For readers of a certain age—I have in mind those who, like myself, first came to modern poetry (and to the criticism written to defend and elucidate it) in the years just after the Second World War—the publication of Allen Tate's "Collected poems 1919–1976" … is an event that stirs a good many memories and associations…. [In the] first years after the war Mr. Tate already seemed a venerable survivor of several lost worlds. The Nashville of the Fugitives, the New York of the young Malcolm Cowley and Kenneth Burke and E. E. Cummings, like the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Ford Madox Ford, had receded into the mists of literary legend….

[Today] the battles of the New Criticism and the literary and political divisions they engendered are as distant from us as the Nashville of the Fugitives. They too evoke yet another lost world….

Throughout [the complex...