Essays of Four Decades - Hardcover

Tate, Allen

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Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0196903831 ISBN 13: 9780196903835

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1970

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Allen Tate

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From the Inside Flap:

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.

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