A teacher, biographer, poet, and leader of the New Criticism movement, John Orley Allen Tate joined his peers at Vanderbilt University in defaming modernity and encroaching technology, which he feared compromised humanity. He was born on December 19, 1899, in Winchester, Kentucky, and he sparked wonder and speculation in his parents. Visitors examined his oddly bulging head, which they identified as a sign of mental retardation. Tate studied at Tarbox School in Nashville for one year before entering Cross School in Louisville; he then completed pre-college courses at Georgetown University Preparatory School.
Tate, one of John Crowe Ransom's gifted freshmen, entered the English program at Vanderbilt with a considerable reading background and familiarity with metaphysical poetry and the French symbolists. He made good on his early promise by publishing in The Fugitive and The Double-Dealer and composing "The Chaste Land," an irreverent parody of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The onset of tuberculosis temporarily interrupted his graduating magna cum laude with the class of 1922. He taught high school in Lumberport, West Virginia, and worked briefly in his brother's coal office. Incapable of commercial thinking, he put his mind to literature, his life's work.
