Tate, (John Orley) Allen

Tate, [John Orley] Allen (1899–1979), Tennessee author, began his career as an editor of The Fugitive (1922) and also showed interest in regionalism through his contributions to the symposia I'll Take My Stand (1930), The Critique of Humanism (1930), and Who Owns America? (1936), and in his interpretive biographies of Stonewall Jackson (1928) and Jefferson Davis (1929). He is best known for his poems, published in Mr. Pope and Other Poems (1928), Three Poems (1930), Poems, 1928–1931 (1932), The Mediterranean and Other Poems (1936), Selected Poems (1937), Winter Sea (1944), Poems, 1922–1947 (1948), The Swimmers (1971), and Collected Poems (1977).

His metaphysical poetry is distinguished by a neoclassical polish and satire, achieving sharp contrasts through use of archaisms verging on the baroque. He described his technique as “gradually circling round the subject, threatening it and filling it with suspense, and finally accomplishing its demise without ever quite using the ultimate violence upon it.”

His criticism has been published as Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (1936); Reason in Madness (1941); On the Limits of Poetry (1948), including essays from the preceding volumes; The Hovering Fly (1949), literary essays; The Forlorn Demon (1953), “didactic and critical essays”; Collected Essays (1959); Essays of Four Decades (1969); and Memoirs and Opinions (1975). The Fathers (1938) is a novel set in pre‐Civil War Virginia.

His anthologies include American Harvest (1942), edited with John Peale Bishop, a collection of creative writing, 1920–40; and, with his former wife (1924–59), Caroline Gordon, he wrote the text The House of Fiction (1950). Tate edited the Sewanee Review (1944–46) and taught at the University of Minnesota (1951–68). His correspondence with Donald Davidson was published in 1974, that with John Peale Bishop in 1981, and that with Andrew Lytle in 1987.