"The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem." -- Allen Tate
John Orley Allen Tate (November 19, 1899 - February 9, 1979) was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1943 to 1944.
"A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.""According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.""At twelve I was determined to shoot only For honor; at twenty not to shoot at all; I know at thirty-three that one must shoot As often as one gets the rare chance - In killing there is more than commentary.""But in our age the appeal to authority is weak, and I am of my age.""Dramatic experience is not logical; it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak, in criticism, of form.""Experience means conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama.""For some reason most critics have a hard time fixing their minds directly under their noses, and before they see the object that is there they use a telescope upon the horizon to see where it came from.""Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.""How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.""I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.""I believe the term modulation denotes in music the uninterrupted shift from one key to another: I do not know the term for change of rhythm without change of measure.""In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem.""Men expect too much, do too little.""Narcissism and the Confederate dead cannot be connected logically, or even historically; even were the connection an historical fact, they would not stand connected as art, for no one experiences raw history.""Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.""Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.""Religion is the sole technique for the validating of values.""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.""So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.""The innocent mansion of a panther's heart!""The mission for the day is to encourage students to think beyond traditional career opportunities, prepare for future careers and entrance into the workplace.""The Spring I seek is in a new face only.""There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.""We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.""What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why."
Tate was born 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.
He began attending Vanderbilt University in 1918, where he met fellow poet Robert Penn Warren. Warren and Tate were invited to join a group of young Southern poets under the leadership of John Crowe Ransom; the group were known as the Fugitive Poets and later as the Southern Agrarians. Tate contributed to the group's magazine The Fugitive and to the agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand published in 1930. Tate also joined Ransom to teach at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.
In 1924, Tate moved to New York City where he met poet Hart Crane, with whom he had been exchanging correspondence for some time. During a summer visit with Warren in Kentucky, he began a relationship with writer Caroline Gordon. They married in New York in May 1925. Their daughter Nancy was born in September.
He 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.
In 1950, Tate converted to Roman Catholicism.
Tate married the poet Isabella Gardner in the early fifties. 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. Gardner divorced Tate.
He married Heinz in 1966. They moved to Sewanee, Tennessee. In 1967 Tate became the father of twin sons, John and Michael. Michael died at eleven months from choking on a toy. A third son Benjamin was born in 1969.
In 1924, Tate began a four-year sojourn in New York City where he worked freelance for The Nation, contributed to the Hound and Horn, Poetry magazine, and others. He worked as a janitor, and lived la vie boheme in Greenwich Village with Caroline Gordon, and when urban life proved too overwhelming, repaired to "Robber Rocks", a house in Patterson, New York, with friends Slater Brown and his wife Sue, Hart Crane, and Malcolm Cowley. He would, some years later, contribute to the conservative National Review as well.
1928 saw the publication of Tate's most famous poem, "Ode to the Confederate Dead", not to be confused with "Ode to the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery" written by American Civil War poet and South Carolina native, Henry Timrod. In 1928, Tate also published a biography Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier.
In 1929, Tate published a second biography Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall.
By the 1930s, Tate had returned to Tennessee, where he worked on social commentary influenced by his agrarian philosophy. In addition to his work on I'll Take My Stand, he published Who Owns America?, which was a conservative response to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. During this time, Tate also became the de facto associate editor of The American Review, which was published and edited by Seward Collins. Tate believed The American Review could popularize the work of the Southern Agrarians. He objected to Collins's open support of Fascists Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, and condemned fascism in an article in The New Republic in 1936.
In 1938 Tate published his only novel, The Fathers, which drew upon knowledge of his mother's ancestral home and family in Fairfax County, Virginia.
Tate was a poet-in-residence at Princeton University until 1942. He founded the Creative Writing program at Princeton, and mentored Richard Blackmur, John Berryman, and others. In 1942, Tate assisted novelist and friend Andrew Lytle in transforming The Sewanee Review, America's oldest literary quarterly, from a modest journal into one of the most prestigious in the nation. Tate and Lytle had attended Vanderbilt together prior to collaborating at The University of the South.
Tate died in Nashville, Tennessee. His papers are collected at the Firestone Library at Princeton University.
