Allen Tate

John Orley Allen Tate was born in Winchester, Kentucky, in 1899. He died in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1979. He devoted his three-quarters of the twentieth century, with nearly single-minded passion, to becoming a man of letters. There have been few figures in the history of American letters who have striven so fiercely for that title and left both wreckage and achievement along the way; Edgar Allan Poe is another, and Tate wrote about him as “our cousin.” Tate’s undergraduate education at Vanderbilt University in Nashville (1918–1923) is usually considered the initial stage of his quest. There he met Robert Penn Warren, with whom he started a modernist literary crusade, as well as Donald Davidson and the more senior John Crowe Ransom, against whose traditionalist bulwark Tate mounted an assault. Edgy and argumentative criticism became thereafter a constant in Tate’s literary career. That career is reflected in four major divisions or stages. First, an early engagement (not quite a full embrace) of his regional identity as a “son of the South.” Early poems such as “Ode to the Confederate Dead” and his essay in I’ll Take My Stand (1930), “Some Remarks on the Southern Religion,” position Tate as a critic of the South but still in the South. His only fiction, the novel The Fathers (1938; rev. 1960) deploys his ideological outlook as an array of characters swept up in the Civil War—a conflict Tate saw as ongoing in US social and political history. When the political and social agenda at the heart of the reactionary project of Southern Agrarianism failed to gain traction in the mid-1930s, Tate moved to poetry and literary criticism. This phase can be said to encircle the most significant achievements of Tate’s striving to become a modern man of letters. His critical essays, frequent reviews, and assessments of the contemporary status of poetry in the United States established him as a major player. He taught creative writing at Princeton University from 1939 to 1942; was appointed the first Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress in 1943; edited the Sewanee Review from 1944 to 1946. In 1949 he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and to the more selective American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1964. He won the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1956. He taught at the University of Minnesota from 1951 until his retirement in 1968. A third aspect of Tate’s importance to modern letters may be pinned to his conversion to Catholicism in 1950. He subsequently became a beacon in the “Catholic Revival.” He was awarded the Christian Culture Gold Medal in 1958. Jacques Maritain, recipient of the Gold Medal in 1942 and French ambassador to the Vatican 1945–1948, had been Tate’s sponsor at his baptism. A fourth aspect developed after Tate’s death from roots in his conservative political thought; he became a focal point in academic “culture wars.”