Tate was born in 1899 in Winchester, Kentucky. He attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he joined the group of Southern writers that would come to be known as the Fugitives, and subsequently, the Agrarians. Tate produced his most important work in the 1920s-1940s. Though he always had ambitions as a poet, his most important contributions were in the areas of literary and cultural criticism. He became an influential advocate of a conservative, hierarchical and agrarian South at a time when that region was still in a phase of transition into a modern industrial system. Tate’s most important essays can be found in Essays of Four Decades (1968). His most important poem is “Ode to the Confederate Dead”…
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Citation: Lesman, Robert. "Allen Tate". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 February 2009 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4316, accessed 24 November 2024.]
