Allen Tate: The Modern Mind and the Discovery of Enduring Love
by john v. glass iii
the catholic university of america, 376 pages, $59.95
I well remember sitting up half the night annotating Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” in my Norton anthology. As do I remember reading for the first time Tate’s most accessible poem, “The Swimmers”—an autobiographical narrative about boys out for a summer swim who come upon the body of a lynched black man—and sensing I was in the presence of true poetic and moral power.
But during these last two decades, Tate has been studied less for the poetry that won him early fame and more as one of the brightest of the Southern agrarians who sought to take a conservative intellectual stand against the secularizing and atomizing “industrialism” of American culture. Many scholars have treated his biography and prose works, but they keep their distance from his difficult poetry. Their monographs have been, perhaps, the more readable for it.
The same can be said for the handful of writers who have studied Tate for his part in the mid-century Catholic literary revival. When he converted in 1950, it seemed confirmation that Catholicism was taking an ascendant role in American philosophical and literary—if not theological—discourse. Tate became a representative Catholic “man of letters in the modern world.” Peter Huff’s account of Tate’s conversion, for instance, does not quote from his poems even once.
John V. Glass seeks to correct this oversight in his study of Tate’s achievement as a poet. Though Glass finds himself pulled off the trail at several points into prefatory throat-clearing and extended digressions on Tate’s biography (one of them a chapter in length), it is good finally to have a book on Tate the poet.