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PARTISAN REVIEW
identifies as "the dark center from which one may see coming the dark–
ness gathering outside us," a darkness resulting from the West's retreat
from its fundamental principles. Nor need those principles be merely
religious, though for Tate they include religion-"a society which has
once been religious cannot, without risk of spiritual death, preceded by
the usual agonies, secularize itself." The supreme loss has been the
breakdown and abandonment of cultural analogies, "the analogies in
which man conceives his nature" and which matter far more than, say,
political rhetoric or theoretical "discourse." Away from intellectual
abstraction, from a technocracy of infinitely generated means without
ends, away from the modern malady which Tate calls "the angelic imag–
ination" and which finds its exemplar in "Our Cousin, Mr. Poe"-away
from these Tate points back
to
a mode of imagining which found its
fruition in Dante and the medieval world of correspondences, pitting
against Poe's "nothingness" the "symbolic imagination," a centripetal
instance of unity on a variety of planes:
To bring together various meanings at a single moment of action is
to exercise what I shall speak of here as the symbolic imagination
.... The symbolic imagination conducts an action through anal–
ogy, of the human to the divine, of the natural to the supernatural,
of the low to the high, of time to eternity.... Shall we call this the
Poetic Way?
It
is at any rate the way of the poet, who has got to do
his work with the body of this world, whatever that body may look
like to him, in his time and place-the whirling atoms, the body of
a beautiful woman, or a deformed body, or the body of Christ, or
even the body of this death.
If
the poet is able to put into this mov–
ing body, or to find in it, a coherent chain of analogies, he will
inform an intuitive act with symbolism; his will be in one degree or
another the symbolic imagination.
In his apprehension of cultural loss, no less than in his application of a
Dantescan paradigm, Tate resembles other poet-critics of the twentieth
century such as
T.
S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Rangier than Eliot, better
grounded than Pound, Tate nonetheless shares with them a deep nostal–
gia and a corresponding grit, Odysseus adrift upon Yeats's "filthy mod–
ern tide." Indeed, one senses in his essay on Yeats, the attitude and
voice-the desideratum-of Tate himself: "He only wanted what all
men want, a world larger than himself
to
live in; for the modern world
as he saw it was, in human terms, too small for the human spirit."
It is obvious from the above that for Tate "literary criticism" involves
the whole person, a whole culture, and not only that, whole worlds; he
