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Allen Tate was a poet, teacher, novelist, and a leading exponent of New Criticism. He was
one of the youngest New Critics. He belonged to the Southern grOup of American critics. . He gives
importance to the formal qualities of a work of ar Reactionary)Essays on Poetry, ldeas,
lale
and Reason in Madness are well_knoyn collections of Èssays and reviews by Tate. As a new
critig Tate has coined thetermfensiono describe what he calls "he common quality of goog
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'sview
that a good poem is one in which the extension and the intension are in a state of tension. In other
words, a good poem is a combination of both extensive or denotative and intensive or connotative
meanings.
The esay is divided into 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 The
poem was much appreciated when it was published in 1927 But Tate says that the poem did not
make it clear how the judicial execution of two migrantsSacco and Vanzetti-has something to
do with the rotting of crops and the general aricheas in Massachusetts, The poem is an example for
the fallacy of communication in poetry because the poem isobscurefor those who do not share the
feelings of the poet or her contemporaries.
Another example of such obscurity is found in the poem The Vine" by James
language here appeals to an affective (emotional) state. It does not have coherent Thonmson.
meaning
The
either
literal or implied. The more closely one,examines the lyric, the more obscure it
imagery does not add anything to the general-idea of the poeme becomes. The
Jhe Vhe
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.

One more 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 savs that both the poems are failures. (The Ving> is a failure in
ailure in connotation. { Denotation= the act of denotation. 'Hymn: To Light'
denoting. The primary, literal,.r.
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explicit meaning of aphrase, or symbol. The word is contrasted with connotation. "The building is
on fire'fire' is used to denote external conflagration. My heart is on fire'fire' does not
mean external conflagration. The word connotes excitement).
The Vinefailure in denotation. "The language of the poem lacks objective content. Take "music
nd 'song'. The context does not allow us to apprehendthe terms in extension; that is 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 song and the feast of love is music. Nothing
willchange. Thus the poem is mneaningless.
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 ll. The group will become unified
only if we forget the denotative meanings of them.
Tate calls these poems absurd. This is because good poetry is aunity 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 diserimination here are notY
deductive powers but total human powers: They have special application to poetry which is a
single experience of medium. Thus these kinds of poetry suffer from the fallacy of
communication.

Part II defines tension inpoetry and explains its importance.

Definition of Tension in Poetry
Tate has invented the term Tension by chopping off the prefixes/"in" and "ex from the two
terms intension" and extension". Here, cxtension refers to extensive or logical or denotative
meaning in poetry. On the othe hand, ("intension') refers to the intensive or connotative or
suggestive meaning of poetry. A successful poem is the one in which these two meanings are in a
state of tension. Tate asserts that tension is the life of thepoem.
Tate says that the meanings selected by the readers along the line between the extremes of
intension and extension vary according to the personal interest.
fhe Platonis will tend to stay very close tof the extension end./He might decide that
Marvell'sTo His CoyMistress recommends mmoral behavior 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 the intensive meaning too. These meaning are sensuality (extensive) and asceticism
or spirituality (intensive).
Tate gives another example. He quotes from Donne's love lyric A Valediction:
Then Mourning.
Forbidding Tate quotes the lines which contain the gold conceit. Here, the souls of
the lovers and their unity are compaed with the uniqueness of gold. Soul is non-spatial. It is
cOntradicted with a spatial image-that of gold. However, the denotation of the gold contains the
enrich each other.
Tuli meaning of the passage. Extension and intension are one here. And they
Tate gives us many other examples from the Metaphysicals, Symbolists and Shakespeare to
Prove his point. He says that these lines can be used astouchstones)in the Arnoldian sens.
Part lll gives the final example of the significance of tension. thee line - som
in the third part of his essay, Tate gives a cetfrom The Divine Comedy' by
Dante. (1265-1321).The tercet taken from Inferno provides an excellent example of tension.
Dante mests them in the Second Circle of
he context: Paolo and Francsc were illicit lovers. wind.
iti.When Dante sees them they are whirling in a high The wind is the symbol ofius When
born:
tarcesca speaks to the poet, the wind dies down. She tells him where she was

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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 of these lines is that she was born ip'a fÕwn that is on the bank of the Sea
shore, where the river Po' falls along with the tributaries,/But the metaphorical meaning is more
than just this description of the place. The tributaries are conceived to be chasing the Po down to
the sea. Francesca has told Dante where she lives, in the most direct language. But she has told him
more than that. She fuses herself with the river Po where she was borm. We see the pursued river as
Francesca in hell. The river is pursued by tributaries. Francesca is pursued by lovers, pursued by
lust (symbolized as wind). 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 Dante's 'Inferno' the damned are incarnations of theit sin.
The winds of lust is both a visual image as well as an auditory image. Francesca is heard by the
poet when the hissing sound of the wind dies down. After the wind has abated we hear in the
silence the susurration (continuous whispering sound) of the descending Po. The river becomes a
visual and auditory image. Francesca becomes her sin (as stated carlier). Her sin is embodied in the
image. Thus we are entitled to say that is a sin that we can both hear and see. Here both the
intension and extension becomes one. Tate quotes these lines as a supreme example of tension in
poctry. New critics have popularized certain terms and concepts in criticism. T S. Eliot made
popular terms like Objective Correlative', Unification of sensibility', and dissociation of
sensibility'. A. Richards popularized terms like pseudo-statement", Connotation and
Sdenotation'. Wimsatt and Beardsley use terms like intentional fallacy' and 'affective
fallacy', Cleanth Brooks uses terms like'ionyand paradox. These terms have enriched English
criticism during the twentieth century.
Justice Denied in Massachusetts' (1927)This poem explained the story of two Italian
immigrants who 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
unethical justice system because the govemor refused many pleas concerning any kind of appeal.
Millay, herself, was one of the
people who h¡d made a plea în their defense. Her requests were also
denied and she strongly felt that the men didn't get a fair public hearing leftists. they were
immigrants, they were poor, and because many of their advocates were women orbecause
Literary Criticism "Tension in poetry" Allen Tate (1899-1979)
Introduction :-The rise of New Criticism:
The new criticism which was a school of criticism
twentieth century in America and England. It put the theory offlourished during the first half of the
inspiration off the gear. It assumes a
close and causative relationship between society and
It is the stress on textual criticism which has made it literature and between society and the writer.
new. Otherwise there is nothing new in it. It
had its origin in the writings of T. E. Hulme; but it is now
term was first used by J. E. Spingam. Its chief exponents inmainly an American movement. The
Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Richard Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, America are Kenneth Burke, John
etc. In England its leading
representatives are I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, William Empson, etc.
was the reaction against the external school of criticism
historical and biographical aspects of a text. It is an internal school which focuses on sociological,
of criticism. Different New
critics of poetry answered differently in response to the question... "What is poetic iu poetry? To
the new critics poetic poetry is "its ability to attract attention towards
itsel."

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