Allen Tate [Hardcover]

Thomas A. Underwood (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 15, 2000

Despite his celebrity and his fame, a series of literary feuds and the huge volume of sources have, until now, precluded a satisfying biography of Allen Tate. Anyone interested in the literature and history of the American South, or in modern letters, will be fascinated by his life. Poetry readers recognise Tate, whom T.S. Eliot once called the best poet writing in America, as the author of some of the 20th century's most powerful modernist verse. Others know him as a founder of "The Fugitive", the first significant poetry journal to emerge from the South. Tate joined William Faulkner and others in launching what came to be known as the Southern Literary Renaissance. In 1930, he became a leader of the Southern Agrarian movement, perhaps America's final potent critique of industrial capitalism. By 1938, Tate had departed politics and written "The Fathers", a critically acclaimed novel about the dissolution of the ante-bellum South. He went on to earn almost every honour available to an American poet. Based on the author's unprecedented access to Tate's personal papers and surviving relatives, this book brings Tate to 1938. It explores his attempts, first through politics and then through art, to reconcile his fierce talent and ambition with the painful history of his family - and of the South. Tate was subjected to, and also perpetuated, fictional interpretations of his ancestry. He alternately abandoned and championed southern culture. Viewing himself as an orphan from a region where family history is identity, he developed a curious blend of spiritual loneliness and ideological assuredness. His greatest challenge was transforming his troubled genealogy into a meaningful statement about himself and southern culture as a whole. It was this problem that consumed Tate for the first half of his life, the years recorded here. This portrait of a man who both made and endured American literary history depicts the South through the story of one of its treasured, ambivalent and sometimes wayward sons. Readers should gain a fertile understanding of the southern upbringing, education, and literary battles that produced the brilliant poet who was Allen Tate.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Some biographers depict the triumph of poetic genius as a thing fated and inevitable. Underwood discards all such illusions in this compelling account of Allen Tate's formative years. Indeed, painstaking research reveals how close this literary genius came to losing his way and squandering his gifts by becoming a political pamphleteer. To uncover the reasons for this near-tragedy, Underwood plumbs a difficult childhood during which Tate's parents burdened him with the myth of beleaguered southern virtue. In his self-lacerating responses to the imperatives of that myth, Tate vacillated. His true artistic vocation allied him with regional giants like Faulkner and Ransom and with international figures like Hemingway and Pound. But reactionary politics exercised a strong attraction, drawing Tate into the orbit of apologists for Hitler and Mussolini. Tracing each step--and misstep--in letters, conversations, and poems, Underwood charts the torturous path by which Tate finally escaped from fascist temptations and genealogical confusions. Liberated at last by self-knowledge, Tate could finally write the milestone novel The Fathers, in which he exposed--with artistic poise and maturity--the imprisoning cultural contradictions of the South. A biographical study to be treasured as long as Tate's masterful verse attracts readers. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

A well-researched, thoroughly detailed study of how the South shaped and alienated one of its best-known men of letters. -- Gary Kerley, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Not only comprehensive and well researched . . . but also insightful -- Fred Hobson, The Atlantic Monthly

Tate is fully dramatized here as a soul in torment, a seminal figure in Southern literature. . . -- Library Journal

Tate is fully dramatized here as a soul in torment, a seminal figure in Southern literature. . . -- Library Journal

[A] first rate biography. . . . [written] with skill, care and psychological acuity. -- Washington Post

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 440 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (December 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691069506
• ISBN-13: 978-0691069500
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,985,980 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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