Yes, Tate was a reactionary. But he believed that one could animate Western culture only by reacting violently to the enervating forces within it. “Reaction is the most radical of programs,” he wrote; “it aims at cutting away the overgrowth and getting back to the roots.”⁶⁴Tate reminds us that reaction, while decisively radical, is anything but progressive in form, for a progressive radicalism only rearranges the foliage. His reactionary tendencies emerged from what he called a “healthy skepticism,” a skepticism “which, like formaldehyde, is a great preservative of all sorts of things—of a sense of how things really were and of resistance against things as they are.”⁶⁵Tate possessed both of these senses; he knew that to be without the one is surely to be without the other.

Still, his reactionary tendencies never prevented him from making even the most difficult of concessions. His being a “historical relativist”—though not a philosophical or moral one—finally compelled him, for example, to concede that the Southern way of life, all nostalgia aside, could not have continued, and that a Southern victory over the Northern states might very well have precipitated its demise. “For the Confederacy to have survived,” he wrote, “the development of competitive power would have followed military victory and political independence.” The politicians of South Carolina, he regretfully admitted, would have been just as anxious as their Northern counterparts to enter the global power arena. “So I am convinced—if one can be convinced of what didn’t happen—that a uniform industrial civilization would have spread over the ‘two countries’; so that the South today [in 1962] would be even more ‘Yankee’ than it actually is.” The paradox of the historical outcome, adds Tate, is “that the South has enjoyed a longer period of identity in defeat than it might have been able to preserve in victory.”⁶⁶

It was as a man of letters, however, not as a historian, that Tate stood tall among his contemporaries. His early poetry was championed by Ford Madox Ford, whose recommendation was decisive in securing for Tate a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928. To be near the man he considered his foremost teacher, the young writer Robert Lowell lived for several weeks in a pup tent pitched on Tate’s lawn. Theodore Roethke and John Berryman sought Tate’s advice on the making of poetry. Jacques Maritain referred to their guide as “an astounding force of nature” and arranged a private meeting between “this great poet whom I love so much” and Pope Pius XII.⁶⁷For Austin Warren, Tate was “a transmitter of the poet’s discipline and authority . . . a prime and fortifying representative of culture.”⁶⁸

During his tenure at the University of Minnesota, where he taught English from 1951 until his retirement in 1968, Tate delivered invited papers across America, throughout Western Europe, and in India. He also received honorary degrees, as well as several prestigious awards, including the National Medal for Literature, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, and the Gold Medal of the Dante Society. In 1959 The Sewanee Review reverenced Tate by publishing an issue of verse, essays, and notes in honor of his sixtieth birthday. Chief among the contributors was Eliot, who recognized the genius of his protégé in this telling sentence: “Allen Tate is a good poet and a good literary critic who is distinguished for the sagacity of his social judgment and the consistency with which he has maintained the least popular of political attitudes—that of the sage.”⁶⁹

As sage Tate resisted the creeds of modernism, creeds inspirited by Rousseau and institutionalized by the heirs of Marx and Engels. Even as a burgeoning writer living in Manhattan between the two World Wars, Tate rejected the faith of those fashionable intellectuals whom he engaged on that proverbial island of sophistication and forward looks, a faith predicated upon the myths of progress and materialism. From the start he was, in the words of his loyal confidant Cleanth Brooks, “the man of insight, the man of the shrewdest judgment, the truly orthodox man.”⁷⁰Concisely put, Tate was everything that the present literary establishment despises: a crusader for the philosophical and theological realism of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

So much more could be said about the stand of Allen Tate. To be sure, much more needs to be said. In the end, however, Tate speaks for himself—in, and through, all that he wrote. He speaks with certainty, lucidity, and authority. His is the voice not of quiet desperation, but of calm conviction. His purpose is true and consistent, and that purpose is, according to his longtime friend Andrew Nelson Lytle, to remind us of “that Western knowledge of ourselves which is our identity.”⁷¹This knowledge flows from the sacred source of all created things, the source to which Tate would have us forever returning, lest we float like so many dead things into the chaotic sea of nothingness.

