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. Scarcely 20 years had passed since the appearance of his first books in 1928—the year of both "Mr. Pope and Other Poems" and "Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier"—yet in those 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….

It seemed slightly incredible … that this embattled exponent...