Allen Tate

The poet and critic Allen Tate might be called the 'Eliot of the American South'. In his essays of the 1920s and 1930s Tate was to give the idea of the South a decisive philosophical foundation. Further, in such poems as "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (1927) he was able to encapsulate the specific historical being of this region - including its "neo-gothic" broken quality - in commanding modernist form. It was for this reason that Walker Percy said that Tate and William Faulkner were the only "great cosmos-shaping poets" that the South had produced. There is no lack of contemporary criticism explaining why this should be so in the case of Faulkner, but Tate has in recent years become a more shadowy figure and one too often disposed of in his categorization as a Nashville Agrarian. This study tries to redress the balance. A fundamental imperative in Tate's work is his need to connect the South as a model of order to a European or classical-Christian archetype. In doing this he became part of what is still a relatively little-studied countermovement in American literature that valued Catholic forms of the imagination. This is why the study tries to interpret Tate within the wider context of what might be called an American traditionalist modernism, both in its appearance in the first half of the twentieth century in such authors as T.S. Eliot and in its continuation in the South of the post-World War II era (in Lewis P. Simpson, Richard Weaver and Walker Percy). Indeed in placing Tate at the centre of this many-sided countermovement this study attempts to branch out to a broader analysis of the central tenets of American traditionalist modernism and of its distinctive ecumenical sensibility. "a true opus magnum ... an achievement of a very high academic order" Prof. dr. hab. Marek Wilczyński