Books: The Thirty-Year War

COLLECTED ESSAYS (578 pp.)—Allen Tate—Swallow ($6).

In presenting his credentials as an essayist, Poet-Critic Allen Tate, 60, makes a mock show of inadequacy. He laments his failure to do research, bewails his faulty memory, confesses that, although he has been writing it for 30 years, he can neither define literary criticism nor guess its aims. Yet Tate confidently jabs his critical stiletto into a wide range of men and institutions, from Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson ("the light-bearer who could see nothing but light, and was fearfully blind") to criticism itself (it "is in at least one respect like a mule: it cannot reproduce itself, though, like a mule, it is capable of trying").

Thought v. Being. Many of the 42 essays are intelligent, imaginative analyses of such literary greats as Emily Dickinson, Poe, T. S. Eliot, Dostoevsky and John Donne. But Tate's concern is with life as well as literature, and his theme is the "deep illness of the modern mind." The villain, says Tate, was French Philosopher Rene Descartes, whose triumphant discovery of at least one ultimate certainty ("I think, therefore I am") is responsible for dividing man against himself by isolating thought from total being. Today's battle is waged "between the dehumanized society of secularism, which imitates Descartes' mechanical nature, and the eternal society of the communion of the human spirit."

In Tate's world, a politician who uses immoral methods unconsciously acts on the assumption that society is a machine. So do bankers, butchers and bartenders—everyone who exhibits the "secularism of the swarm" and pursues purely materialist goals. This drift away from a moral center can be clearly seen in the totalitarian states, and is spreading through the free world, where "so much of democratic social theory reaches us in the language of 'drive,' 'stimulus' and 'response.' " For these words Tate would substitute, respectively, "end," "choice" and "discrimination," for "it is by means of discrimination, through choice, towards an end, that the general intelligence acts."