Allen Tate

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Allen Tate (1899-1979), American poet, critic, biographer, and editor, was a founder and editor of the Fugitive. John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks were also part of the Fugitive group, and they and Tate formulated the New Critical poetic theories that arose out of the early work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Tate's earliest publications included the interpretative biographies Stonewall Jackson (1928) and Jefferson Davis (1929). His first collection of verse, Poems, 1928-31, was published in 1932. While teaching English literature at several colleges, including Princeton, he held the chair of poetry at the Library of Congress from 1934 to 1944. He edited the Sewanee Review from 1944 to 1946. After 1951 he taught English literature at the University of Minnesota and lectured extensively at universities throughout the country.

Tate's creative work always echoed his preoccupations as a southerner. His penetrating and original novel, The Fathers (1938), which is experimental in form and style and in many ways similar to some of William Faulkner's fiction, is a tortured exploration of the guilt and moral significance of Tate's heritage as a son of the Confederacy.

In typical modernist fashion, Tate was determined in his poetry to be "unromantic." His poetic masterpiece, the "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (1928), is an elegy characterized by the density of its imagery, irony, and irresolvable ambiguity. The conclusion of the "Ode" offers no simple solution to the problems it presents but does suggest that the Confederacy, and, by implication, all of mankind, was its own victim in the Civil War. Most of his other poems are "accomplished" examples of romantic irony within a narrow range of feeling. Their images are original and exhibit a great deal of formal dexterity, but the poems cannot compare in substance with the best work of Robert Penn Warren.

Poems, 1922-47 (1948) and Poems (1961) include most of Tate's verse. His career was largely sustained by the perception and intelligence of such critical works as Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (1936), On the Limits of Poetry (1948), and The Man of Letters in the Modern World (1955). His Collected Essays was published in 1959 and Essays of Four Decades in 1969.

Tate converted to Catholicism in 1950, and some of his writing reflected this. A former student of Tate's, Richard Margolis, wrote in the New Leader, "Like his faith, Tate's verse carried plenty of doctrinal punch along with a load of ambiguity; often at its center lurked a mystery not to be solved. One could say the same for the man."

Tate married the writer Caroline Gordon, and they collaborated on some works, including a collection of short stories, House of Fiction. They were divorced, but later remarried, and finally divorced a second time. Tate then married an ex-nun, Helen Heinz.

Tate moved to Monteagle, TN, in 1966, where he remained until his death in 1979. While in Tennessee, he spent his time writing and visiting with old friends from his alma mater Vanderbilt, as well as the University of the South. He also kept in touch with the Sewanee Review, although not directly involved with it. During his final years, he visited various college campuses, giving lectures on literature and politics. He also corresponded regularly with many famous literary friends, creating a wealth of personal papers.

Tate died in Nashville, TN, on Feb. 9, 1979. During his lifetime, he published 20 books and received many literary honors, including the Bollingen Prize for poetry.

Further Reading

Studies of Tate and his work include Willard B. Arnold, The Social Ideas of Allen Tate (1955); George Hemphill, Allen Tate (1964); the section on him in Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets, from the Puritans to the Present (1968); Walter Sullivan, Allen Tate: A Recollection (1988).

Quotes:

"Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values."

For those of a similar name, see Alan Tate (disambiguation).

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Allen Tate
Born	19 November 1899(1899-11-19) Winchester, Kentucky, USA
Died	9 February 1979 (aged 79) Nashville, Tennessee, USA
Occupation	Poet, essayist
Nationality	United States

John Orley Allen Tate (November 19, 1899 - February 9, 1979) was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1943 to 1944.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Writings 3 Bibliography 3.1 Poetry 3.2 Prose 4 References 5 External links

Biography

Tate was born near Winchester, Kentucky to John Orley Tate, a businessman, and Eleanor Parke Custis Varnell. In 1916 and 1917 Tate studied the violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.

He began attending Vanderbilt University in 1918, where he met fellow poet Robert Penn Warren. Warren and Tate were invited to join a group of young Southern poets under the leadership of John Crowe Ransom; the group were known as the Fugitive Poets and later as the Southern Agrarians. Tate contributed to the group's magazine The Fugitive and to the agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand published in 1930. Tate also joined Ransom to teach at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.

In 1924, Tate moved to New York City where he met poet Hart Crane, with whom he had been exchanging correspondence for some time. During a summer visit with Warren in Kentucky, he began a relationship with writer Caroline Gordon. They married in New York in May 1925. Their daughter Nancy was born in September.

He and Gordon were divorced in 1945 and remarried in 1946. Though devoted to one another for life, they could not get along and later divorced again.

Tate married the poet Isabella Gardner in the early fifties. While teaching at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, he met Helen Heinz, a nun enrolled in one of his courses, and began an affair with her. Gardner divorced Tate.

