Everything about Allen Tate totally explained
John Orley Allen Tate (
November 19,
1899 -
February 9,
1979) was an
American poet, essayist, and social commentator, and
Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 1943 - 1944.
Allen Tate was born near
Winchester, Kentucky the son of John Orley Tate, a businessman, and Eleanor Parke Custis Varnell. In
1916 and
1917 Tate studied the violin at the
Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.
Tate 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 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
Hart Crane, with whom he'd been exchanging correspondence for some time. During a summer visit with Warren in
Kentucky, he began a relationship with
Caroline Gordon, whom he 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 couldn't get along, and 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 and 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 while left in the care of a babysitter. A third son Benjamin was born in 1969.
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," which reveals many striking similarities--if not outright borrowings--to the poem "Ode to the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery" written by 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.
The
1930s found Tate back in
Tennessee working 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 the
fascist Seward Collins. Tate saw
The American Review as an organ for popularizing the work of the
Southern Agrarians, but he objected to Collins's open support of
Mussolini and
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 the knowledge of his mother's ancestral home 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 attended Vanderbilt together prior to collaborating at
The University of the South.
Tate died in
Nashville,
Tennessee. Tate's papers are at the Firestone Library at
Princeton University.
Selected works
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.
Further Information
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