Allen Tate Summary

Allen Tate (1899-1979), American poet, critic, biographer, and editor, was a founder and editor of the Fugitive. John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks were also part of the Fugitiv... Read more

The phrase "man of letters," so often used in praise of Allen Tate, may suggest by its near-obsolescence that Tate and his work belong to the past, perhaps to the Old South, not to the late-twentieth ... Read more

In the following mixed review of Mr. Pope and Other Poems, Zabel argues that most of Tate's poetry is obscured by “texture of allusions and intricate phraseology.” Allen Tate&#... Read more

In the following review, Morse notes the lack of development in Tate's poetry, but underlines the strengths of the poems collected in Selected Poems. In the current issue of the Virginia Qua... Read more

In the following review, Brooks praises the topicality and richness of the poems in The Winter Sea, contending that the collection “deserves to be read by every one seriously interested in mode... Read more

In the following essay, Koch differentiates Tate from the Fugitive poets and views him as a “poet of romantic sensibility who has tried with varying success to compress his talents into a chast... Read more

In the following essay, Berland explores the role of violence in Tate's poetry and finds parallels between his verse and that of John Webster. Duchess: I could curse the stars— Bosola... Read more

In the following essay, Feder elucidates the influence of classical myths and literature on Tate's poetry. I “Consciousness of history cannot be fully awake, except where there is oth... Read more

In the following essay, Bishop provides a reading of several of Tate's early poems, maintaining that it was his ability “to incorporate the tone of his age into the rhythms of his poetry... Read more

In the following essay, Squires explores the significance of three of Tate's poems: “The Maimed Man,” “The Swimmers,” and “The Buried Lake.” It may ... Read more

In the following essay, True discusses Tate's importance as a poet. I In his essay, “Our Cousin, Mr. Poe,” Allen Tate wrote about his reading Poe, as a boy of fourteen, and gaz... Read more

In the following essay, Wiltshire asserts that Tate's “radical understanding of tradition, whereby the past must die and be transformed in order to enter into the life of the present, pl... Read more

In the following essay, Folks considers the unifying stylistic and thematic elements of the “Maimed Man” trilogy, focusing on the autobiographical aspects of the poems. The “Ma... Read more

Critical Essay by Cleanth Brooks [Tate grounds] his quite various speculations on art, letters, society, manners, morals, and human behavior … on a total view of man; that is to say, on religi... Read more

Critical Essay by Thomas R. West Allen Tate published in 1938 a splendid novel that places the social and aesthetic vision in a living circumstance. The setting of The Fathers is Virginia and Georget... Read more

Critical Essay by Hilton Kramer For readers of a certain age—I have in mind those who, like myself, first came to modern poetry (and to the criticism written to defend and elucidate it) in the... Read more

Critical Essay by Hilton Kramer For readers of a certain age—I have in mind those who, like myself, first came to modern poetry (and to the criticism written to defend and elucidate it) in the... Read more

Critical Essay by Roy Fuller In the thirties (and it did not end with the thirties) I greatly admired Tate for the sonorous and noble effects in much of his poetry, which I wanted to make a part of m... Read more

Critical Essay by Malcolm Cowley I doubt that any other poet in this country is a better judge of his contemporaries than Allen Tate. He has a personal distinction that frees him from jealousy and a ... Read more

Critical Essay by Monroe K. Spears Mr. Tate is, as critic, essentially a polemicist, an aggressive and sometimes truculent warrior who for more than twenty years has conducted a skillful defensive ac... Read more

Critical Essay by Northrop Frye Mr. Allen Tate is a religious determinist, and apart from his intellectual honesty (he constantly makes a point of giving his own case away), a very astute one. If the... Read more

Critical Essay by Richard Foster Tate has always been less a technical literary critic than an essayist using literature as the frame of reference within which he criticizes the mind and life of his ... Read more

Critical Essay by R. K. Meiners Many of [Tate's] early essays are stylistically awkward, full of involuted, semi-philosophical phrasings, and tentative in their critical formulations. But, tho... Read more