154
PARTISAN REVIEW
Corpse
In
the Kitchen, Poem in the Hole
ESSAYS OF FOUR DECADES. By Allen Tate. Introduction by Louise Cowan.
Intercollegiate Studies Institute Books.
$29.95.
THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER: ESSAYS ON THE POETRY OF ELEANOR Ross TAY–
LOR. Edited by Jean Valentine. Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Press.
$
I
5
.00.
IT'S EASY TO SEE WHY NO ONE READS Allen Tate anymore. New Criti–
cism is now supremely old hat, and his was the Jim Beam of new crit–
ics. At every facet his outlook fails us: he is Classical-Christian
(Virgilian-Dantescan), humanist, formalist, poet-critic of the center–
back when we believed in such thing as a center. I think of the stone in
Yeats's "Easter
1916"
while reading him, set there to "trouble the liv–
ing stream"; a more apt figure would be Old Rocky Face from the late
poem "The Gyres":
The gyres! the gyres! Old Rocky Face, look forth;
Things thought too long can be no longer thought,
For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth,
And ancient lineaments are blotted out.
Irrational streams of blood are staining earth;
Empedocles has thrown all things about;
Hector is dead and there's a li ght in Troy;
We that look on but laugh in tragic joy.
"Things thought too long can be no longer thought. . .. " Tate and his
clan held intellectual sway for forty years, at least in the land of letters;
these reprinted essays span those decades. In his company are such lumi–
naries as John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks,
and Randall Jarrell. Beginning with the journal
The Fugitive
and the
manifesto-anthology
l'll Take
My
Stand
in
1930,
these southern Fugi–
tive-Agrarians, writes Louise Cowan in her insightful introduction,
"went on individually to produce an impressive number of volumes in
both poetry and criticism, dominated the literary journals and the most
important English departments in the nation, generated hundreds of dis–
ciples, taught thousands of students how to read poetry." They stressed
the poem itself, not as a product of its time or cu lture. Theirs were the
quaint notions that literature had value, was capable of being judged,
that each good poem was (in Brooks's famous figure) a well wrought
