Keeper of the Flame
For all of his achievements, Allen Tate has suffered curious neglect.

By Scott Morris, author of the novel The Total View of Taftly
April 28-29, 2001

Allen Tate: Orphan of the South, by Thomas A. Underwood (Princeton, 429 pp., $35)

doubt," the novelist Malcolm Cowley once stated, "that

Printer-Friendly E-mail a Friend

any other poet in this country is a better judge of his contemporaries than Allen Tate." Literary critic R. P. Blackmur ranked Tate as an artist above Hemingway. T. S. Eliot considered him the best poet writing in America. More recently, George Core, editor of The Sewanee Review, argued that Tate "may well be the best American critic of our century."

The quantity, quality, and diversity of the work Tate left behind is, indeed, remarkable. He was the author of two biographies, a memoir, eight collections each of poetry and essays, a novel, and over a hundred articles. He was an editor of and contributor to both The Fugitive and the Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand, which remains an important work of political and cultural philosophy. As for awards and honors, Tate occupied the chair of poetry at the Library of Congress, served as president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, was elected to the Ameri can Academy of Arts and Letters, and won prizes from the Academy of American Poets and other arbiters of artistic greatness. Three years before his death in 1979, Tate was given the National Medal for Literature.

Yet for all of his achievements, Tate has suffered curious neglect. The reasons will be discussed below, but for now the good news is that there are signs his reputation is being restored. In 1999, ISI Books published his Essays of Four Decades, making Tate's critical work available again. And we now have the first installment of a two-volume biography, which covers Tate's life from his birth in 1899 in Winchester, Ken tucky, to the publication of his acclaimed novel The Fathers in 1938.

Precocious and with a cranium large enough to titillate a phrenologist, Tate was awkward and aloof as a child. But by the time he enrolled at Tennessee's Vanderbilt University, Tate had learned to play the enfant terrible. "If Jesus Christ should come upon earth and present me a poem I sincerely thought inferior, I would tell him just that to his teeth," the undergraduate once tenderly remarked. Though this comment betrays Tate's youthful hubris, it also speaks to his fearless commitment to art. Years later his dedication led Hemingway to conclude, "What it came down to was guts. And moral guts Allen had."

Even courage and genius need pruning, however, and happily for Tate he arrived at Vanderbilt just as the group of young thinkers who came to call themselves the Fugitives was beginning to coalesce. From this nascent movement would come the Agrarians and the New Critics. Donald Davidson, Robert Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ran som are only three of the great writers nurtured by these remarkable gatherings.

A hotheaded advocate of modernism, Tate was publishing poetry in national magazines even as an undergraduate. Looking back on this period, he described himself as "a prig as disagreeable as you could possibly conjure up." But with the assistance of Davidson, Ransom, and the others, Tate matured and acquired intellectual discipline. When he moved to New York in the 1920s and met the poets and critics he had admired from afar — Hart Crane, e. e. cummings, and Malcolm Cowley — he was at last able to take the full measure of his Fugitive years. Though the young writers he met up north were great talents, they had little interest in the philosophical and aesthetic ideas that had captivated him and his fellow Fugitives. Having initially bridled at his mentors' old-fashioned rigor, he now saw that he had been given a valuable inheritance, one that served him particularly well as a participant in (as well as a critic of) modernism.

Tate's postgraduate years were marked by growing fame, relentless poverty, and great eccentricity. Under wood's biography abounds with lively anecdotes, providing a vivid primer on the American literary scene of the last century. We are informed, for example, that Tate and his future wife, the novelist Caroline Gordon, first made love in a Kentucky graveyard during a visit to Robert Penn Warren after Warren had tried to kill himself. (Gordon herself claimed that she had tried to commit suicide at the age of four.) We are also told of Tate's run-ins with various Left Bank expatriates, including Hem ing way and Fitzgerald. Underwood offers a priceless encounter between Tate and Gertrude Stein, who one day remarked that no southerner could afford to know any history. Tate, who was then in the middle of researching a biography, shook his head and replied: "You ignorant old bi**h!" Thereby confirming once and for all his impeccable literary judgment.

