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.
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).
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.
