Background
Tate was born on November 19, 1899 near Winchester, Kentucky, to John Orley Tate, a businessman, and Eleanor Parke Custis Varnell.
(In this vivid portrait of one of the South's ablest (and ...)
In this vivid portrait of one of the South's ablest (and most enigmatic) commanders, Allen Tate portrays the warrior whom Lee would mourn as "his right arm." Southern Classics Series.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1879941023/?tag=2022091-20
(Written early in Tate's career, this study of the Confede...)
Written early in Tate's career, this study of the Confederacy's fallen leader is highly critical of his flaws yet ultimately sympathetic to the Southern cause.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1879941244/?tag=2022091-20
( One of the early-twentieth century Southern intellectua...)
One of the early-twentieth century Southern intellectuals and artists of the early twentieth century known as the Agrarians, Allen Tate wrote poetry that was rooted strongly in that region's past?in the land, the people, and the traditions of the American South as well as in the forms and concerns of the classic poets. In "Ode to the Confederate Dead"? generally recognized as his greatest poem?he delineates both the horror of the sight of rows of tombstones at a Confederate cemetery and the honor that such sacrifice embodies, resulting in "a masterpiece that could not be transcended" (William Pratt).
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(The distinguished American poet and critic offers recolle...)
The distinguished American poet and critic offers recollections of his private and literary life, friends, and contemporaries and recent critical essays on twentieth-century poets and novelists
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0804006628/?tag=2022091-20
( The Fathers is the powerful novel by the poet and criti...)
The Fathers is the powerful novel by the poet and critic recognized as one of the great men of letters of our time. Old Major Buchan of Pleasant Hill, Fairfax County, Virginia, lived by a gentlemen's agreement to ignore what was base or rude, to live a life which was gentle and comfortable because it was formal. Into this life George Posey came dashing, as Henry Steele Commager observed, to defy Major Buchan, marry Susan, betray Charles and Semmes, dazzle young Lacy, challenge and destroy the old order of things. The Fathers was published in 1938. It sold respectably in both the United States and England, perhaps because people expected it to be another Gone With the Wind, wheras it is in fact the novel Gone With the Wind ought to have been. Since its publication it has received very little attention, considering that it is one of the most remarkable novels of our time. Its occasion is a public one, the achievement and the destruction of Virginia's antebellum civilization. Within that occasion it discovers a terrible conflict between two fundamental and irreconcilable modes of existence, a conflict that has haunted American experience, but exists in some form at all times. The Fathers moves between the public and the private aspects of this conflict with an ease very unusual in American novels, and this ease is the most obvious illustration of the novel's remarkable unity of idea and form, for it is itself a manifestation of the novel's central idea, that the belief widely held today, that men may live apart from the political order, that indeed the only humane and honorable satisfactions must be gained in spite of the public order, is a fantasy. From the introduction of The Fathers
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Tate was born on November 19, 1899 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.
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 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 February 9, 1979.
( One of the early-twentieth century Southern intellectua...)
(This classic collection of nearly fifty essays by one of ...)
(The distinguished American poet and critic offers recolle...)
(Written early in Tate's career, this study of the Confede...)
(In this vivid portrait of one of the South's ablest (and ...)
(Examines the careers of Dickinson, Crane, Robinson, Aiken...)
( The Fathers is the powerful novel by the poet and criti...)
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. "
Along with fellow Fugitives, Warren and Ransom, as well as nine other Southern writers, Tate also joined the conservative political group known as the Southern Agrarians.
Tate married Gordon in New York in May 1925. Their daughter Nancy was born in September.
Tate 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.
He also married the poet Isabella Gardner in the early 1950s.
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.
Tate divorced Gardner and married Heinz in 1966. They moved to Sewanee, Tennessee. In 1967, Tate became the father of twin sons. The youngest died at eleven months from an accident. A third son was born in 1969.