"Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them"
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Tate is drawing a hard border around what he thinks poetry is for: not to tidy up experience, but to keep us inside its irresolvable pressures without lying about them. The key phrase is "logically resolved". He grants reason its jurisdiction: we can name the conflict, diagram it, even argue it persuasively. Then he undercuts the Enlightenment fantasy that articulation equals cure. Knowing the shape of the trap does not spring it.
The intent is polemical, and it arrives with a distinctly mid-century suspicion of both sentimental uplift and rationalist problem-solving. Tate, a central figure among the Southern Agrarians and the New Critics, is speaking from a culture and a critical movement that prized complexity, paradox, and the poem as a self-contained arena where competing truths can coexist. His "serious poetry" is also a gatekeeping category: an implicit swipe at verse that behaves like journalism, therapy, propaganda, or moral instruction. If the poem is offering solutions, he implies, it is probably offering simplifications.
Subtext: modern life keeps promising resolution (through politics, science, technique, self-help), yet the most durable human conflicts persist: duty versus desire, faith versus doubt, freedom versus belonging, mortality versus meaning. Tate isn't anti-reason; he is anti-consolation-by-reason. Poetry, in his view, earns its seriousness by staging those conflicts in language that can hold contradiction without forcing it into a conclusion. That is why the line lands: it flatters our intelligence, then refuses to let intelligence pretend it has finished the job.
The intent is polemical, and it arrives with a distinctly mid-century suspicion of both sentimental uplift and rationalist problem-solving. Tate, a central figure among the Southern Agrarians and the New Critics, is speaking from a culture and a critical movement that prized complexity, paradox, and the poem as a self-contained arena where competing truths can coexist. His "serious poetry" is also a gatekeeping category: an implicit swipe at verse that behaves like journalism, therapy, propaganda, or moral instruction. If the poem is offering solutions, he implies, it is probably offering simplifications.
Subtext: modern life keeps promising resolution (through politics, science, technique, self-help), yet the most durable human conflicts persist: duty versus desire, faith versus doubt, freedom versus belonging, mortality versus meaning. Tate isn't anti-reason; he is anti-consolation-by-reason. Poetry, in his view, earns its seriousness by staging those conflicts in language that can hold contradiction without forcing it into a conclusion. That is why the line lands: it flatters our intelligence, then refuses to let intelligence pretend it has finished the job.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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