54 Facts About Allen Tate

1.

John Orley Allen Tate, known professionally as Allen Tate, was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and poet laureate from 1943 to 1944.

2.

In 1916 and 1917 Allen Tate studied the violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.

3.

Allen Tate was the first undergraduate to be invited to join a group of men who met regularly to read and discuss their poetry: they included John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson on the faculty; James M Frank, a prominent Nashville businessman who hosted the meetings; and Sidney Mttron Hirsch, a Jewish mystic and playwright, who presided.

4.

Allen Tate took along a younger friend to some meetings, sophomore Robert Penn Warren, who was invited to become a member in 1923.

5.

When Robert Penn Warren left Southwestern College to accept a position at Louisiana State University, he recommended Allen Tate to replace him.

6.

Allen Tate accepted the position, and spent 1934 through 1936 there as lecturer in English.

7.

Allen Tate made his debut as a critic in the weekly book page Davidson edited for the Nashville Tennessean, publishing 29 reviews there during 1924.

8.

In 1924, Allen Tate moved to New York City where he met poet Hart Crane, with whom he had been corresponding for some time.

9.

In 1928, along with others New York City friends, Allen Tate went to Europe.

10.

In 1928, Allen Tate published his first book of poetry, Mr Pope and Other Poems, which contained his most famous poem, "Ode to the Confederate Dead".

11.

That same year, Allen Tate published a biography Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier.

12.

Just before leaving for Europe in 1928, Allen Tate described himself to John Gould Fletcher as "an enforced atheist".

13.

In 1929, Allen Tate published a second biography, Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall.

14.

Allen Tate believed The American Review could popularize the work of the Southern Agrarians.

15.

Allen Tate objected to Collins's open support of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, and condemned Fascism in an article in The New Republic in 1936.

16.

In 1938 Allen Tate published his only novel, The Fathers, which drew upon knowledge of his mother's ancestral home and family in Fairfax County, Virginia.

17.

Lytle was teaching history at the nearby University of the South and was made editor of the Sewanee Review for a year; Allen Tate helped him by getting poems and articles from Wallace Stevens, William Meredith, and others.

18.

In 1943 Allen Tate was appointed the first rotating Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress, where he established the Associate Fellows in American Letters.

19.

Allen Tate initiated recordings of 16th and 17th century English lyrics and modern American poetry from Emily Dickinson to Karl Shapiro for Books for the Blind.

20.

Allen Tate reviewed Shapiro's first book of poems, Person, Place and Thing, for the magazine Common Sense in 1943, writing the review as a letter to Sgt.

21.

Allen Tate was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1949.

22.

Allen Tate would try without success until the end of his life to get Gordon elected to the Institute.

23.

Allen Tate's godfather was the philosopher Jacques Maritain, who had been his friend at Princeton for several years.

24.

In 1951, six weeks after his baptism, Allen Tate, writing "as a Catholic," published a letter in The New York Times objecting to Cardinal Francis Spellman's banning the Italian film The Miracle.

25.

Allen Tate was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry for 1956.

26.

In Minneapolis Allen Tate had been living in the Oak Grove Hotel; Gardner bought and furnished a house.

27.

That year Allen Tate edited Selected Poems of John Peale Bishop, and The Fathers was reprinted.

28.

Allen Tate was awarded the Brandeis Creative Arts Medal in Poetry in 1961 for lifetime achievement.

29.

Isabella met Natasha Spender, with whom Allen Tate had had an affair.

30.

Allen Tate remained friends with the Spenders until his death as well as with Elizabeth Hardwick, his other serious affair during his marriage with Gordon.

31.

Allen Tate was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which had only 50 members, in 1964.

32.

Allen Tate was the subject of a long illustrated article leading off the arts section of the Sunday Minneapolis Star Tribune for Jan 24,1965.

33.

Allen Tate moved back into the Oak Grove Hotel after Gardner learned that he had been having an affair with a graduate student, Helen Heinz, a nun who was assistant director of nursing at a county hospital.

34.

Allen Tate was named the first Regents Professor of English at Minnesota.

35.

Allen Tate was a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, fall 1966, and at Vanderbilt University, spring 1967.

36.

For Francis Biddle's 80th birthday dinner in Washington, Allen Tate delivered a greeting speech in Latin.

37.

Allen Tate sold his papers to the Firestone Library at Princeton; the proceeds would help build a new house for his retirement at Sewanee.

38.

Allen Tate was elected president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

39.

Allen Tate delivered the principal address at Ransom's 80th birthday celebration at Kenyon College.

40.

Allen Tate resigned as president of the National Institute in November 1968 because of the tiring trips to New York.

41.

Allen Tate edited The Complete Poems and Selected Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe and published Essays of Four Decades.

42.

Allen Tate gave the annual Joseph Warren Beach Memorial Lecture at the University of Minnesota in 1970 and read at the Poetry International Festival in London.

43.

Allen Tate published The Swimmers and Other Selected Poems in 1971.

44.

Allen Tate lectured at UNC Greensboro for two weeks in 1970 and 1971 and at Harvard for four days in 1971.

45.

Allen Tate was earning as much as he could by lecturing because the annuity his brother Ben left him would expire after his death.

46.

Allen Tate had to cancel his Hopwood Awards Lecture at the University of Michigan in 1972 when he was hospitalized at the Vanderbilt Hospital for ten days with bronchitis and emphysema; Gordon substituted for him.

47.

Allen Tate received a medal for distinction in literature from the University of South Carolina.

48.

Allen Tate was sick when he delivered the three Gauss Lectures for 1973 at Princeton; he collapsed afterwards and was in the hospital at Princeton for ten days with emphysema.

49.

In 1974 Allen Tate gave a lecture at the Library of Congress on the centenary of Robert Frost's birth.

50.

Allen Tate wasn't allowed to attend the public events but, though weak, was engaging and witty at the social events which included his friends Eudora Welty, Joseph Frank, Francis Fergusson, and others.

51.

Allen Tate was hospitalized at Vanderbilt Hospital for three weeks in 1975 following a coma; he was now bedridden.

52.

Allen Tate received the Ingram Merrill Foundation's Award in Literature for 1975.

53.

For example, though Allen Tate spoke well of the work of fellow Modernist poet Langston Hughes, in 1931, Allen Tate pressured his colleague Thomas Dabney Mabry, Jr.

54.

Allen Tate expressed views against interracial marriage and miscegenation and refused to associate with black writers.