SOURCE: Morse, Samuel French. “Second Reading.” Poetry 51, no. 5 (February 1938): 262-66.

In the following review, Morse notes the lack of development in Tate's poetry, but underlines the strengths of the poems collected in Selected Poems.

In the current issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review (Winter, 1938) Allen Tate clarifies the statement with which the preface to his Selected Poems ends. In an article on his “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” the author points out the difference between feeling and experience, between knowledge “about” something and the knowledge as the thing itself. “In a manner of speaking,” he writes, “the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poet says apart from the words of the poem.” It is thus possible to learn more completely than before just where Mr. Tate stands, though the same principles have been set down at greater length in other of...