Allen Tate Quotes

Tate was born near Winchester, Kentucky to John Orley Tate, a businessman, and Eleanor Parke Custis Varnell. In 1916 and 1917 Tate studied the violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.
He began attending Vanderbilt University in 1918, where he met fellow poet Robert Penn Warren. Warren and Tate were invited to join a group of young Southern poets under the leadership of John Crowe Ransom; the group were known as the Fugitive Poets and later as the Southern Agrarians. Tate contributed to the group's magazine The Fugitive and to the agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand published in 1930, and this was followed in 1938 by Who Owns America? Tate also joined Ransom to teach at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Some of his notable students there included the poets Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell. Lowell's early poetry was particularly influenced by Tate's formalist brand of Modernism.
In 1924, Tate moved to New York City where he met poet Hart Crane, with whom he had been exchanging correspondence for some time. Later,he went to Europe. In London he visited with T.S. Eliot, whose poetry and criticism he greatly admired, and he also visited Paris. After two years abroad, he returned to the United States, and in 1930 was back in Tennessee.
Tate died in Nashville, Tennessee. His papers are collected at the Firestone Library at Princeton University.