Tension in Poetry
Allen Tate
Lecture notes by S. Sreekumar
Allen Tate was a poet, teacher, novelist, and a
leading exponent of New Criticism. He was one of the youngest New Critics who
belonged to the Southern group of American critics.
Tate gives importance to the formal qualities of a work of art.
Reactionary Essays on Poetry, Ideas, and Reason in Madness are his well-known collections of Essays and reviews. As a new critic, Tate has coined the term ‘tension’ to describe what he calls ‘the common quality’ of ‘good poetry’@
‘Tension in Poetry’ is taken from Tate`s The Man of Letters in the Modern World, Selected Essays. The essay deals with tension as the life of a poem. It reveals Tate’s view that a good poem is one in which the extension and the intension are in a state of tension. It is a combination of both extensive or denotative and intensive or connotative meanings.
