Tension in Poetry by Allen Tate--Theory

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.    

The essay has three parts.

Part 1 deals with the fallacy of communication in poetry.

Part II defines tension in poetry and explains its importance.

Part III gives the final example of the significance of tension. 

Part I—Fallacy of Communication

 

Mass language, says Tate, is the medium of communication. Tate illustrates the point with some examples. The first example is “Justice Denied in Massachusetts,” a poem by Miss Millay^$ [see notes]. 

 

The poem received much attention at its publication in 1927. But Tate says that the poem did not clarify how the judicial execution of two migrants—Sacco and Vanzetti—has something to do with the rotting of crops and the general aridness in Massachusetts. The poem is an example of the fallacy of communication in poetry because it is obscure. The poem makes sense only for those who share the feelings of the poet or her contemporaries. 

 

Another example of obscurity is found in the poem “The Vine” by James Thomson. The language here appeals to an affective (emotional) state. It does not have a coherent literal or implied meaning. The more closely one examines the lyric, the more obscure it becomes. The imagery does not add anything to the general idea of the poem.

The wine of love is music             

And the feast of love is song        

When love sits down to banquet

Love sits long

Sits long and rises drunken

But not with the feast and the wine

He reeleth with his own heart

That great rich vine.

Another example is Cowley’s ‘Hymn: To Light.’

 

The violet, springs little Infant, stands,

Girt in thy purple Swaddling – bands:

On the fair Tulip thou dost dote;

Thou cloathst it in a gay and party-colored Coat.

Tate says that both poems are failures. ‘The Vine’ is a failure in denotation. ‘Hymn: To Light’ is a failure in connotation. 

[Denotation= the act of denoting. The primary, literal, or explicit meaning of a phrase or symbol. The word is a contrast to connotation. “The building is on fire’—‘fire’ is used to denote external conflagration. “ My heart is on fire’—‘fire’ does not mean external fire. The word connotes excitement].

The Vine is a failure in denotation. “The language of the poem lacks objective content. Take music and song. The context does not allow us to apprehend the terms in extension. There is no reference to objects that we may distinguish as ‘music’ and ‘song’. According to Tate, we can even revert the idea and say that the wine of love is a song and the feast of love is music. Nothing will change. Thus the poem is meaningless.

 

‘Hymn: To Light ’is a failure in connotation. The connotations of violet, swaddling bands, and light (represented by the pronoun ‘thou’) give us a group of images. We can appreciate them only if we forget the denotative meanings of the terms. The poet uses violets, diapers, and light without referring to the denotative aspects at all. The group will become unified if we forget the denotative meanings of them.

Tate calls these poems absurd because good poetry is a unity of all the meanings from the furthest extremes of intension and extension. “The reader’s recognition of the action of this unified meaning is the gift of experience, culture, and humanism. The powers of discrimination here are not deductive powers but total human powers”. They apply to poetry, a single experience of the medium. Thus these kinds of poetry suffer from the fallacy of communication. 

Part II defines the term and explains its importance.

 

 

Definition of Tension in Poetry

 

 

Tate has invented the term by chopping off the prefixes in and ex from intension and extension. Extension refers to extensive or logical, or denotative meaning in poetry. On the other hand, intension refers to the intensive or connotative meaning of poetry. A successful poem is one in which these two meanings are in a state of tension. Tate asserts that it is the life of the poem.

• • Tate says that the meanings selected by the readers vary according to personal interests. The selection is always between the extremes of intension and extension.  
  • The Platonist will tend to stay very close to the extension end. He might decide that Marvell`s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ recommends immoral behaviour to young men. It is, of course, one ‘true’ meaning of the poem.
  • However, the full tension of the poem will not allow the readers to entertain it exclusively. The poem has an intensive meaning too. These meanings are sensuality (extensive) and asceticism or spirituality (intensive).  

Then Tate gives another example. He quotes from Donne`s love lyric,  A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. Tate quotes the lines which contain the gold conceit. Here, the poet compares the souls of the lovers and their unity with the uniqueness of gold. The soul is non-spatial. The poet uses a spatial image (that of gold) to contradict it. However, the denotation of the gold contains the full meaning of the passage. Extension and intension are one here and enrich each other. Tate gives us many other examples from the Metaphysicals, Symbolists, and Shakespeare to prove his point. He says that these lines can be used as ‘touchstones’ in the Arnoldian sense.

Part III gives the final example of the significance of tension. 

 

In the third part of his essay, Tate takes a tercet from The Divine Comedy (by Dante 1265-1321). 

 

The tercet from Inferno provides an excellent example of tension.

 

The context:  Paolo and Francesca were illicit lovers. Dante meets them in the Second Circle of hell. They are whirling in a high wind. The wind is the symbol of lust. When Francesca speaks to the poet, the wind dies down. She tells him where she was born:

 

The town where I was born sits on the shore,

Whither the Po descends to be at peace,

Together with the streams that follow him.

 

Here the literal meaning is that she was born in a town on the Sea-shore. Here the river Po falls along with the tributaries. But the metaphor is more than just the description of the place. Dante pictures the streams of the river as chasing the Po down to the sea. Francesca has told Dante where she lives using lucid language but has told him more than that. She fuses herself with the river Po where she was born. 

 

We see the pursued river as Francesca in hell. Tributaries pursue the river. Similarly, lovers follow Francesca. Lust (symbolized as wind) follows her. 

 

The tributaries that pursue a river become one with the river as they flow into it. Similarly, Francesca has become one with her lovers, her lust. She has become absorbed by the sin of lust—she becomes the sin. In the Inferno, the damned are incarnations of their sins.

 

The wind of lust is an image. It is a visual as well as an auditory image. Francesca is heard by the poet when the hissing sound of the wind dies down. After the wind abates, we hear the susurration (continuous whispering sound) of the descending Po. Thus we see and hear the sin. Both intension and extension become one. Tate quotes these lines as a supreme example of tension in poetry.

NOTES

 

@ New critics popularized many terms and concepts in criticism. Eliot popularized  Objective Correlative, Unification of sensibility, and dissociation of sensibility.  

 I. A. Richards popularized terms like pseudo-statement, Connotation, and denotation. Wimsatt and Beardsley used intentional fallacy and affective fallacy. 

Cleanth Brooks used terms like irony and paradox. These terms have enriched English criticism during the twentieth century. 

 Justice Denied in Massachusetts (1927)

 This poem narrates the story of two Italian immigrants. They were convicted of robbery and murder and shortly after executed for their crimes in Boston in 1927. 

Many believed that the men were innocent and that they just fell victim to the justice system because the governor refused many pleas concerning any appeal. Millay, herself, was one of the people who had made a plea in their defense. She strongly felt that the men didn't get a fair public hearing because they were immigrants. They were poor, and many of their advocates were women or leftists.

 

This summary is purely for scholarly purposes.

 Dr. S. Sreekumar