Allen Tate

Few poets embody the post-Civil War identity of the American South more than Allen Tate. Growing up in Kentucky and Tennessee, Tate’s identity as a Southerner dominated everything about his life, from his poetry to his literary criticism to his political views. Although he was born decades after the American Civil War, Tate firmly believed in the Confederate cause. His views on race make him a complicated literary figure.

Content warning: Contains themes of racism.

Allen Tate: Biography

American poet, critic, novelist, and teacher Allen Tate was born John Orley Allen Tate on November 19, 1899. The son of a Kentucky businessman and his Virginian wife, Tate was born and raised in Kentucky. His identity as a Southerner consumed his lifestyle, poetry, and social commentary throughout his entire career.

Tate inherited his love of English literature from his mother, and he studied at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1918. At Vanderbilt, he became very close with an informal group of Southern intellectuals and poets, who called themselves “the Fugitives”. The Fugitives consisted of Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson, Merrill Moore, and Tate’s instructor, John Crowe Ransom. Tate was the first undergraduate student to be invited to join the group of poets as they read and commented upon their own poetry and that of others.

In 1922, the group began publishing The Fugitive, a poetry magazine that ran for three years. The magazine wanted to prove that southerners could provide valuable contributions to the genre of poetry. In Tate’s time and even today, there is a long-held belief that southerners are simple, ignorant, and dumb. In the American North, there was (and still is) a prejudice against southerners because of their dialect and the way they hold onto tradition. For much of American literary history, the Southern voice was largely ignored, which only escalated after the American Civil War. Tate and the Fugitives worked to combat that.

Tate’s poetry centered on his identity as a southerner. Other southerners pictured above, Pixabay

Tate graduated from Vanderbilt in 1922 and began working as a critic in 1924. The first magazine he worked for was the Nashville-based Tennessean, and he later worked for The Nation, Hound & Horn, Poetry magazine, and others. He moved to New York City in 1924 and began a friendship with fellow poet Hart Crane. Tate met novelist Caroline Gordon in 1924 and married her in May 1925. The two had their first daughter in September that year.

In 1928, Tate published his first collection of poems, Mr. Pope and Other Poems, and his first biography, Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier. That same year, he and his family left the United States for two years to travel and live in Europe. Tate met Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein as well as his literary hero, T.S. Eliot, during his time abroad.

After he returned to the United States, Tate once again settled in the South in Tennessee. Tate taught at Southwestern College in Memphis from 1934 until 1936. He was named poet laureate of the United States from 1943 to 1944. Afterward, he joined The Sewanee Review, an American literary magazine, which became one of the foremost literary magazines in the United States under his editorship. He taught at the University of North Carolina, Princeton University, and finally at the University of Minnesota from 1951 until his retirement in 1968.

In 1970, Tate published The Swimmers and Other Selected Poems. In 1972, he was hospitalized for ten days with bronchitis and emphysema. His health never really improved, and he was hospitalized sporadically throughout the 1970s. His final collection, Collected Poems, 1916-1976, was published in 1977. Tate died on February 9, 1979, and was buried in Sewanee, Tennessee.

Allen Tate and Southern History

Tate’s primary argument throughout his work is that American southerners need to remember their history and return to their traditional way of life. Tate himself was deeply invested in Southern history and wrote extensively on the American Civil War, praising the Confederate soldiers for their bravery and heroism. Tate argued that the Confederates wanted to protect the traditional agrarian way of life in the South, while the Union wanted them to conform to the industrialization of the North. During his time, Tate mourned the loss of individualism, faith, and tradition of the American South while romanticizing Southern history and traditional culture.

Tate cared about Southern history so deeply that he wrote two biographies on Southern historical figures. He published Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier in 1928 and Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall in 1929. His 1938 novel, The Fathers, is generally considered to embody the modern image of the South. It captures the outbreak of the Civil War in Virginia as tensions mounted between Union sympathizers and Confederate sympathizers.

