Allen Tate: The Modern Mind and the Discovery of Enduring Love

Beginning with his early devotion to Art itself, followed by his effort to replace the primacy of Art with that of History, Tate's poetry dramatizes his gradual movement--one that is first public and intellectual, and then private and spiritual--toward acceptance of the central spiritual tradition of Western Civilization. By focusing on the relationship between Tate himself and the speakers in his poems, and on the relationship between those speakers and readers who like the poet, John V. Glass III helps the reader find themselves drawn into universally apprehensible experience. The course of Tate's own thought, frequently presented as being at a remove from common experience, proves not merely accessible, but also a model for those who, like Tate himself, seek to understand the fractured nature of Modernity and to discover an alternative to it in a traditional conception of Being.