SOURCE: Wiltshire, Susan Ford. “Vergil, Allen Tate, and the Analogy of Experience.” Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly 5, no. 2 (winter 1985): 87-98.

In the following essay, Wiltshire asserts that Tate's “radical understanding of tradition, whereby the past must die and be transformed in order to enter into the life of the present, places Tate in a direct lineage with his predecessor, Vergil.”

As a poet and critic Allen Tate was committed to the particularities of history, the definiteness of place, the passing of time, and the importance of the public realm. Cumulatively, those commitments mean that he opposed abstraction in all its forms. As early as 1930 he had made this explicit: “For abstraction is the death of religion no less than the death of anything else.”¹ We come to understand our experience, he would say, not by resorting to abstractions, but by connecting one experience with another. Those connections...