THE JOHNS HOPKINS NIVERSITY PRESS Several Thousand Books Author(s): Allen Tate Source: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 75, No. 3 (Summer, 1967), pp. 377-384 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27541522 Accessed: 14-10-2018 21:35 UTC STOR Is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and bulld upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive, We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor-org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about |stor-org/terms eF The Tohns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and fi extend seuss te The Seuance Review B 4 ‘hi content dovnload froma 132.176.2512 Sm, 14 Qct2018 2135322 UTC “Alluse subjectto tps: sont tor ngsJR SEVERAL THOUSAND BOOKS* By ALLEN TATE Mr. President, Members of the Faculty, Members of the Gradu- ating Classes, and Ladies and Gentlemen: am honored to have been given the privilege of speaking to I you this evening. But the occasion itself, I have sometimes thought, might be more honored in the breach than the ob- servance. Is there anybody wise enough to tell people who are about to go out into the world what they ought to do? Not knowing what you ougit to do, I cannot conform to the tra- ditions of the Commencement and tell you how to do it, I could say that the future is in your hands, that the hands are strong, that your courage is equal to the task, I could thus produce an imitation of the Ciceronian exordium and peroration, and while I ‘was producing it you would think about something else—whether your family got here with the car to drive you home; whether the girl you met yesterday evening at the dance has another boy friend; whether, if you are almost a Ph.D., you will get that grant from the Ford Foundation, These are the things you will think about this evening, regardless of what I say. 1 do not doubt your courage, nor do I question the strength of your hands. Yet one may reasonably doubt that your hands will be given the ‘opportunity to grasp what, in those happier times that for you never existed, you would want them to grasp. It has been frequently said that the mode of modern poetry is “Commencement Address, University of Minnesota, March 18, 1967. ‘his content downloaded fram 132 174.2512 on Sim, 4 Oct 2018 21:3522 UTC ‘Aluse subject ps Jabot star orghenas378 SEVERAL THOUSAND BOOKS the mode of prophecy, a vision of the end of all things. This is obvious the moment we evoke the names of Rilke, Valéry, Mon- tale, Yeats, Eliot. If the mode of modern poetry is prophecy, the rhetorical mode of prophecy itself is hyperbole, We fore- see a future dominated and perhaps eventually destroyed by the evils, with no redemptive power of any good, of our own time. Tam therefore about to preach a sermon; and because I am not properly ordained for this office, I shall adopt not a holy but a secular text, which is as follows: The price the man of today has paid for his increase in power is, it should seem, an appalling superficiality in deal- ing with the low of his own nature, This sentence was written by the late Irving Babbitt in 1919. I shall not refer to it again but rather offer you three characters modelled after Theophrastus, one living, the two others dead, ee ee Every September, almost a century ago, Charles Eliot Norton greeted the first meeting of his classes at Harvard with a snobbish irony that we today might have to take literally, He is reported to have said: “I suppose that nobody in this room has ever seen a gentleman.” The New England scholar, if rumor be reliable, hhas not been famous for humility. I surmise that Norton was inviting the students to look at one gentleman, perhaps the last, before the species became extinct. I intend no irony whatever when I say that nobody in this auditorium, either you out there of ‘we up here, has ever seen an educated person, I may not be the ‘oldest member of the faculty on this platform. Allow me the rhetorical privilege of believing that I am. So it is possible that I may have seen, some fifty to sixty years ago, one or two edu- cated men, (At that time it was not necessary to consider whether there were educated women.) I have not seen an educated man since, and I fear that you will never see one, ‘his content downloaded fram 132 174.2512 on Sim, 4 Oct 2018 21:3522 UTC ‘Aluse subject ps Jabot star orghenas