Keeper of the Flame

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

‘I DOUBT,” the novelist Malcolm Cowley once stated, “that 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.”

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Scott Morris

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

‘I DOUBT,” the novelist Malcolm Cowley once stated, “that 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.”