Underwood also details the summer Robert Lowell came to live with Tate, "inaugurating one of the most powerful and volatile mentor-protégé relationships in American literary history." Ford Madox Ford had been introduced to Lowell, who was then under the psychiatric care of the former Fugitive poet Merrill Moore. Ford, recognizing Lowell's intelligence, handed him the following advice: "Young man, go south and learn how to write." Ford himself then traveled to Tennessee to live with the Tates while working on The March of Literature, where he grew ever more corpulent and suffered from "a variety of physical ailments aggravated by the greasy Tennessee food." To everyone's surprise, Lowell pulled up one day, urinated on the side of the road, and pitched a Sears, Roebuck tent in Tate's yard. Though Lowell proceeded to drive everyone crazy, he emerged from the experience awestruck by Tate. "All the English classics," he recalled, "and some of the Greeks and Latins were at Tate's elbow. He maneuvered through them, coolly blasting, rehabilitating, now and then reciting key lines in an austere, vibrant voice. Turning to the moderns, he slaughtered whole Chicago droves of slipshod Untermeyer Anthology experimentalists."

The difficult Lowell wasn't the only writer to benefit from Tate's guidance. The equally difficult Hart Crane did as well. Like Lowell, he moved in with Tate and made a nuisance of himself. But he too found the help that he was looking for — Tate provided extensive editorial and emotional assistance while Crane was working on The Bridge. And when no one else in American publishing thought Vladimir Nabokov worth a try, it was Tate (working at Holt) who first published Bend Sinister. Tate even wrote a blurb for the novel, which Nabokov would later say was the best he'd ever received.

Tate's judgment as a critic and mentor was equaled by his talent as a writer. Though he wrote until his death, the turbulent years that Under wood recounts in this first volume were among his most prolific. "To hear the night, to crave its coming, one must have deep inside one's secret being a vast meta phor controlling all the rest: a belief in the innate evil of man's nature, and the need to face that evil, of which the symbol is darkness, of which again the living image is man alone." This justly famous passage from The Fathers makes clear that Tate had attained both wisdom and mastery of craft.

Tate was a fighter, and he didn't miss out on many of the cultural brawls of his time. In an era far more skeptical than our own, Tate, who would later convert to Catholicism, heralded the supremacy of a theological outlook. He and his fellow Agrarians challenged Communism throughout the 1930s, when Marxist and socialist ideas were ascendant among the intelligentsia. V. F. Calverton, the Marxist editor of the Modern Quarterly, Granville Hicks, literary editor of the New Masses, and the critic Waldo Frank — among others — were beginning to evaluate contemporary literature according to its social content, while Tate took up arms to keep art safe from politicization. Long before the dawn of modern conservatism in the 1950s, Tate and his brethren were fighting against collectivist and secularist agendas with all their considerable might.

Aside from these battles, Tate continued to write poetry, and would always consider writing poetry the most important thing he did. He recognized that in order to win what is nowadays referred to as the culture war, one must be an active participant in one's culture. He furthermore understood that such participation must be for artistic rather than political purposes. "I confess that the political responsibility of poets…irritates me because the poet has a great responsibility of his own," Tate stated in his essay "To Whom Is the Poet Responsible?"

Anyone wondering why Tate has been neglected need look no further than those words. Far more than Tate's political conservatism, it was his forceful defense of the belief in a pre-political life — which is to say a realm that both precedes and transcends political concerns — that has caused left-leaning academics to wish Tate could be made to go away. Raising above politics the concerns of marriage and family, art and literature, and piety and loyalty toward one's home is anathema in the highly politicized environment of today's academy.

It is also precisely why Tate is to be valued so highly. For he saw very clearly what most contemporary thinkers do not: The result of viewing everything through political eyes is a distortion of man's nature and harmful to his well-being. The enduring power of Tate's work is that it challenges this myopic vision, returning our eyes to what one of his favorite writers, William Faulkner, called the "old verities." To neglect these verities in favor of government programs and economic policies is to do nothing less than to forfeit our humanity.