Most readers have long known that Tate has produced some of the finest poetry of his generation. This is true even of unsympathetic readers inclined to complain that the corpus is uneven in quality (as it is) and unfulfilled in promise (as it is not). Most consider the single novel [The Fathers] a distinguished achievement, though few have recognized that it constitutes the great watershed in Tate's life as an artist, bringing into significant conjunction the insights, tendencies, and techniques of his early work and anticipating the masterworks that began to appear after 1940. As for criticism, no one—at least no one since the appearance of Essays of Four Decades in 1969—has doubted that in an age of critics Tate stands with the half dozen best and most influential. Now it is possible to regard the whole as a series of forays into the knowledge essential to our...