ALLEN TATE: BIOGRAPHY AND BACKGROUND

Allen Tate was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and poet laureate.

He attended Vanderbilt University and founded the famous magazine The Fugitives.

His intellectual group included John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren.

Tate was associated with the Agrarian movement, a group of Southern intellectuals who promoted traditional agrarian values.

MAJOR WORKS AND PUBLICATIONS

• Mr. Pope and Other Poems (1928)

• Ode to the Confederate Dead (1927)

• The Man of Letters in the Modern World (1955)

• Tension in Poetry (Essay)

• Essays of Four Decades (1968)

• Reason in Madness (1941)

• Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas

CRITICAL CAREER AND EDITORIAL ROLES

Tate made his debut as a critic in the weekly book page Tennessean, publishing 29 reviews in 1924.

He noted that "An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes" was the first significant attempt by white critics to do justice to Negro literature.

He worked as a freelance for The Nation and contributed to Hound & Horn and Poetry magazine.

He also served as the de facto associate editor of The American Review.

TENSION IN POETRY

Taken from "The Man of Letters in the Modern World," this essay argues that tension is the life of a poem.

The essay is divided into three parts:

• Part I: The fallacy of communication in poetry.

• Part II: Definition and importance of tension.

• Part III: Final examples of the significance of tension.

DEFINING TENSION: EXTENSION AND INTENSION

Tate coined 'tension' by stripping the prefixes from extension and intension.

• Extension (Denotative): The logical, literal, or surface meaning of the poetry.

• Intension (Connotative): The hidden, suggestive, or metaphorical meaning.

A good poem is one where these two are in a state of tension.

The meaning selected by the reader varies along the line between these extremes according to personal interest.

LITERARY EXAMPLES OF TENSION

1. Andrew Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress': Contains both extensive meaning (sensuality) and intensive meaning (asceticism/spirituality).

2. John Donne's 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning': Uses the gold conceit where the spatial image of gold contradicts the non-spatial soul, yet the denotation enriches the passage.

3. Dante's 'Inferno': Tate cites the tercet about the town on the shore as a supreme example where intension and extension become one.

STRUCTURE AND TEXTURE

• Structure: The formal and technical aspects (rhyme, meter, organization). Tate calls this the "architectural" aspect.

• Texture: The sensory and linguistic aspects (metaphors, similes, symbols). Texture conveys the emotions and ideas within the structural framework.

CONCLUSION

Tate's theories emphasize that the unity of a poem's literal and metaphorical meanings creates its unique power.

These elements can be used as "touchstones" in the Arnoldian sense to judge the quality of poetry.