The central argument in Tate’s work is that Southerners need to relearn their history and their ancestor’s culture and relationship to the land, Pixabay

Tate’s attitudes on race make him a complicated literary figure. He was poet laureate of the United States and highly esteemed in his own time, but he was also deeply racist. Tate was explicitly prejudiced against Black people in the 1930s and refused to associate with Black writers like Langston Hughes. Tate spoke out against interracial marriage and believed in white supremacy. He denounced lynching as a symptom of weak rule, while also stating it couldn’t be destroyed until white people felt that their power would not be taken from them. In his later career, Tate slightly modified his position and his rhetoric surrounding the Black community, but he would be forever remembered for his racist ideologies.

Tate’s attitudes on race make him a complicated literary figure. He was a poet laureate of the United States and highly esteemed in his own time, but he was also deeply racist. Tate was explicitly prejudiced against Black people in the 1930s, and refused to associate with Black writers like Langston Hughes. Tate spoke out against interracial marriage and believed in white supremacy. He denounced lynching as a symptom of weak rule while also stating it couldn’t be destroyed until white people felt that their power would not be taken from them. In his later career, Tate slightly modified his position and his rhetoric surrounding the Black community, but he would be forever remembered for his racist ideologies.

Allen Tate Poems

Below are some of Tate’s most influential poems.

“Ode to the Confederate Dead“ (1928)

“Ode to the Confederate Dead” is Tate’s most well-known poem, included in his 1928 Mr. Pope and Other Poems collection. The poem is situated in a dilapidated Southern cemetery, where dead Civil War soldiers are laid to rest. The speaker notes that the dead soldiers had the same values and dreams as he did, and that modern Southerners have forgotten these heroes.

But the dead symbolize more than just lost Confederates because they come to represent the traditions of the past that connected the Southerners to the natural world. Now, modern Southerners (and in fact the entire world) have lost their respect for nature and replaced it with narcissism as they view the world as a commodity, valuable in how it can benefit them. The speaker ends the poem by warning his readers that death is ultimately an equalizer and treating the natural world without respect won’t save them from death – it will only serve to condemn them.

“Seasons of the Soul” (1948)

“Seasons of the Soul” was published in Tate’s 1948 poetry collection Poems 1922–1947. The poem was written during World War II and implies the speaker’s Dante-esque descent into hell as he ages. The poem starts off with Summer, which represents the current age. The speaker also uses pointed imagery to compare Summer to the age of antiquity when agriculture was the dominant economic force (a time that Tate himself argued Southerners should get back to).

The poem then shifts into Fall, which is representative of the speaker aging and losing his connection to the world around him. He says that he feels trapped and his own ancestors refuse to recognize him. This calls into question how the speaker’s identity changes over time.

In Winter, both the Christian God and pagan gods are dead, further deepening the speaker’s hopelessness. The speaker calls out to Venus, the goddess of love, for help, showcasing that only love can save the speaker from his hopelessness. Finally, in Spring, the speaker calls out for the “Mother of Silences,” who is implicitly connected to the Virgin Mary. He asserts that she is the only one who can save them when they begin to die.

“The Swimmers” (1960)

“The Swimmers” recounts Tate’s personal experience of seeing the body of a lynched Black man in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, when he was 11 years old. The poem starts out peacefully with the sounds of running water and nature. The speaker and his friends are idly spending a Summer day “chasing shade” when they witness 12 horses galloping past them. The boys follow and see a dead Black man. The speaker says he wishes he could get his innocence back.

The sheriff comes along and casually notes that he got there too late. The sheriff then treats the body irreverently, kicking it to get the noose loose and taking it back to town, more upset about the dust than the fact that the man has been murdered. The young speaker mourns his loss of innocence and notes that everyone in the town was responsible for the hate crime, but no one will claim responsibility.

“The Buried Lake” (1960)

“The Buried Lake,” like “Seasons of the Soul,” centers on the speaker’s realization that the only way to feel unrelenting love and truly free oneself from guilt is through spiritual transcendence. After a lifelong ambivalence toward religion, Tate converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1950s. “Seasons of the Soul” and “The Buried Lake” both examine how one becomes lost without spiritual guidance. “The Buried Lake” refers to the deepness of the speaker’s heart, which has been buried and hidden for years until he united with the “Lady of light” or the Virgin Mary. In his lifetime, critics set Tate’s “The Buried Lake” and “Seasons of the Soul” at odds with one another. Different critics claimed one poem was better than the other at revealing spiritual truths.