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Allen Tate
University of Minnesota Press
Six American Poets from Emily Dickinson to the Present was first published in 1969. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.This volume provides critical introductions to the work of Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Conrad Aiken, Marianne Moore, and E.E. Cummings, six American poets all of whom were born in the nineteenth century and whose various life spans overlap to cover a period of nearly a century and a half, reaching into the present. In his introduction, Allen Tate discusses the significance of this group of poets and their influence on contemporary poetry. He points out that the overlap in their ages gives a somewhat longer perspective to modern American poetry than the rise of modernism around 1912 has led us to look for. “The impressive variety and versatility of contemporary American poetry, including its ‘modernist’ development,” he writes, “has been the achievement of men and women born before 1901.”In discussing the six poets introduced in this volume, Mr. Tate offers interesting comments on the place in literary history of a number of other poets including Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Phelps Putnam, Mark Van Doren, John Hall Wheelock, and John Crowe Ransom.The introductions to the six poets are based on the material of six of the pamphlets in the series of University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers: Emily Dickinson by Denis Donoghue, Hart Crane by Monroe K. Spears, Edwin Arlington Robinson by Louis Coxe, Conrad Aiken by Reuel Denney, Marianne Moore by Jean Garrigue, and E.E. Cummings by Eve Triem.
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Fathers
Allen Tate
Ohio University Press, 1984
The Fathers is the powerful novel by the poet and critic recognized as one of the great men of letters of our time.

Old Major Buchan of Pleasant Hill, Fairfax County, Virginia, lived by a gentlemen's agreement to ignore what was base or rude, to live a life which was gentle and comfortable because it was formal. Into this life George Posey came dashing, as Henry Steele Commager observed, “to defy Major Buchan, marry Susan, betray Charles and Semmes, dazzle young Lacy, challenge and destroy the old order of things.”

The Fathers was published in 1938. It sold respectably in both the United States and England, perhaps because people expected it to be another Gone With the Wind, wheras it is in fact the novel Gone With the Wind ought to have been. Since its publication it has received very little attention, considering that it is one of the most remarkable novels of our time. Its occasion is a public one, the achievement and the destruction of Virginia's antebellum civilization. Within that occasion it discovers a terrible conflict between two fundamental and irreconcilable modes of existence, a conflict that has haunted American experience, but exists in some form at all times. The Fathers moves between the public and the private aspects of this conflict with an ease very unusual in American novels, and this ease is the most obvious illustration of the novel's remarkable unity of idea and form, for it is itself a manifestation of the novel's central idea, that “the belief widely held today, that men may live apart from the political order, that indeed the only humane and honorable satisfactions must be gained in spite of the public order, “is a fantasy.”

— From the introduction of The Fathers
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