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Allen Tate (1899-1979) Tate, born in Kentucky and graduated from Vanderbilt University, was a poet and a literary critic, who wrote at least 20 books and received many honors, including the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1956. He was the founding editor of The Fugitive, from 1922 to '25, a magazine of poems published in Nashville by a group of Southern poets. Tate is noted for his poem "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (1927).
The second Poet Laureate of the United States was John Orley Allen Tate, but went exclusively by Allen Tate in his literary career. Mr. Tate was born near Winchester, Kentucky. Mr. Tate wrote one novel The Fathers (1938),.that is a loose depiction of his early years with a father who left the family and allowed his mother and three boys to flounder.
Mr. Tate had musical ambitions, and studied the violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music although he failed to achieve his ambitions and this disappointment is alluded to in his 1953 poem "The Buried Lake."
Mr. Tate enrolled at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and while there he helped launched a poetry journal called Fugitive in 1922. Tate thus became a founding editor of the poetry journal whose three-year run heralded the literary renascence of the South.
Tate received a letter in 1922 from Hart Crane, and in that letter Mr. Crane stated that he hear some similarities between the poems of Tate and the poems of T. S. Eliot. This letter motivated Tate to buy a copy of Eliot's Poems and he immediately identified with the works of Mr. Elliot.
In 1922 Mr. Tate came down with tuberculosis, a disease that, at that time in our history was extremely serious, and often deadly. The TB forced Tate to withdraw from Vanderbilt and he went to the mountains of North Carolina to recuperate. Mr. Tate returned to the university in 1923 and during his last semester his roommate was Robert Penn Warren.
After receiving his Bachelor's degree, Mr. Tate moved to New York City, where he met Hart Crane. Mr. Tate married Caroline Gordon, in New York in May 1925. The couple had a daughter, Nancy, born in September of 1925 (which goes to show that the first child can come any time, but the second child always takes 9 months). Between 1925 and 1928, Tate wrote freelance articles and reviews for such periodicals as the Nation and the New Republic, did editorial work for the publisher of pulp romance magazines, and performed janitorial functions in the building. The Tates actually shared a house with Hart Crane, in rural Patterson, New York, during the winter of 1925. Tate later wrote the introduction to White Buildings (1926).Crane's first volume of poetry.
Tate soon published his own work:
1928 Mr. Pope and Other Poems, and a biography, Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier.
1929 Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall
1932 Poems: 1928-1931
1936 The Mediterranean and Other Poems
1937 Selected Poems
1938 The Feathers (a novel)
1942-43 Mr. Tate became the Poet In Residence at Princeton
1943 Mr. Tate he became the Consultant In Poetry at the Library of Congress
1944 Mr. Tate became the editor of the Sewanee Review
1948 he served on the jury that awarded, in February 1949, the controversial first Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound for his Pisan Cantos.
1949 On the Limits of Poetry: Selected Essays, 1928-1948
Poems, 1922-1947.
1950 Mr. Tate became a convert to Roman Catholicism.
1951 Tate accepted a tenured position at the University of Minnesota, and he remained there until he retired in 1968.
1953 The Forlorn Demon: Didactic and Critical Essays
1956 Tate received the Bollingen Prize
1959 Mr. Tate and his wife divorced
1966 Tate married Helen Heinz one of his former students at Minnesota.
1967 Tate and his new wife had twin sons.
1968 One of the twin boys died in an accident.
1969 Tate and his second wife had another son.
1979 Allen Tate died in Nashville.
Tate's papers are at the Firestone Library, Princeton University.
One of Allen Tate's most notable works follows:
Ode to the Confederate Dead by Allen Tate Poet Laureate 1943-1944
Row after row with strict impunity
The headstones yield their names to the element,
The wind whirrs without recollection;
In the riven troughs the splayed leaves
Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament
To the seasonal eternity of death;
Then driven by the fierce scrutiny
Of heaven to their election in the vast breath,
They sough the rumour of mortality.
Autumn is desolation in the plot
Of a thousand acres where these memories grow
From the inexhaustible bodies that are not
Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row.
Think of the autumns that have come and gone!--
Ambitious November with the humors of the year,
With a particular zeal for every slab,
Staining the uncomfortable angels that rot
On the slabs, a wing chipped here, an arm there:
The brute curiosity of an angel's stare
Turns you, like them, to stone,
Transforms the heaving air
Till plunged to a heavier world below
You shift your sea-space blindly
Heaving, turning like the blind crab.
Dazed by the wind, only the wind
The leaves flying, plunge
You know who have waited by the wall
The twilight certainty of an animal,
Those midnight restitutions of the blood
You know--the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze
Of the sky, the sudden call: you know the rage,
The cold pool left by the mounting flood,
Of muted Zeno and Parmenides.
You who have waited for the angry resolution
Of those desires that should be yours tomorrow,
You know the unimportant shrift of death
And praise the vision
And praise the arrogant circumstance
Of those who fall
Rank upon rank, hurried beyond decision--
Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall.
Seeing, seeing only the leaves
Flying, plunge and expire
Turn your eyes to the immoderate past,
Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising
Demons out of the earth they will not last.
Stonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp,
Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run.
Lost in that orient of the thick and fast
You will curse the setting sun.
Cursing only the leaves crying
Like an old man in a storm
You hear the shout, the crazy hemlocks point
With troubled fingers to the silence which
Smothers you, a mummy, in time.
The hound bitch
Toothless and dying, in a musty cellar
Hears the wind only.
Now that the salt of their blood
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea,
Seals the malignant purity of the flood,
What shall we who count our days and bow
Our heads with a commemorial woe
In the ribboned coats of grim felicity,
What shall we say of the bones, unclean,
Whose verdurous anonymity will grow?
The ragged arms, the ragged heads and eyes
Lost in these acres of the insane green?
The gray lean spiders come, they come and go;
In a tangle of willows without light
The singular screech-owl's tight
Invisible lyric seeds the mind
With the furious murmur of their chivalry.
We shall say only the leaves
Flying, plunge and expire
We shall say only the leaves whispering
In the improbable mist of nightfall
That flies on multiple wing:
Night is the beginning and the end
And in between the ends of distraction
Waits mute speculation, the patient curse
That stones the eyes, or like the jaguar leaps
For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim.
What shall we say who have knowledge
Carried to the heart? Shall we take the act
To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave
In the house? The ravenous grave?
Leave now
The shut gate and the decomposing wall:
The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,
Riots with his tongue through the hush--
Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!
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