He married Heinz in 1966. They moved to Sewanee, Tennessee. In 1967 Tate became the father of twin sons, John and Michael. Michael died at eleven months from choking on a toy. A third son Benjamin was born in 1969.

Writings

In 1924, Tate began a four-year sojourn in New York City where he worked freelance for the The Nation, contributed to the Hound and Horn, Poetry magazine, and others. He worked as a janitor, and lived la vie boheme in Greenwich Village with Caroline Gordon, and when urban life proved too overwhelming, repaired to "Robber Rocks", a house in Patterson, New York, with friends Slater Brown and his wife Sue, Hart Crane, and Malcolm Cowley. He would, some years later, contribute to the conservative National Review as well.

1928 saw the publication of Tate's most famous poem, "Ode To the Confederate Dead", not to be confused with "Ode to the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery" written by American Civil War poet and South Carolina native, Henry Timrod. In 1928, Tate also published a biography Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier.

In 1929, Tate published a second biography Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall.

By the 1930s, Tate had returned to Tennessee, where he worked on social commentary influenced by his agrarian philosophy. In addition to his work on I'll Take My Stand, he published Who Owns America?, which was a conservative response to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. During this time, Tate also became the de facto associate editor of The American Review, which was published and edited by Seward Collins. Tate believed The American Review could popularize the work of the Southern Agrarians. He objected to Collins's open support of Fascists Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, and condemned fascism in an article in The New Republic in 1936.

In 1938 Tate published his only novel, The Fathers, which drew upon knowledge of his mother's ancestral home and family in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Tate was a poet-in-residence at Princeton University until 1942. He founded the Creative Writing program at Princeton, and mentored Richard Blackmur, John Berryman, and others. In 1942, Tate assisted novelist and friend Andrew Lytle in transforming The Sewanee Review, America's oldest literary quarterly, from a modest journal into one of the most prestigious in the nation. Tate and Lytle had attended Vanderbilt together prior to collaborating at The University of the South.

In 1950, Tate converted to Roman Catholicism.^[1]

Tate died in Nashville, Tennessee. His papers are collected at the Firestone Library at Princeton University.

Bibliography

Poetry Poems, 1928-1931, 1932. The Mediterranean and Other Poems, 1936. Selected Poems, 1937. The Winter Sea, 1944. Poems, 1920-1945, 1947. Poems, 1922-1947, 1948. Two Conceits for the Eye to Sing, If Possible, 1950. Poems, 1960. Poems, 1961. Collected Poems, 1970. The Swimmers and Other Selected Poems, 1970.

Prose Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier, 1928. Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall, 1929. Robert E. Lee, 1932. Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas, 1936. The Fathers, 1938. Reason in Madness, 1941. On the Limits of Poetry: Selected Essays, 1928-1948, 1948. The Hovering Fly, 1949. The Forlorn Demon, 1953. The Man of Letters in the Modern World, 1955. Collected Essays, 1959. Essays of Four Decades, 1969. Memoirs and Opinions, 1926-1974, 1975.

References

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Allen Tate

• "Poet Laureate Timeline: 1953-1960". Library of Congress. 2008. http://www.loc.gov/poetry/laureate.html. Retrieved 2008-12-19. 

1. ^ Henry L. Carrigan, Jr. "Three Catholic Writers of the South", THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY, 26 February 1986, 216-7

External links

• The Allen Tate Papers at Washington University in St. Louis

v • d • e Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress Joseph Auslander (1937) · Allen Tate (1943) · Robert Penn Warren (1944) · Louise Bogan (1945) · Karl Shapiro (1946) · Robert Lowell (1947) · Léonie Adams (1948) · Elizabeth Bishop (1949) · Conrad Aiken (1950) · William Carlos Williams (1952) · Randall Jarrell (1956) · Robert Frost (1958) · Richard Eberhart (1959) · Louis Untermeyer (1961) · Howard Nemerov (1963) · Reed Whittemore (1964) · Stephen Spender (1965) · James Dickey (1966) · William Jay Smith (1968) · William Stafford (1970) · Josephine Jacobsen (1971) · Daniel Hoffman (1973) · Stanley Kunitz (1974) · Robert Hayden (1976) · William Meredith (1978) · Maxine Kumin (1981) · Anthony Hecht (1982) · Reed Whittemore (1984) · Robert Fitzgerald (1984) · Gwendolyn Brooks (1985) · Robert Penn Warren (1986) · Richard Wilbur (1987) · Howard Nemerov (1988) · Mark Strand (1990) · Joseph Brodsky (1991) · Mona Van Duyn (1992) · Rita Dove (1993) · Robert Hass (1995) · Robert Pinsky (1997) · Rita Dove / Louise Glück / W. S. Merwin (1999) · Stanley Kunitz (2000) · Billy Collins (2001) · Louise Glück (2003) · Ted Kooser (2004) · Donald Hall (2006) · Charles Simic (2007) · Kay Ryan (2008)  · Kay Ryan (2009)

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