Allen Tate

John Orley Allen Tate (19 November 1899 – 9 February 1979) was an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and novelist who stood at the intersection of Southern literature, modernist poetry, and the New Criticism — three of the most important currents in twentieth-century American letters. As a poet, he produced a body of work that is dense, intellectually rigorous, and formally accomplished, anchored by “Ode to the Confederate Dead” (1928), one of the defining poems of American modernism. As a critic, he was one of the founders of the New Criticism — the close-reading method that dominated literary education from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Life

Tate was born in Winchester, Kentucky, into a family that claimed (with varying degrees of accuracy) distinguished Southern lineage. He grew up in various towns across the upper South and entered Vanderbilt University in 1918, where he became part of the Fugitives, the group of poets and intellectuals that included John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Robert Penn Warren, and Merrill Moore. The Fugitives published The Fugitive magazine (1922–1925), which became one of the most important little magazines of the American modernist period.

After Vanderbilt, Tate moved to New York, where he became a freelance literary journalist and entered the orbit of Hart Crane, Edmund Wilson, and other modernist writers. His first marriage, to the novelist Caroline Gordon (1924), produced a long, turbulent relationship marked by mutual literary brilliance, alcoholism, infidelity, divorce, remarriage, and final divorce. He married the poet Isabella Gardner in 1959, and finally Helen Heinz in 1966.

Tate taught at various universities — Princeton, the University of Minnesota (where he edited the Sewanee Review and served as a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress), and elsewhere. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1950, a turn that shaped his later critical and personal writing.

Ode to the Confederate Dead (1928)

Tate’s most famous poem — which he revised over a decade — is not a celebration of the Confederacy but a meditation on the modern individual’s inability to connect with the heroic past. The poem’s speaker stands at the gate of a Confederate cemetery, contemplating the dead soldiers’ capacity for sacrifice and communal action, and recognising his own inability to share it. The poem’s central tension — between the desire for historical meaning and the modern condition of solipsistic isolation — is rendered through dense, allusive, Latinate verse that draws on Eliot, the Metaphysicals, and classical rhetoric.

Tate’s own essay “Narcissus as Narcissus” (1938) provides a detailed analysis of the poem’s strategy, making it one of the few canonical poems accompanied by a canonical self-interpretation.

The Fugitive-Agrarian Movement

In 1930, Tate contributed the essay “Remarks on the Southern Religion” to I’ll Take My Stand, the manifesto of the Southern Agrarians — a group of twelve writers who argued that the traditional, agrarian South offered a model of civilisation superior to the industrial, capitalist North. The Agrarian movement has been celebrated as a prophetic critique of industrialisation and condemned as a nostalgic defence of a slave-based social order. Tate’s own relationship to the movement was complicated: he believed in the Agrarian critique of modernity but was intellectually too cosmopolitan and too committed to modernist literary practice to be a simple regionalist.

Critical Work

Tate’s literary criticism — collected in Essays of Four Decades (1968) — is among the most influential of the mid-century. His essay “Tension in Poetry” (1938) argues that the meaning of a poem resides in the tension between its literal and figurative dimensions — an idea that became foundational to New Critical practice. His essays on Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, and Edgar Allan Poe are still read.

The Fathers (1938)

Tate’s only novel is set during the Civil War and tells the story of two Virginia families — one representing traditional Southern order, the other representing charismatic individual will — whose fates are entwined as the old world collapses. The novel is underrated and deserves wider readership.

Collecting Tate

Mr. Pope and Other Poems (1928, Minton, Balch) in first edition brings $100–$400. The Fathers (1938, Putnam) brings $50–$200. Essays of Four Decades (1968) brings $20–$60. Signed copies are available. Tate’s extensive correspondence — with Warren, Ransom, Crane, and others — is held at Princeton and Vanderbilt.