I met the poet Allen Tate only twice. The first time, in Harvard, he urged me to read Father William F. Lynch's Christ and Apollo, advice that enhanced my intellectual life short of transforming it. The second time was many years later. I happened to be giving a lecture at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. Vaguely aware that Tate and his wife lived a few miles from the university, I did not think of seeking him out.
We had had no communication for years. So I was surprised when my host, Walter Sullivan, told me that Tate had expressed a wish to see me. I was to be brought to his house, where I would find the front door unlocked. He would be in bed, in the second room on the left down the corridor. Unfortunately, his wife would not be there to receive me: she had business elsewhere. No one told me that I would find Tate hooked up to two oxygen tanks and quietly dying of emphysema. I tried to hold a conversation, and asked him about his early years with John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks.
There was no reply, until I made the mistake of mentioning the poet Wallace Stevens, whereupon Tate growled in a sentence that seemed to take an hour to emerge: "I'm tired being told by Mr Stevens that there is nothing to be hoped for after death." There was no merit in staying any longer, so I said goodbye and found my way out. He died a few months later.
Thomas A. Underwood's biography of Tate brings the story from November 19th, 1899, when Tate was born to parents of Scotch-Irish ancestry in Winchester, Kentucky, to 1938, when he published a remarkable novel of the Old South, The Fathers. There is no literary reason why the biography should end at that point. The difficulties are issues of tact and law.
In his middle and later years Tate was a relentless philanderer. Some of his women are still alive and do not want their sexual lives to be noised abroad. There is also Tate's widow, notably vigilant in the report of such episodes. So Underwood has confined himself to Tate's early literary and intellectual life, a limitation that still leaves much of great cultural interest to be pondered.
Like Davidson, Tate could not let the South alone. He was by native disposition a landowner of the South, though he owned no land worth disputing. Like Ransom for some years, he maintained a one-sided quarrel with the North, industrialism, the city, science, and positivism. He spoke up for tradition, family, the land, agrarianism as a way of life. When he thought to be socially explicit, he was a white supremacist. In 1934 he wrote: "I belong to the white race, therefore I intend to support white rule. Lynching is a symptom of weak, inefficient rule; but you can't destroy lynching by fiat or social agitation; lynching will disappear when the white race is satisfied that its supremacy will not be questioned in social crises." He blamed the increasing number of lynchings on three factors: "Communist agitation, which deludes the Negro into believing that he can better his condition by crime; general economic fear and instability taking the form of mob violence; and outside interference in the trials of accused Negroes."
But Tate's significance belongs to the history of modern poetry, fiction, and criticism rather than to racial prejudice and the political rhetoric of the South. From his early years at Vanderbilt, when he was not wasting his spirit in drink and sex, he made himself informally learned in Greek, Latin, and modern literature. He was the first of his group to see that T.S. Eliot was the crucial figure in poetry and criticism. Ransom withheld his approval from the new literature of Pound and Eliot. When Eliot's The Waste Land appeared in 1922, Tate and Ransom quarrelled over its form. Ransom held that good forms were as wellestablished as good manners, and for like reasons of civility and ceremony. Tate held that new feelings needed new forms, and that the form of The Waste Land was exactly what the new fears and desires needed.
Ransom was not prepared to give up on the formal achievements of Thomas Hardy in poetry and of the great English novelists in moral fiction. Tate committed himself to the poetics of Eliot, Pound, and Hart Crane. But he had problems with his own poetry. It was difficult to write under Eliot's shadow. Eliot was not a prolific poet, but every now and again he was able to distance himself from his griefs to the point of giving them an ostensibly impersonal form and a strange, irrefutable music. Tate had feelings enough, but he choked his mind with ideas and notions to the point at which he virtually suppressed whatever music he might have achieved.
Most of his verse is clotted, as if he were afraid to leave any possible implication to one side. When he seemed to find a style, it turned out to be Eliot's or Crane's or Ransom's. Only rarely, in three or four poems, did Tate bring to the pitch of a personal style what he otherwise merely thought. I have in mind, and in the mind's ear, these: 'The Mediterranean', 'The Swimmers', 'To the Lacedemonians,' and parts of the 'Ode to the Confederate Dead.' The Fathers remains a triumph.
Denis Donoghue is the Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. His most recent books are Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot and Adam's Curse: Reflections on Literature and Religion