1. Letter to Andrew Lytle, 23 Dec. 1954 and 9 Feb. 1955, The Lytle-Tate Letters: The Correspondence of Andrew Lytle and Allen Tate, ed. Thomas Daniel Young and Elizabeth Sarcone (Jackson, 1987), 243.
2. Essays of Four Decades (Chicago, 1968), 122.
3. Mere Literature and the Lost Traveller (Nashville, 1969).
4. Essays of Four Decades, 147.
5. Allen Tate: A Literary Biography (New York, 1971), 23.
6. H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: Second Series (New York, 1920), 136–37.
7. “The Fugitive 1922–1925: A Personal Recollection,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 3 (1942), 79.
8. Allen Tate: A Literary Biography, 54.
9. “Statement of Principles,” I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners (1951 [1930]), xix.
10. The Poetry Reviews of Allen Tate 1922–1944, ed. Ashley Brown and Frances Neel Cheney (Baton Rouge, 1983), 69.
11. Rev. ed. (Baton Rouge, 1977 [1938]), 134–35.
12. Allen Tate, Introduction, Sanctuary, by William Faulkner (New York, 1968), xi.
13. “Remarks on the Southern Religion,” I’ll Take My Stand, 174.
14. Letter to Donald Davidson, 10 December 1932, The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate, ed. John Tyree Fain and Thomas Daniel Young (Athens, Ga., 1974), 280.
15. “Humanism and Naturalism,” Memoirs and Opinions 1926–1974 (Chicago, 1975), 190. As “The Fallacy of Humanism,” this essay first appeared in Criterion 8 (1929), 661–81; it was reprinted in Hound and Horn 3 (1930), 234–57; and again in The Critique of Humanism: A Symposium, ed. C. Hartley Grattan (New York, 1930), 131–66.
16. For an assessment of Babbitt’s and More’s religious essences, see, in particular, George A. Panichas, The Critical Legacy of Irving Babbitt: An Appreciation (Wilmington, Del., 1999), 83–106.
17. Ibid., 92.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 94.
20. Ibid., 93.
21. Quoted in Allen Tate: A Literary Biography, 94.
22. Letter to Davidson, 18 February 1929, The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate, 223.
23. Tate’s conversion to Roman Catholicism was slow, if inevitable. He did not enter the Church until 1950. That year he and Caroline Gordon, sponsored by Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, received their first communion together.
24. Tate, “Remarks on the Southern Religion,” 156–57.
25. Ibid., 159.
26. Ibid.
27. Letter to Davidson, 18 February 1929, The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate, 224.
28. Essays of Four Decades, 14–15.
29. Ibid., 55.
30. In the following passage, Tate paraphrases the symposium’s underlying thesis: “Even though personal production for use throughout society is now neither possible nor desirable, it should not be forgotten that the nearer a society is to personal production for use the freer it is. We are not, therefore, crying for absolute liberty; we do want a little of it—as much as can be got when the majority of men own small units of production, whether factories or farms.” See “Notes on Liberty and Property,” Who Owns America?: A New Declaration of Independence, ed. Herbert Agar and Allen Tate (Boston, 1936), 92.
31. Letter to Davidson, 4 December 1942, The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate, 329.
32. Essays of Four Decades, 6
33. Ibid., 235.
34. Ibid., 10.
35. Ibid., 144.
36. Ibid., 552.
37. Ibid., 170–71.
38. Ibid., 150.
39. Ibid., 162.
40. Ibid., 169.
41. Memoirs and Opinions 1926–1974, x.
42. Ibid.
43. Introduction, Essays of Four Decades (Wilmington, Del., 1999), xix.
44. Creation and Discovery: Essays in Creation and Aesthetics (New York, 1955), 279.
45. A bibliography of Tate’s prolific achievement is available in Allen Tate and His Work: Critical Evaluations, ed. Radcliffe Squires (Minneapolis, 1972), 309–34.
46. See, respectively, Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York, 1925), ix; T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York, 1961), 72; and Essays of Four Decades, 539.
47. Essays of Four Decades, 406.
48. See Michael M. Jordan, “Sense and Sensibility,” review of Romantic Confusions of the Good: Beauty as Truth, Truth Beauty, by Marion Montgomery, The University Bookman, Vol. 39, No. 4 (1999), 35.
49. All the poems quoted are from Allen Tate, Collected Poems 1919–1976 (New York, 1977).
50. Essays of Four Decades, 595–96.
51. Ibid., 599.
52. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, trans. Anthony Kerrigan (Notre Dame, 1985), 93.
53. Ibid., 174.
54. Essays of Four Decades, 537.
55. The Fathers, 219.
56. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York, 1958 [1880]), bk.12, ch.6.
57. Quoted in James Dickey, Introduction, The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories (New York, 1981), 16.
58. Essays of Four Decades, 178.
59. Memoirs and Opinions, 1926–1974, 12.
60. Essays of Four Decades, 104.
61. Letter to Davidson, 5 January 1943, The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate, 333.
62. June 1931, The Republic of Letters in America: The Correspondence of John Peale Bishop and Allen Tate, ed. Thomas Daniel Young and John J. Hindle (Lexington, 1981), 36.
63. Allen Tate: A Recollection (Baton Rouge, 1988), 66.
64. “Remarks on the Southern Religion,” 174–75.
65. Letter to Davidson, 12 April 1928, The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate, 212.
66. “The Gaze Past, the Glance Present,” The Sewanee Review 70 (1962), 672.
67. Jacques Maritain, letter to Caroline Gordon, 24 February 1968, Exiles and Fugitives: The Letters of Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Allen Tate, and Caroline Gordon, ed. John M. Dunaway (Baton Rouge, 1992), 91.
68. In Continuity: The Last Essays of Austin Warren, ed. George A. Panichas (Macon, Ga., 1996), 127.
69. “A Note,” Sewanee Review 67 (1959), 576.
70. Letter to Allen Tate, 23 August 1973, Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate: Collected Letters 1933–1976, ed. Alphonse Vinh (Columbia, 1998), 254.
71. Andrew Lytle, “Allen Tate: Upon the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday,” Sewanee Review 67 (1959), 543.