Tate's major contribution to classroom teaching took him to Southwestern College, the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina (now UNC Greensboro), and Columbia. In 1939, he was named Princeton's first fellow in creative writing. Parallel to classroom brilliance, he served the Library of Congress as its 1943 poetry consultant. Before retirement, he edited and taught at the universities of Chicago and Minnesota, where he published Collected Essays (1959) and Poems (1960). After a divorce from Gordon, he was married to Isabella Gardner for eleven years and then for thirteen years to Helen Heinz, mother of his sons John Allen, Michael Paul, and Benjamin Lewis.
Tate's last titles include Memoirs and Opinions (1975) and two verse compendia, The Swimmers and Other Poems (1971) and Collected Poems 1919–1976 (1977), compiled two years before his death on February 9, 1979, in Nashville. His honoraria brought him numerous awards, including the Bollingen Prize and the National Medal for Literature.
