| Name: |
Allen Tate |
| Birth Date: |
|
| Death Date: |
|
| Place of Birth: |
|
| Place of Death: |
|
| Nationality: |
|
| Gender: |
|
| Occupations: |
|
John Orley Allen Tate was born in Clark County, Kentucky. After an uneven preparatory education, he entered Vanderbilt University in September 1918. During the course of his studies, he became a student of John Crowe Ransom, who remembers Tate in those days as a student who "was reading Baudelaire and Mallarme ... [and] already quoting de Gourmont on the 'dissociation of ideas.'" Tate was the only undergraduate invited by Donald Davidson to join the Fugitives and to work on their literary journal. Writing under the pseudonym Henry Feathertop, Tate published poems in the Fugitive that already showed the influence of his reading of French poets.
Moreover, Tate seems to have derived his attitude toward writing from the French. As Andrew Lytle says of him, "He, more than any other writer, has upheld this professionalism of letters. This attitude is obviously more French than English and is, I feel, unique in the English-speaking world, at least to the extent he carried and carries it." Tate's actual experiences in Paris influenced him little, however, for a number of reasons, including his solid grounding in classics (part of his undergraduate education), his passionate devotion to the beleaguered South of the twenties and thirties, and the odd historical fact that many expatriates were basically uninfluenced by their Parisian experiences.
This is a free page. This page contains 151 words. This
biography contains 2,900 words (approx. 10 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our (John) (Orley) Allen Tate Access Pass.
