independent
angelic intelligence, which Mr. Tate takes as the working hypothesis on
which to explain the condition of modern dissociation-a dissociation
that amounts to a complete disintegration of the personality. The fol–
lowing passage defines Mr. Tate's general position pretty clearly:
Taste is the discipline of feeling according to the laws of the
natural order, a discipline of submission to a permanent limitation of
man; this discipline has been abrogated by "the mathematical reason–
ing" whose purpose is the control of nature. Here we have the Cartesian
split-taste, feeling, respect for the depth of nature, resolved into a
subjectivism which denies the sensible world; for nature has become
geometrical, at a high level of abstraction, in which "clear and distinct
ideas" only are workable. The sensibility is frustrated since it is denied
its perpetual refreshment in nature: the operative abstraction replaces
the rich perspective of the concrete object. R eason is thus detached from
feeling, and likewise from the moral sense, the third and executive mem–
ber of the psychological triad . .. We get the hypertrophy of the
in–
tellect and the hypertrophy of the will. When neither intellect nor will
is bound to the human scale, their projection becomes god-like, and
man becomes an angel . . . .
It is against the background of this idea that Mr. Tate analyzes
Eureka,
the most extraordinary thing that Poe ever wrote-that long
cosmological prose poem in which Poe virtually identifies himself with
God in the act of creating and finally destroying the Universe, and,
incidentally, himself and God along with it. When one recalls the
spiritual affinity with
Eureka
that Valery displayed in his brilliant essay
on it, Mr. Tate's warning that what destroyed Poe "is potentially
destructive of us" becomes effectively ominous. Poe's opposite number
in the pre-Cartesian pages of Mr. Tate's book is Dante.
If
the implied
