Allen Tate

Allen Tate
Born	(1899-11-19)November 19, 1899 Winchester, Kentucky, U.S.
Died	February 9, 1979(1979-02-09) (aged 79) Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.
Occupation	Poet, essayist
Genre	Poetry, literary criticism
Literary movement	New Criticism
Notable works	"Ode to the Confederate Dead"
Spouses	Caroline Gordon ​ ​ (m. 1925; div. 1945)​ ​ ​ (m. 1946; div. 1959)​ Isabella Gardner ​ ​ (m. 1959; div. 1966)​ Helen Heinz ​ (m. 1966)​

Allen Tate (November 19, 1899 – February 9, 1979), named at birth John Orley Allen Tate, was an American poet, essayist, and critic.

Tate was born in 1899 in Winchester, Kentucky. He went to college in 1919 at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. The poet John Crowe Ransom was one of his teachers. With his classmate Robert Penn Warren, he joined a group of writers who started a magazine called The Fugitive.

From 1928 to 1932, Tate lived in France. There he got to know other American writers, like Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. He thought about what it meant to be a person from the American South in the modern world. He wrote biographies of American Civil War figures from the South.

He wrote his most famous poem in 1925 and 1926. It was “Ode to the Confederate Dead." In that poem, a person walking past a Confederate cemetery stops and thinks about what he sees.

He taught at Kenyon College, Princeton University, the University of North Carolina, New York University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Minnesota.

He received many honors during his life, including the Bollingen Prize and a National Medal for Literature. He was the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (poet laureate) from 1943 to 1944.

He died in Nashville in 1979.

Books

• Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier (1928)
• Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall (1929)
• Poems, 1928-1931 (1932)
• The Mediterranean and Other Poems (1936)
• Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (1936)
• Selected Poems (1937)
• The Fathers (1938)
• The Winter Sea (1944)
• Poems, 1920-1945 (1947)
• Poems, 1922-1947 (1948)
• Two Conceits for the Eye to Sing, If Possible (1950)
• Poems (1960)
• Poems (1961)
• Essays of Four Decades (1969)
• Collected Poems (1970)
• The Swimmers and Other Selected Poems (1970)
• Memoirs and Opinions, 1926-1974 (1975)
• Collected Poems 1919-1976 (1976)

Related pages

• List of poets from North America