John Orley Allen Tate (November 19, 1899 – February 9, 1979), known professionally as Allen Tate, was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and poet laureate from 1943 to 1944. Among his best known works are the poems "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (1928) and "The Mediterranean" (1933), and his only novel The Fathers (1938). He is associated with New Criticism, the Fugitives and the Southern Agrarians.
Life
Early years Tate was born near Winchester, Kentucky, to John Orley Tate, a Kentucky businessman and Eleanor Parke Custis Varnell from Virginia. On the Bogan side of her grandmother's family, Eleanor Varnell was a distant relative of George Washington; she left Tate a copper luster pitcher that Washington had ordered from London for his sister.
In 1916 and 1917 Tate studied the violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.
College and the Fugitives Tate entered Vanderbilt University in 1918. He was the first undergraduate to be invited to join a group of men who met regularly to read and discuss their poetry: they included John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson on the faculty; James M. Frank, a prominent Nashville businessman who hosted the meetings; and Sidney Mttron Hirsch, a mystic and playwright, who presided. Tate graduated Vanderbilt in 1922 with a B.A. magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.
In 1922, the group began publishing a poetry magazine named The Fugitive, so the group was known as the Fugitives. Tate took along a younger friend to some meetings, sophomore Robert Penn Warren, who was invited to become a member in 1923. The aim of the group, according to the critic J. A. Bryant, was "to demonstrate that a group of southerners could produce important work in the medium [of poetry], devoid of sentimentality and carefully crafted," and they wrote in the formalist tradition that valued the skillful use of meter and rhyme.
When Robert Penn Warren left Southwestern College to accept a position at Louisiana State University, he recommended Tate to replace him. Tate accepted the position, and spent 1934 through 1936 there as lecturer in English.
1920s Tate made his debut as a critic in the weekly book page Davidson edited for the Nashville Tennessean, publishing 29 reviews there during 1924. The fifth book he reviewed was An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes, edited by Newman Ivey White and Walter Clinton Jackson--"the first significant attempt" by "white critics to do justice to Negro literature in America." He faulted the editors' standards of "refinement" and "taste." "This of Claude McKay: 'Some of his poems are too erotic for good taste and conventional morality.' Whose good taste and whose morality?" It was easy "to understand why they overlooked altogether the work of Jean Toomer. Toomer is the finest Negro literary artist that has yet appeared in the American scene, but he is interested in the interior of Negro life, not in the pressure of American culture on the Negro."
In 1924, Tate moved to New York City where he met poet Hart Crane, with whom he had been corresponding for some time. Over a four-year period, Tate worked freelance for The Nation, and contributed to the Hound & Horn, Poetry magazine, and others. To make ends meet, he worked as a janitor.
During a summer visit with the poet Robert Penn Warren in Kentucky, he began a relationship with writer Caroline Gordon. The two lived together in Greenwich Village, but moved with Crane to a house in Patterson, New York, near "Robber Rocks," the home of friends Slater Brown and Sue Brown. Tate married Gordon in New York in May 1925. Their daughter Nancy was born in September. In 1928, along with other New York City friends, Tate went to Europe. In London, he visited with T. S. Eliot, whose poetry and criticism he greatly admired, and he also visited Paris.
In 1928, Tate published his first book of poetry, Mr. Pope and Other Poems, which contained his most famous poem, "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (not to be confused with "Ode to the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery" by the poet Henry Timrod). That same year, Tate also published the biography Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier. Later he became tired of the "Ode."
Just before leaving for Europe in 1928, Tate described himself to John Gould Fletcher as "an enforced atheist".Thomas A. Underwood, Allen Tate: Orphan of the South, Princeton University Press, p. 154. He later told Fletcher, "I am an atheist, but a religious one — which means that there is no organization for my religion." He regarded secular attempts to develop a system of thought for the modern world as misguided. "Only God," he insisted, "can give the affair a genuine purpose."Underwood, Allen Tate, p. 157. In his essay "The Fallacy of Humanism" (1929), Tate criticized the humanists of his time for creating a value system without investing it with any identifiable source of authority. "Religion is the only technique for the validation of values," he wrote.Underwood, Allen Tate, p. 155 Although he was attracted to Roman Catholicism, he deferred converting. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. observes that Tate may have waited "because he realized that for him at this time it would be only a strategy, an intellectual act".Louis D. Rubin, Jr., The Wary Fugitives: Four Poets and the South, Louisiana State University Press, 1978, p. 125.
In 1929, Tate published a second biography, Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall.
