[The body of Allen Tate's poetry] is slim—as slim as Eliot's and Ransom's. He published one novel, The Fathers (1938). A remarkable work, it was never widely popular; but like Allen's best poetry, it remains in print, and I think it is destined to last.
Why did one so greatly and variously gifted write and publish so little? What he said of his friend John Ransom was not, I think true of him: that he set out deliberately to be a Minor Poet…. My observation is that as an imaginative writer Allen had a gift that was highly and intricately autobiographical. This may seem odd, in that his poetics placed a premium upon achieved anonymity, classical restraint, the primacy of craftsmanship over subject—the antithesis of the romantic subjective artist whose work is the fervent unmediated outpouring of his own sensibilities. "As a poet I have no experience," he once remarked. Yet—and perhaps the paradox is the key—almost all that Allen wrote is drawn either directly from his own situation or from that of his immediate forebears. He used to speak of himself as having conducted his education in public, and if by that statement he meant that his writings consisted of his openly enunciated response to his own experience, it is quite appropriate.
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