About Allen Tate
Allen Tate, born John Orley Allen Tate on November 19, 1899 in Winchester, Clark County, Kentucky and died on February 9, 1979 in Nashville, Tennessee, was an American poet, novelist, essayist, literary critic and teacher. In 1922, he founded and directed the magazine The Fugitive, of which he was the editor until 1925. The group of Fugitives valued the agrarian South against the industrial North. Allen Tate dissociates himself from the members of the group who showed sympathy for Mussolini or Hitler, but if Allen Tate supports democracy against fascism, on the other hand he remains ambiguous as of the racial question despite its developments.Alongside his activities as editor of The Fugitive, he moved to New York in 1924, for a four-year stay. He was a freelance journalist for The Nation, and writes articles for the poetry magazine Hound and Horn. From 1928 to 1930, with the help of a Guggenheim scholarship, he lived in Europe for two years. Returning to Tennessee in 1930, he took over the management of the conservative magazine The American Review.
He published his first collection 'Poems, 1928-1931' in 1932, followed by The Mediterranean and Other Poems in 1936, Selected Poems in 1937, and The Winter Sea in 1944. In 1943, he was appointed consultant and then Poet laureate of America from 1943 to 1944. At the same time he was in charge of the poetry section at the Library of Congress. During his exercise of this function, he created the Quarterly journal of the Library of Congress which reports on the acquisitions and the news of the library. In 1950 he converted to Catholicism.
A disciple of Thomas Ernest Hulme and greatly influenced by T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, he became a theoretician within the New Criticism literary movement. In 1954, he received the American Rome Prize in Literature for all of his work and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1956. He was awarded the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the best book of poems in 1977.
He began his career as a university professor in 1934, first at Southwest Tennessee Community College, at Woman's College at the University of North Carolina, then at Princeton University, finally joining the university of Minnesota where he taught from 1951 until his retirement in 1968.
Tate died in the Vanderbilt Hospital February 9, 1979. He was buried at Sewanee.
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Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.
