"Poetry seems to come out of the Hebraic Christian tradition of humanism," he explains. "The humanistic tradition is destroyed in the big, industrial technological civilizations. In certain islands, the great universities like Harvard and certain Southern universities, we still have it, but it's not the prevailing culture any longer. In that sense, the anthology was a defense of poetry."

Tate's artistic demands on himself are even more stringent than his social demands. His early training was rigorous. "In his Advanced Composition class. Mr. Ransom would assign all of Shakespeare's sonnets for us to study," Tate remembers. "Then we'd have to write a Shakespearean sonnet of our own, then an Italian sonnet, and so on."

Poetic models continued to figure in Tate's development for some time. "I didn't read any of T.S. Eliot till 1920," he explains, "though I'd read some of Pound. When I read Eliot, I couldn't write anything for a long time. Critics have pointed out that I'd written Eliotic poems before I read Eliot. That often happens in a certain period; people begin to do the same thing independently. But Eliot was so much more mature, you see, and I was just a boy. He rather overwhelmed me. So for awhile, I had to avoid that sort of influence.

"But we have to take off from somebody. A completely original poet would be an idiot. I had a young student at Minnesota years ago whom I asked, 'What poets do you read?' He answered, 'I don't read anybody, because I don't want to be influenced.'"

Although Tate's early work can, on occasion, be derivative or hesitant ("It begins in uncertainty," said one critic, "and attains meaning only during composition"), his more mature poems are unquestionably written in his own voice--elegant, allusive, densely packed like semi-precious stones inside a glass paperweight. His later poems show a solidity, a self-confidence, not always removed from stubborness.

"It isn't really a question of not wanting to be part of a new mode of poetry," he explains, examining himself beside Warren. Lowell, and Berryman. "I just couldn't do it. That highly personal, confessional, loose form; Mr. Warren, particularly. Well, of course, all poetry is personal. T.S. Eliot was highly personal, but not in any direct sense. But Robert Lowell is personal in a very direct and spontaneous way; he's sort of making a public confession. I always think the confession should be in the confessional, should be private."

Since Tate never raises his voice or flaunts his feelings, a superficial reading of his poems can be bewildering, if not discouraging. A careful reading offers the rewards of getting to know someone who is terribly shy, but very wise.

"It seems to me that formal versification is absolutely necessary to poetry," he observes, "because it's the assurance to the reader that the poet is at least in temporary command of the disorder out there and of the disorder inside himself. Without that order, poetry begins to go off in all directions at once; it dissolves.

"Formal versification is not artificial, any more than our walking down the street taking the same step is artificial. Formal versification is as fundamental as any other rhythm that the whole human organism participates in."

If reading Tate's poems we are struck first by the formality of the versification, listening to them, we finally begin to feel the inner rhythm, the naturalness of it, in spite of, no because of, the great care with which it was planned.

For all their intricacies, the poems, as Tate reads them, are as accessible as music: the ironic knell of "Jubilo," the vaguely erotic syncopation of "Shadow and Shade," the echoes of "The Swimmers" which seem to fall in terzarima without apparent effort.

Later, when we read them over to ourselves we may stumble again over the epigraphs from Dante, the classical allusions, the dramatic connections only hinted at, not explained. But even then, the sound of the poems read aloud comes back to us, as natural as breathing and as necessary as song.