The Dark Center of Modern Society: Tate

Deep Illness of the Modern Soul

Lear:  Get thee glass eyes,

           And, like the scurvy politician,

            seem

           To see the things thou dost

            not.  Now, 

            now, now, now,

            Pull off my boots; harder,

            harder: so.

Edgar:  O, matter and impertinency

             mixed!

             Reason in madness!

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On Dante….”sight is the king of the senses and that the human body, which like other organisms lives by touch,…”  Tate, The Angelic Imagination

What shall we say who have knowledge
   Carried to the heart? ~Allen Tate

On ‘Essays on Four Decades’ by Allen Tate

Tate "raised issues that still need to be confronted in our society." Louise Cowan continues in her introduction to this edition:
"[Tate's] concern ... was with one theme: the 'deep illness of the modern mind.' 'The mind,' he wrote, 'is the dark center from which one may see coming the darkness gathering outside us.'

"This darkness, as he has indicated ... stems from the West's retreat from its own fundamental principles. A society can hardly revert to a healthy paganism, he once wrote, after it has had the Christian revelation. Following a refection of the brilliant synthesis of Medieval Christendom, what was ahead for Western culture but abstraction and fragmentation? Having once known the higher reality, how can a culture be vital and productive with a lesser view?...

"One discerns in all his work ... that Tate is himself that marginal figure, standing between two epochs, lamenting the loss of an age of faith and dreading the oncoming darkness.... It was given to Tate to visualize the end of modernity."

Allen Tate guides us into the core of Western thought.

……………….

The human place is a soulful place — a place consisting of multiplicity, richness, and ambiguity. The horizontality of communitas is exemplified in the face-to-face encounter.

When we insist upon one language, one understanding, we build our tower of Babel. Such a monstrous enterprise lacks humility, for the hegemony of the One Voice drowns out the Saying of the many. With the ego-centric attempt to construct a metaphysical language, we erect a tower which attempts to leave behind the messy, earthy, paradoxical nature of encounter…

In his estrangement, his dwelling place -- his origin -- becomes uncanny. He returns with boons for his community, and his dwelling place is enriched by the strange treasures he bears along with him on the festive return home. The journey outward is not in the service of an ethereal escape from the human realm; rather, Janus’ adventure into the strange is in the service of a transformation of the ground of his dwelling.

In “Theorizing, Journeying, Dwelling,” Bernd Jager writes:

The journey cut off from the sphere of dwelling becomes aimless wandering, it deteriorates into mere distraction or even chaos or fugue. The journey requires a place of origin as the very background against which the figures of a new world can emerge...To be without origin, to be homeless is to be blind. On the other hand, the sphere of dwelling cannot maintain its vitality without the renewal made possible by the path. A community without outlook atrophies, becomes decadent and incestuous. Incest is primarily the refusal of the path; it therefore is a refusal of the future and a suicidal attempt to live entirely in the past. The sphere of dwelling, insofar as it is not moribund is interpenetrated by journeying (249).

Here, the theorist is described “as a recipient of the divine message and as a faithful transmitter of that message back to the people” (236). The poet, then, is a theoretician in the truest, most original sense of the word.

The poet is the dwelling-venturer who discovers the Divine not by rising above materiality, but rather by a deepening of experience. Allen Tate makes the distinction between the angelic imagination and the symbolic imagination. While the angelic imagination “tries to disintegrate or to circumvent the image in the illusory pursuit of essence,” the symbolic imagination “conducts an action through analogy, of the human to the divine, of the natural to the supernatural, of the low to the high, of time to eternity” (427). The symbolic imagination begins within the human place, and through the soul-making of de-literalizing the image, the poet works to show the traces of the Divine in the concrete description of the mundane. The poet who imagines symbolically cultivates the dwelling-place of the human, and she does not mistake herself for a god. Instead, she discovers the gods in the…dance…Symbolic Imagination

Men in a dehumanized society may communicate, but they cannot live in full com-
munion. ~Allen Tate, The Forlorn Demon

On Anne Roche Muggeridge and her death. 
Review of her The Gates of Hell book:  Those already familiar with an earlier work by Malcolm Muggeridge's courageous, Canadian-born daughter-in-law, titled The Gates of Hell, will know what to expect from this latest study of the post-Vatican II Catholic Church. (The American edition is, more accurately, subtitled Revolution in the Catholic Church.)
Despite a succession of devastating accounts of spiritual corruption and decline in sections of the Catholic Church in the Western world by the likes of James Hitchcock, Michael Davies, Msgr George Kelly and Christopher Derrick, the silent majority of Church-attending Catholics seems still blissfully unaware of any serious crisis of faith.
If Anne Roche Muggeridge's latest book fails to arouse more of the Catholic electorate - or of that minority which still reads religious literature - it seems nothing ever will.
...
, to realise, that a full-scale revolution has been completed within the Church, a new Reformation institutionalised, involving a sweeping takeover of Catholic structures with a "liberal consensus" created, and dissent made orthodoxy. At the same time, non-revolutionised Catholics have "begun to behave like exiles".

…………………..

Robert Lowell: Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he wrote rigorously formal poetry that drew praise for its exceptionally powerful handling of meter and rhyme. Lowell was politically involved—he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War and was imprisoned as a result, and actively protested against the war in Vietnam—and his personal life was full of marital and psychological turmoil. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized.

Lowell in the mid-fifties began to write more directly from personal experience, and loosened his adherence to traditional meter and form. The result was a watershed collection, Life Studies (1959), which forever changed the landscape of modern poetry. 
Considered by many to be the most important poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century, Lowell continued to develop his work with sometimes uneven results, all along defining the restless center of American poetry, until his sudden death from a heart attack at age 60.