Talk:Allen Tate

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Can it be true that Tate worked for National Review? It wasn't founded until the 50s, and the article seems to imply he worked there in the 20s.
 * Text now rearranged for better clarity; and [citation needed] message posted for this. Milkunderwood (talk) 08:41, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

The account of his marital history seems to contradict the statement in the entry for Caroline Gordon that they were married for 34 years (married, divorced for a brief period, then remarried). I have seen elsewhere that they divorced for the second time in 1959.

+++++++++++++++++ As best I can tell, everything else in the article on Tate is correct and well-expressed, though the coverage remains somewhat skimpy. But Tate's poem owes nothing to and in no way resembles Henry Timrod's poem, although I suppose that it is possible that Tate knew Timrod's poem and deliberately challenged its sentimentality with Tate's own hard-chiseled modernity and irony. Tate's poem owes a great deal to T. S. Eliot and other modernists. Here is Timrod's poem in its entirety (I have been unable to format this comment as poetry, and have inserted a "/" to indicate line breaks):

Ode to the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery by Henry Timrod

I.

Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,/ Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause; / Though yet no marble column craves / The pilgrim here to pause. /

II.

In seeds of laurel in the earth/ The blossom of your fame is blown,/ And somewhere, waiting for its birth,/ The shaft is in the stone! /

III.

Meanwhile, behalf the tardy years/ Which keep in trust your storied tombs,/ Behold! your sisters bring their tears,/ And these memorial blooms./

IV.

Small tributes! but your shades will smile/ More proudly on these wreaths to-day, / Than when some cannon-moulded pile / Shall overlook this bay. /

V.

Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!/ There is no holier spot of ground / Than where defeated valor lies, / By mourning beauty crowned! /

Here is the opening of Tate's poem (which is several times as long as Timrod's), and which I quote from memory:

Row after row, with strict impunity,/ The headstones yield their names to element;/ The wind whirrs without recollection./ In the riven troughs, the splayed leaves/ Pile up, of nature the casual sacrifice/ To the seasonal eternity of death. /

Further on, Tate's poem becomes much harder to understand than this opening.

I will wait a couple of weeks before removing this egregiously incorrect statement about "Ode to the Confederate Dead." The statement is somewhat as if one were to claim that Picasso had borrowed his style as a painter from Renoir, or from Millet. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Htkirbys (talk • contribs) 18:56, 17 September 2007 (UTC) Htkirbys 19:09, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Tate did not end his life an Atheist, and his conversion to Roman Catholicism was rather formidable to his later work. I am removing the "American Atheist" tag because it is unfounded. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.142.33.37 (talk) 02:53, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Fugitives and Agrarians - 2 different groups
The article presently says This is incorrect, or at best misleading. The two groups overlapped both in time and in membership, but were distinct, and they had distinct interests, with the Fugitives (poets) being more interested in poetry criticism, the Southern Agrarians in the values of the old South. See http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/speccol/vuhistory/fugitives_agrarians.php for members and brief biographies, and their respective affiliations. Milkunderwood (talk) 07:19, 22 July 2013 (UTC)
 * "the group were known as the Fugitive Poets and later as the Southern Agrarians."
 * Better now - thanks for help in phrasing. I've made another clarifying change. Milkunderwood (talk) 21:47, 23 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Changed word 'literary' back to 'political'. Agrarians did not focus on literature. Even though many of the "Twelve Southerners" were literary figures, if you look at I'll Take My Stand, the essays are all about the writers' political philosophy. They write about industrialization vs. agrarian economic models and how they had affected The South. They also write about culture in the South, but they write about it through an openly political lens. This is the primary distinction between the two groups: one was primarily focused on nurturing literature in the South, and the other was focused primarily on conservative politics and economic models in the South. Jpcohen (talk) 13:29, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Isabella Gardner 1915-1981
No Wikipedia entry for Gardner. There's a biography just come out and people will want to know who she is and what she wrote. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.10.198.117 (talk) 18:05, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Note this is not the same person as Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1840-1924. Milkunderwood (talk) 07:55, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes! It's a disgrace that as of May 2024, there is still no Wikipedia article on this well-regarded poets' poet. I have never seen anybody, anywhere disparage Isabella Gardner as a poet.

tate and racism section
Are Tate's racist views exceptional enough, coming from a conservative, white Southern man in the 1930-50s, to warrant such a large amount of the entire article on Tate's life and work? Whenever a figure has a history of making or publishing controversial remarks (whether they be racist, anti-Semitic, sexist in nature) or if that subject has been involved in any type of controversy, really, that subject matter flares up the passions of editors and takes up more space of an article than is usually warranted.

How do other editors view this section of the article? Could it use trimming? There do seem to be a lot of quotes listed, I suppose, to prove that Tate was a racist. I don't think we need a slew of quotes to get that Tate held racist views.

I should also note that I don't get the part of this section that associates Modernism with racism. Tate's racist views were very common in the South in the first half of the 20th century. They have more to do with that culture than with Modernism. Jpcohen (talk) 01:19, 19 June 2014 (UTC)


 * //Are Tate's racist views exceptional enough, coming from a conservative, white Southern man in the 1930-50s, to warrant such a large amount of the entire article on Tate's life and work?//
 * Warrant to whom, though? As a Black woman, and to other people who are interested in how the racism of influential intellectual figures affected American cultural history, it might be warranted. Personally, I find Tate to be a perfectly fascinating character. His poetry is lovely and he does seem to have evolved in his attitudes towards racism. He supported full voting rights for Black people, and I think his idea that voting rights should come first and that a solution to social and educational segregation would evolve organically in an environment where everyone had an absolute right to a free vote to be honorable and plausible. Pascalulu88 (talk) 01:00, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

EVERYTHING should be in this section and I will warn you not to cut it back again. The movement in poetry scholarship is toward revisiting the racist views of Southern Agrarian/Modernists. 66.65.84.20 (talk) 01:53, 20 June 2014 (UTC)


 * I agree that Allen Tate's racism is important. Young poetry scholars are integrating race into scholarship on Modernism.Jpeeps (talk) 02:03, 20 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Can we invite others to this conversation? I have learned a lot from this debate and it's important that all voices are heard.  I also agree that things should not be deleted until more voices are added.  JohnPSeverance, Jr.

I have removed the following text from the article: ""'Racism' is a neologism so recent that it wasn't in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1970. George Orwell noted in the 1940s that 'fascist' was a content-free negative epithet, applied to anyone and anything of which one disapproved. 'Racism' performs a similar disreputable function for the permanently aggrieved today" ("News & Comments: March 2019," The New Criterion, March 2019." I tracked down that March 2019 New Criterion article, and it (unlike the other New Criterion reference) has nothing to do with Tate; it doesn’t mention his name at all. Whoever added it was simply complaining about how the term "racism" is used today. CRCulver (talk) 07:30, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

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"Womanizing"?
Allen Tate was a notorious womanizer. Whoever he was married to, or living with at whatever time, there was always, eventually, another woman somewhere on the side. Some of these fugitive relationships had cultural significance. We would not have Mildred Haun's beautiful stories of Tennessee mountain life collected in "The Hawk's Done Gone" if Tate had not been getting it on with her, and getting her stories collected and published by Vanderbilt University Press. It wouldn't hurt to have a small section on his several dalliances. Pascalulu88 (talk) 01:12, 16 May 2024 (UTC)