SOURCE: Feder, Lillian. “Allen Tate's Use of Classical Literature.” The Centennial Review 4, no. 1 (winter 1960): 89-114.

In the following essay, Feder elucidates the influence of classical myths and literature on Tate's poetry.

I

“Consciousness of history cannot be fully awake, except where there is other history than the history of the poet's own people: we need this in order to see our own place in history.” T. S. Eliot regards this consciousness of history as one of the requirements of the mature poet, and he suggests Vergil as an example of the poet who exhibits this awareness of his relation not only to the past of his own nation but to the past of a civilization before his. Vergil himself has provided for Allen Tate a means of extending his view of history, and, as the “story of Aeneas” was for Vergil “a statement of relatedness between two great...