''Essays of Four Decades'' is a 1967 essay collection by the American writer

Allen Tate John Orley Allen Tate (November 19, 1899 – February 9, 1979), known professionally as Allen Tate, was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and poet laureate from 1943 to 1944. Among his best known works are the poems " Ode to th ...

. It is divided into five sections. The first consists on texts about modern poetry in general. The second focuses on individual writers, including

John Donne John Donne ( ; 1571 or 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet, scholar, soldier and secretary born into a recusant family, who later became a clergy, cleric in the Church of England. Under Royal Patronage, he was made Dean of St Paul's, D ...

Emily Dickinson Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Little-known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massac ...

John Keats John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tub ...

W. B. Yeats William Butler Yeats (, 13 June 186528 January 1939), popularly known as W. B. Yeats, was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer, and literary critic who was one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the ...

Hart Crane Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was an American poet. Inspired by the Romantics and his fellow Modernists, Crane wrote highly stylized poetry, often noted for its complexity. His collection '' White Buildings'' (1926), feat ...

Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an List of poets from the United States, American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Ita ...

and

Herbert Read Sir Herbert Edward Read, (; 4 December 1893 – 12 June 1968) was an English art historian, poet, literary critic and philosopher, best known for numerous books on art, which included influential volumes on the role of art in education. Read wa ...

. The third consists of essays about imagination and critical reception. The fourth is about the

Southern United States The Southern United States (sometimes Dixie, also referred to as the Southern States, the American South, the Southland, Dixieland, or simply the South) is List of regions of the United States, census regions defined by the United States Cens ...

. The fifth consists of prefaces to some of Tate's previous books.

The book consists of the following texts. I * "The Man of Letters in the Modern World" * "To Whom Is the Poet Responsible?" * "Is Literary Criticism Possible?" * "The Function of the Critical Quarterly" * "Tension in Poetry" * "Literature as Knowledge" * "The Hovering Fly" * "Techniques of Fiction" * "Miss Emily and the Bibliographer" * "Understanding Modern Poetry" * "A Note on Critical 'Autotelism'" * "Three Types of Poetry" * "The Present Function of Criticism" * "Modern Poetry" * "Poetry Modern and Unmodern" II * "A Note on Donne" * "The Point of Dying: Donne's 'Virtuous Men'" * "A Note on Elizabethan Satire" * "A Reading of Keats" * "Emily Dickinson" * "Yeats's Romanticism" * "Hart Crane" * "Crane: The Poet as Hero" * "Hardy's Philosophic Metaphors" * "Edwin Arlington Robinson" * "John Peale Bishop" * "MacLeish's ''Conquistador''" * "Ezra Pound" * "Herbert Read" III * "Our Cousin, Mr. Poe" * "The Angelic Imagination" * "The Symbolic Imagination" * "The Unilateral Imagination; Or, I, too, Dislike It" * "T. S. Eliot's ''Ash Wednesday''" * "Longinus and the New Criticism" * "Johnson on the Metaphysical Poets" * "Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Prize" IV * "The Profession of Letters in the South" * "The New Provincialism" * "What Is a Traditional Society?" * "Religion and the Old South" * "A Southern Mode of the Imagination" * "Narcissus as Narcissus" V :Prefaces: * To ''Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas'' * To ''Reason in Madness'' * To ''On the Limits of Poetry'' * To ''The Forlorn Demon'' * To ''The Man of Letters in the Modern World''

References

{{Allen Tate 1967 non-fiction books Books by Allen Tate American essay collections Swallow Press books Books of literary criticism Books about writers Books about the Southern United States

Contents

References