Allen Tate (1899-1979)

Biography

John Orley "Allen" Tate was born in Winchester, Kentucky, on November 19, 1899. Educated at numerous schools growing up, Tate eventually decided to attend Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1922. He had already become a published poet and cofounder of The Fugitive--a literary review focusing on the formal techniques of poetry and defending the traditional values of the agrarian South. Upon leaving Vanderbilt, Tate took a job teaching high school in West Virginia in 1924. He met his wife, Caroline Gordon, while in West Virginia spending time with long-time friend and roommate at Vanderbilt—Robert Penn Warren. For the next few years, the Tates lived in New York City while Allen worked as a critic and free-lance writer.

After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Tates moved to France and became friends with many of the expatriates. In 1930, he and his wife settled down in the small town of Clarksville, Tennessee, and for the next three decades Tate taught at several universities. He taught poetry at Princeton from 1939-1942, and eventually retired from teaching at the University of Minnesota in 1951. Tate died in 1979.

Bibliography

Fiction

• The Fathers (1938)

Non-Fiction

• Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier (1928)
• Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall (1929)
• The Cantos of Ezra Pound: Some Testimonies (contributor, 1933)
• Reason in Madness (1935)
• Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence (editor, with Herbert Agar, 1936)
• Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (1936)
• Reason in Madness: Critical Essays by Allen Tate (1941)
• Invitation to Learning (editor, with Huntington Cairns and Mark Van Doren, 1941)
• Princeton Verse Between Two Wars: An Anthology (editor, 1942)
• American Harvest (editor, 1942)
• The Language of Poetry (editor, 1942)
• On the Limits of Poetry: Selected Essays, 1928-1948 (1948)
• The Hovering Fly, and Other Essays (1949)
• The House of Fiction: An Anthology of the Short Story, with Commentary (editor, with Caroline Gordon, 1950)
• The Forlorn Demon: Didactic and Critical Essays (1953)
• The Man of Letters in the Modern World: Selected Essays, 1928-1955 (1955)
• Collected Essays (1959)
• T.S. Eliot: The Man and His Work (editor, 1966)
• Essays of Four Decades (1968)
• The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate (1974)
• Memoirs and Opinions, 1926-1974 (1975)
• The Republic of Letters in America: The Correspondence of John Peale Bishop & Allen Tate (1981)
• The Poetry Reviews of Allen Tate, 1924-1944 (1983)
• The Lytle-Tate Letters: The Correspondence of Andrew Lytle and Allen Tate (1987)
• Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate: Collected Letters, 1933-1976 (1998)

Poetry

• The Golden Mean and Other Poems (1923)
• White Buildings (1926)
• Mr. Pope and Other Poems (1928)
• Poems, 1928-1931 (1932)
• The Mediterranean and Other Poems (1936)The Mediterranean and Other Poems (1936)
• Selected Poems (1937)
• Sonnets at Christmas (1941)
• The Vigil of Venus (translator, 1943)
• The Winter Sea (1944)
• Poems, 1920-1945: A Selection (1947)
• Poems, 1922-1947 (1948)
• Poems (1960)
• The Swimmers and Other Selected Poems (1970)
• Collected Poems, 1919-1976 (1948)

Short Fiction

• The Fathers and Other Fiction (1977)

Sources and Links

• Biography and Bibliography of Allen Tate
• Collection of critical, historical, and biological information on Tate
• Tennessee Authors
• Francisco, Edward, Robert Vaughan, Franscisco, Linda., eds. The South in Perspective. New Jersey: Upper Saddle River, 2001. 597.

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