1930s After two years abroad, the Tates returned to the United States in 1930. During two months in New York, Tate secured a publisher for a symposium on the South and agrarianism that he and Ransom, Davidson, Andrew Lytle, and others had been planning. In Tennessee, the Tates took up residence at Benfolly in Clarksville, Tennessee| With an antebellum mansion with a 185-acre estate attached. Allen's brother Ben Tate, "who had made a lot of northern money out of coal.", purchased the house for them. House guests at Benfolly were frequent: Ford Madox Ford, Edmund Wilson, Louise Bogan, Phelps Putnam, Stark Young, the Howard Bakers, the Malcolm Cowleys, the Ransoms, the Warrens.Ian Hamilton, Against Oblivion: Some Lives of the Twentieth Century Poets, Viking, 2002, p. 134.
Meeting at Benfolly and in Nashville, Tate, Ransom, Davidson et al. completed work on their symposium, I'll Take My Stand by Twelve Southerners, published in 1930. Tate didn't like the title; he had argued for "Tracts Against Communism." His contribution was "Remarks on the southern Religion": the Old South was a feudal society "without a feudal religion"; her Protestant "religious mind was inarticulate, dissenting, and schismatical."
In 1933 Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder and editor of Hound & Horn, wrote Tate, the Southern editor, that he "would like very much to know what all you people think could be done in relation to black and white." . . . Was the friction "inevitably racial, or accidentally economic?" Why were sexual relations between a white man and a black woman tolerated but not the reverse? Tate stated that there was "absolutely no 'solution' to the race problem in the South. That is, there is no solution that will remove the tension and the oppression that the negro must feel. . . . When two such radically different races live together, one must rule. I think the negro race is an inferior race." The key was social order, which served not social justice but "legal justice for the ruled race. . . . Liberal agitators" deprived "the negro of even the legal justice." Liberal policy was like "that of the Reconstruction, . . . a steady campaign against the Southern social system . . . to crush absolutely the remaining power of independent agriculture." As for the sexual question, "it is upon the sexual consent of women that the race depends for the future. . . . Under the industrial capitalist regime . . . women are no longer the very center of the social system. . . . What is to be done about all this I do not know; and I am inclined to think no one else knows."
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 Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, and condemned Fascism in an article in The New Republic in 1936. Much of Tate's major volumes of poetry were published in the 1930s, and the scholar David Havird describes this publication history in poetry as follows: By 1937, when he published his first Selected Poems, Tate had written all of the shorter poems upon which his literary reputation came to rest. This collection--which brought together work from two recent volumes, Poems: 1928-1931 (1932) and the privately printed The Mediterranean and Other Poems (1936), as well as the early Mr. Pope--included "Mother and Son," "Last Days of Alice," "The Wolves," "The Mediterranean," "Aeneas at Washington," "Sonnets at Christmas," and the final version of "Ode to the Confederate Dead." While visiting in Washington in 1936, Tate was interviewed by the Washington "'Post'": "South Is U.S. Literary Center, Asserts Allen Tate, Noted Poet."Havird, David. American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 by the American Council of Learned Societies.
Ford dedicated his book Provence to Gordon and Tate writing 'who came to Provence and there wrote to "That Sweet Land" the poem called "The Mediterranean" and where we went in the boat was a long bay".
Tate and Herbert Agar in 1936 put together a symposium entitled Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence (Houghton Mifflin); the 21 contributors included eight Agrarians, three economists, a woman psychologist, and an English Distributist. The book made the bestseller list; it was reissued in 1999 by ISI Books. In 1936 also Scribner's published Tate's Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Idea; Maxwell Perkins, editor to both Tate and Gordon, told Tate, "It is an honor to publish this book."
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.
1940s Tate was the poet-in-residence at Princeton University from 1939 to 1942, and founded the university's Creative Writing Program. He established the Mesures Lectures. During 1940 through 41 he was also a regular panelist, with Mark Van Doren and Huntington Cairns, on the popular CBS radio program Invitation to Learning and sometimes a guest the following year. Random House published the transcripts.
The Tates moved to Monteagle, Tennessee in 1942 to write, living on publishers' advances (Gordon was a novelist). Robert Lowell and Jean Stafford joined them. Lytle was teaching history at the nearby University of the South and was made editor of the Sewanee Review for a year; Tate helped him by getting poems and articles from Wallace Stevens, William Meredith (poet), and others.
In 1943 Tate was appointed the first rotating Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress, where he established the Associate Fellows in American Letters. He initiated recordings of 16th and 17th century English lyrics and modern American poetry from Emily Dickinson to Karl Shapiro for Books for the Blind. He reviewed Shapiro's first book of poems, Person, Place and Thing, for the magazine Common Sense in 1943, writing the review as a letter to Sgt. Shapiro, then stationed in Australia, mixing some compositional advice with high praise ("May I list here certain poems that for me are already placed among the best poetry of our time?"), and beginning a long friendship. Tate was known for his aid to talented younger writers: John Berryman, Joseph Frank (writer), Robert Lowell, William Meredith Jr, Howard Nemerov, Delmore Schwartz, and Peter Taylor.