After moving to New York to edit Telling Tales, Tate married fiction writer Caroline Gordon in 1924 and resettled at a farmstead in Clarksville, Tennessee. The couple had a daughter, Nancy Meriwether. Late in their marriage, the Tates collaborated on The House of Fiction (1950), a standard composition text for English majors. Tate worked at various editorial posts while publishing increasingly mature verse. The recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships, he returned from a sojourn in Paris to contribute to Literary Review, Minnesota Review, Shenandoah, Partisan Review, Yale Review, Criterion, and Le Figaro Litteraire. He showcased his poetry in Mr. Pope and Other Poems (1928) and demonstrated Southern loyalties in biographies of two notable nineteenth-century Confederates, Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier (1928) and Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall (1929).
Tate was a consummate versifier and supporter of the Vanderbilt coterie known as the Fugitive Agrarians who sought a return to earth-based life and values; Tate was the group's only undergraduate member. He participated with Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and eight others in the symposium I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930). At the height of his literary career, he published Poems: 1928–1931 (1932), The Mediterranean and Other Poems (1935), and Selected Poems (1937), and co-edited Who Owns America (1936) with Herbert Agar. The Fathers (1938), a self-revelatory historical novel, detailed his family's role in American and Southern history. As a literary theorist, Tate issued criticism in Reactionary Essays in Poetry and Ideas (1936); Reason in Madness (1941), co-authored by H. Cairns and Mark Van Doren; The Language of Poetry (1942); On the Limits of Poetry: Selected Essays (1948); The Forlorn Demon: Didactic and Critical Essays (1953); and a compilation, Essays of Four Decades (1969).
