front cover of Allen Tate
Allen Tate
John V. Glass III
Catholic University of America Press, 2016
This study reconsiders and reassesses the work of Allen Tate as a poet whose themes and expression place him among the most studied and canonical Modernists of the last century. Allen Tate (1899-1979), a former Poet Laureate of the US, although generally regarded during his lifetime as one of the twentieth century's preeminent literary critics and men of letters, has been largely overlooked by critics in the years since his death. John V. Glass III rectifies this by tracing the development of Tate's thought and verse from his early years as a student at Vanderbilt in the 1920s through his final terza-rima sequence completed in the 1950s. Tate's poetry in the intervening years charts the course of an American modernist who brings to bear on the problems of his age the unique perspective of a southerner, one who refuses either to accept sentimentality or to repudiate the past in his search for a solution to the dissociation of sensibility.
[more]

front cover of Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate
Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate
Collected Letters, 1933-1976
Edited by Alphonse Vinh & Intro by Louis D. Rubin, Jr.
University of Missouri Press, 1998

Offering all of the extant letters exchanged by two of the twentieth century's most distinguished literary figures, Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate: Collected Letters, 1933-1976 vividly depicts the remarkable relationship, both professional and personal, between Brooks and Tate over the course of their lifelong friendship.

An accomplished poet, critic, biographer, and teacher, Allen Tate had a powerful influence on the literary world of his era. Editor of the Fugitive and the Sewanee Review, Tate greatly affected the lives and careers of his fellow literati, including Cleanth Brooks. Esteemed coeditor of An Approach to Literature and Understanding Poetry, Brooks was one of the principal creators of the New Criticism. His Modern Poetry and the Tradition and The Well Wrought Urn, as well as his two-volume study of Faulkner, remain among the classics read by any serious student of literature. The correspondence between these two gentlemen-scholars, which began in the 1930s, extended over five decades and covered a vast amount of twentieth-century literary history.

In the more than 250 letters collected here, the reader will encounter their shared concerns for and responses to the work of their numerous friends and many prominent writers, including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Robert Lowell. Their letters offer details about their own developing careers and also provide striking insight into the group dynamics of the Agrarians, the noteworthy community of southern writers who played so influential a role in the literature of modernism.

Brooks once said that Tate treated him like a younger brother, and despite great differences between their personalities and characters, these two figures each felt deep brotherly affection for the other. Whether they contain warm invitations for the one to visit the other, genteel or honest commentaries on their families and friends, or descriptions of the vast array of social, professional, and even political activities each experienced, the letters of Brooks and Tate clearly reveal the personalities of both men and the powerful ties of their strong camaraderie.

Invaluable to both students and teachers of literature, Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate provides a substantial contribution to the study of twentieth-century American, and particularly southern, literary history.

[more]

logo for Ohio University Press
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
[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
Six American Poets from Emily Dickinson to the Present
An Introduction
Allen Tate
University of Minnesota Press, 1969
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.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter