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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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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).
(This classic collection of nearly fifty essays by one of ...)
This classic collection of nearly fifty essays by one of the century's most acclaimed poets and literary critics speaks poignantly to the concerns of today's students, teachers, and general literature readers alike. It covers the broad sweep of Tate's critical concerns: poetry, poets, fiction, the imagination, language, literature, and culture.
(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
Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier (Southern Classics Series)
(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.
John Orley Allen Tate, known professionally as Allen Tate, was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and Poet Laureate from 1943 to 1944.
Background
Tate was born near Winchester, Kentucky, on November 19, 1899. He was the youngest of the three sons of John Orley Tate, a lumberman, and Eleanor Custis Varnell. Tate's maternal ancestry stemmed from Fairfax County, Va. , the land Tate portrayed in his novel The Fathers (1938). As he grew up, Tate was surrounded by a multitude of books, among them an 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, annotated in his great-grandfather's hand, along with popular novels and histories, the choices of his mother, who was a compulsive and indiscriminate reader.
Education
Tate's formal schooling was haphazard: he attended the Tarbox School in Nashville, Tenn. ; the Cross School, a private classical academy in Louisville, Ky. ; and, for a year, the Georgetown University Preparatory School before entering Vanderbilt University in the fall of 1918. Illness caused him to receive his B. A. degree there in 1923, a year late.
Career
In his junior year he was invited to a meeting of a literary group made up largely of Vanderbilt professors - among them John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Walter Clyde Curry. Its members met every two weeks for critical deliberations on poetry, though Tate recalled their dialogue as more philosophic and aesthetic than literary. With his espousal of Baudelaire and the symbolists, Tate introduced into the discussions a sometimes jarring but always stimulating note of modernism. The group published a magazine, The Fugitive (April 1922 - December 1925), which, by the time of its demise, had launched the careers of four distinguished literary figures: Ransom, Tate, Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren. Warren, an undergraduate from Guthrie, Ky. , had joined the group in 1924 and formed a lasting friendship with Tate. These four, joined by the novelist Andrew Lytle, went on to form the core of Agrarianism, a serious attack in the 1930's on the cultural ills of industrialism. The Fugitive gave rise as well to a view of poetry as a radically distinct mode of knowledge, engendering a school of literary theory - the New Criticism - which, augmented by the work of fellow Vanderbilt graduate Cleanth Brooks, dominated the academic world for some three decades. For Tate, The Fugitive afforded contact with the larger world of letters; his correspondence with Hart Crane introduced him to the writings of T. S. Eliot, Jules Laforgue, and Ezra Pound and led to his allegiance with the avant-garde in poetry and criticism.
During most of the 1920's, Tate made a bare living as a freelance writer, subsisting mostly on commissions for reviews in the New York Herald Tribune, the Nation, and the New Republic. In 1925 the Tates rented half of an old house in Patterson, N. Y. , where Hart Crane joined them for a brief and stormy interval. This period in Tate's life, though spent in poverty and discomfort, provided the leisure to examine his basic convictions; he had already begun to qualify his reservations about the South and during the next few years would carry on a thoughtful and productive correspondence with his Agrarian friends.
Now, however, Tate worked with increasing intensity at his poetry and perfected the prose style that would characterize his best writing: sharp, formal, imperious. He began work on his biographies of Stonewall Jackson (1928) and Jefferson Davis (1929) and wrote a good many of his most brilliant poems--"Ode to the Confederate Dead, " "Mr. Pope, " "Death of Little Boys, " "Causerie" - included in Mr. Pope and Other Poems (1928). These promising achievements earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship, which, with his wife's reception of a similar grant in 1929, allowed the couple to spend the next two years abroad.
