Allen tate poet biography projects
Allen Tate
American poet, essayist, social commentator (1899–1979)
For the American vocalist and songwriter, see Allen Tate (musician).
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 Poetry Collected Poems, 1919-1976 (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1977) Prose Memoirs and Opinions, 1926-1974 (Swallow Press, 1975) Agar, Herbert, and Allen Tate, eds. Who Owns America?: A New Declaration of Independence. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1936. Twenty-one essays, with an introduction by Agar. Common themes are the dangers of centralization of governmental and economic power, the need for a return to regionalism and for small farms and local businesses as bulwarks against “collectivist” concentrations of power whether Marxist or capitalist. Tate’s essay in this volume, “ Notes on Liberty and Property,” asserts the basis of liberty in individually owned private property. It had been published in the ill-fated American Review 6 (1935–1936), pp. 596–611. Brown, Ashley, and Frances Neel Cheney, eds. The Poetry Reviews of Allen Tate, 1924–1944. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. For several years after graduating from Vanderbilt, Tate strove to live on the meager earnings of a book reviewer, poet, and editor. Many of the books he reviewed were volumes of poetry; in the reviews there are traces of the aesthetic theory for which he would become known among transatlantic followers of T. S. Eliot. Gordon, Caroline, and Allen Tate. The House of Fiction: An Anthology of the Short Story, with Commentary. New York: Scribner’s, 1950. Tate and his wife Caroline Gordon entered the burgeoning textbook market with The House of Fiction. Gordon was more immersed in fiction than Tate, and she wrote the lion’s share of the “commentary.” Tate, Allen. Mr. Pope and Other Poems. New York: Minton, Balch, 1928. Tate’s first published volume of poems, published by the same firm which published a series of biographies of Confederate military figures. Tate wrote two of these, on Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis. He attempted a third, on Robert E. Lee, but failed to complete it. Tate, Allen Tate's Life and Career David Havird TATE was born John Orley Allen Tate near Winchester, Kentucky, the son of John Orley Tate, a businessman, and Eleanor Parke Custis Varnell. During Tate's childhood the business interests of his father-lumber, land sales, and stocks-forced the family to move as often as three times a year. As Tate later recalled, "we might as well have been living, and I been born, in a tavern at a crossroads." By 1911 his father's business ventures and his parents' marriage had failed. The youngest of three boys by almost ten years, Tate found himself in "perpetual motion" with his mother, a native Virginian whose family seat in Fairfax County later became the "Pleasant Hill" of Tate's only novel, The Fathers (1938). From 1916 to 1917 Tate studied the violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. As he implies in his late poem "The Buried Lake" (1953), his failure to fulfill his musical ambitions signaled "the death of youth." In 1918 he enrolled at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. During the fall semester of his senior year (1921), at the invitation of Donald Davidson, a member of the English faculty, Tate began attending the informal meetings of the group of men, which also included his sometime professor John Crowe Ransom, that launched the Fugitive in 1922. Tate thus became a founding editor of the poetry journal whose three-year run heralded the literary renascence of the South. At nineteen he had immersed himself in the English poet James Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night (1874), a seminal if (as he later confessed) "disconcerting" influence on his verse. Now among the Fugitives, he distinguished himself as a savant of a cosmopolitan body of literature. According to Ransom, Tate was already reading the French poets Charles Baudelaire (a translation of whose sonnet "Correspondences" he published in 1924), St�phane Mallarm�, and R�my d Allen Tate
The Swimmers and Other Selected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1970)
Poems (Scribner, 1960)
Two Conceits for the Eye to Sing, If Possible (Cummington Press, 1950)
Poems, 1922-1947 (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948)
Poems, 1920-1945 (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1947)
The Winter Sea (Cummington Press, 1944)
Selected Poems (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937)
The Mediterranean and Other Poems (Alcestis Press, 1936)
Poems, 1928-1931 (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932)
Three Poems (1930)
Mr. Pope and Other Poems (Minton, Balch & Company, 1928)
Essays of Four Decades (Swallow Press, 1968)
Collected Essays (Swallow Press, 1959)
The Man of Letters in the Modern World (Meridian Books, 1955)
The Forlorn Demon (Regnery, 1953)
The Hovering Fly (Cummington Press, 1949)
On the Limits of Poetry: Selected Essays, 1928-1948 (Swallow Press, 1948)
Reason in Madness (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1941)
The Fathers (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1938)
Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936)
Robert E. Lee (1932)
Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall (Balch & Company, 1929)
Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier (Balch & Company, 1928) Allen Tate