SOURCE: True, Michael. “Allen Tate as Teacher and Poet.” Cross Currents 29, no. 3 (fall 1979): 324-30.

In the following essay, True discusses Tate's importance as a poet.

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In his essay, “Our Cousin, Mr. Poe,” Allen Tate wrote about his reading Poe, as a boy of fourteen, and gazing, by the hour, “at the well-known, desperate and asymmetrical photograph … which I hoped I should some day resemble.”¹ Anyone who ever saw Mr. Tate—or his photograph—knows that he succeeded in that wish, not only looking like Poe, but also achieving something of the brilliance that one associates with “The Philosophy of Composition” or Eureka. Tate's dark side, in a poem like “The Wolves,” also reminds us of this boyhood hero.

As a member of the Fugitives, an association of teachers and writers at Vanderbilt University in the early 1920's; as editor of Sewanee Review and Hound and Horn; but...