Essays of Four Decades [Hardcover]

Allen Tate (Author)

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Allen Tate (1899-1979) was one of the twentieth century's most celebrated literary critics and poets. A founding member of the Fugitive poets and a contributor to the Southern Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand, Tate was a leading exponent of the New Criticism. In these essays, first collected in 1968, Tate reminds turn-of-the-century readers that the study of literature and poetry is a metaphysical undertaking rooted in what he called "the symbolic imagination," which operates through analogy "of the human to the divine, of the natural to the supernatural, of the low to the high, of time to eternity." In jettisoning this imagination in his reach for pure intellect man has, says Tate, embraced not pure spirituality, but pure nothingness. This collection includes such classic essays as "The New Provincialism," "The Symbolic Imagination," "Yeats's Romanticism," and "The Angelic Imagination." Tate's contributions to the study of literature and poetry are assessed in a new introduction by Louise Cowan, who writes: "One could say of him what he said of Yeats: '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.'" Such yearning stands in stark contrast to the designs of latter-day theorists, whose drive to reduce the poetic imagination to a social construction deracinates our spirit even as their academic jargon renders it inanimate.

About the Author

Allen Tate was a scholar, a poet, a teacher, a critic, an editor, and a biographer. After teaching at numerous colleges and universities, including Princeton, NYU, Kenyon, and the University of Chicago, he retired from the University of Minnesota as Regents' Professor of English. He was founder and editor of The Fugitive, editor of The Sewanee Review, and author of numerous collections of poems and essays, as well as biographies of Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis and a novel, The Fathers.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 663 pages
• Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute; 3rd edition (June 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1882926293
• ISBN-13: 978-1882926299
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #390,063 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An American Classic is back in print., June 11, 2005

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James M. Wilson (Virginia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Essays of Four Decades (Hardcover)

In an age where criticism sounds more and more like the sigh of a dying culture, Tate reminds us of the fundamental truth's of the human condition that are revealed by a certain poetic vision which at once transcends and underscores religion, politics, literature, and poetry. He is a writer that I find myself constantly returning to not merely to gain insight into the particular works in question, but rather to remember the importance of reading literature and poetry in the first place. Tate is one of the best poet's and critics of the 20th century (very much akin to T.S. Eliot in both form and content) but due to his sympathies for the Antebellum South which is heretical in academia, and a growing infatuation with criticism that is divorced from the poetic imagination from which literature springs, Tate is less read than he should be.