Collected Poems, 1919-1976

Description

One of the early-twentieth century Southern intellectuals and artists of the early twentieth century known as the Agrarians, Allen Tate wrote poetry that was rooted strongly in that region’s past—in the land, the people, and the traditions of the American South as well as in the forms and concerns of the classic poets. In “Ode to the Confederate Dead”— generally recognized as his greatest poem—he delineates both the horror of the sight of rows of tombstones at a Confederate cemetery and the honor that such sacrifice embodies, resulting in “a masterpiece that could not be transcended” (William Pratt).

Allen Tate (1899-1979) was born in Winchester, Kentucky, and spent much of his adult life teaching first in the South, then in Minnesota. He is also the author of the novel The Fathers. “Allen Tate is the supreme classicist, the most convincingly grandiloquent orator, of his generation. The rhetoric of his monologues, analyzing the sublime decadence of the moral and political scene, is gloomy, scornful and yet icily aloof. The more philosophical poems tease the reader with ironies of existence and morality. Everywhere is an easy 17th-century formality, sureness with myth, and habit of cadence and judgment…. It is simply important to have Tate again in print, accessible to a couple of generations of readers who probably hardly know him.” —John Fuller, on the hardcover publication of Collected Poems 1919-1976 in 1977

Additional information