To speak of Allen Tate and the personal epic—that peculiarly modern form which views historical material entirely through the glass of a private sensibility, fragmenting it into the elements of a series of lyrics rather than presenting it whole, as narrative—is to find oneself in difficulties at the start. Tate as critic has questioned the validity of the genre in Ezra Pound's Cantos and has rejected it in Hart Crane's The Bridge…. Yet Tate has followed his own advice only as a prose writer. In poetry, he has made his deepest, most artistically complex judgments on the past and the present, and has reached out toward the long poem in "Seasons of the Soul" and the unfinished terzinas, through exactly that lyric concentration on the self which, in theory, he questions.

The paradox deepens when one grasps the importance of action and narrative in Tate's philosophy...