In Europe, the Tates stayed in London and Paris, spent some time with Warren at Oxford, and renewed friendships with Ford Madox Ford, John Peale Bishop, and Léonie Adams; they came to know Eliot, Herbert Read, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and other American expatriates who frequented Sylvia Beach's bookstore. They then moved back to Tennessee, to live for a while in Benfolly, an antebellum house on the Cumberland River bought for them by Allen's brother Ben. Benfolly became a haven for numerous fellow writers, including Katherine Anne Porter, Malcolm Cowley, and the poet Robert Lowell, who pitched a tent on the front lawn to have the benefit of Tate's tutelage. The Fugitive-Agrarian writers came over frequently from Nashville, continuing the discussions that would soon issue in their controversial manifesto I'll Take My Stand (1930). In this milieu Tate's thought was increasingly occupied with the distinctions between traditional culture and its modern secular counterpart.
During these years he produced some of his most celebrated poems: "Sonnets of the Blood" (1931), "Last Days of Alice" (1931), "The Mediterranean" (1932), "Sonnets at Christmas" (1934), and "The Meaning of Life" (1935). Two of his poems, "Winter Mask" (1943) and "Seasons of the Soul" (1944), indicated a new and deeper spiritual orientation. He also published a number of articles in periodicals, later collected in several volumes. Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (1936) and Reason in Madness (1941) contained such major critical pieces as "Tension in Poetry, " "Miss Emily and the Bibliographers, " "Narcissus as Narcissus, " and "What Is a Traditional Society?"
Tate occupied the chair of poetry at the Library of Congress (1934 - 1944), held the position of poet in residence at Princeton (1939 - 1942), and was editor of the Sewanee Review (1944 - 1946).
Together Tate and his wife, Caroline, edited a noted anthology of short stories, The House of Fiction (1950). Shortly afterward they went to live in Minneapolis, where Tate held a professorship at the University of Minnesota from 1951 until his retirement in 1968.
In the 1950's and 1960's, Tate was at the height of his power and his acclaim. Two essays written in 1951, "The Angelic Imagination" and "The Symbolic Imagination, " made clear the overtly theological nature of his criticism. In poetry, he embarked upon an ambitious undertaking, more in the mode of Dante than anything he had before written; he was to complete, however, only three parts of the projected nine-part series: "The Maimed Man, " "The Swimmers, " and "The Buried Lake" (1952 - 1953).
Tate died in Sewanee, Tenn.
Achievements
He was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (1956), the Brandeis University Medal Award for Poetry (1961), and the Dante Society Gold Medal (1962).
Allen was named 'Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress', more commonly known as 'United States Poet Laureate' in 1943.
The writer’s original literary works are available at ‘Princeton University’s ‘Firestone Library’.
Quotations:
"Men expect too much, do too little. "
"Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker. "
"The twilight is long fingers and black hair. "
"The mission for the day is to encourage students to think beyond traditional career opportunities, prepare for future careers and entrance into the workplace. "
"Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them. "
Membership
He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1964) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1965); he served as president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1968.
Connections
In the early 1920s, this gifted poet fell in love with famous American novelist Caroline Ferguson Gordon. They lived in Greenwich Village, Manhattan for some time before moving to New York.
In May 1925, the two writers got married in New York, and had a daughter, Nancy, three years later.
They got divorced after twenty years of marriage, remarried a year later, and separated again, citing irreconcilable differences, even though they were friends throughout their lives.
In 1950, the poet got married to American poet Isabella Gardner early the same decade.
Tate separated from Gardner in 1966, and married a former nun Helen Heinz, who he taught at the ‘University of Minnesota’. The couple were blessed with twins a year later but unfortunately the younger one passed away in infancy. Three years later Helen gave birth to another son.
Father:
John Orley Tate
Mother:
Eleanor Parke Custis Varnell
Spouse:
Helen Heinz
Spouse:
Isabella Gardner
Spouse:
Caroline Ferguson Gordon
She was a notable American novelist and literary critic.
Daughter:
Nancy
Daughter:
Ann Minor Meriwether Tate Wood
1925–2007
Son:
Michael Paul Tate
1967–1968
Friend:
Andrew Nelson Lytle
He was an American novelist, dramatist, essayist and professor of literature.
Friend:
Robert Penn Warren
He was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism.
