Allen Tate was born in 1899 in Winchester, Kentucky. His father’s business endeavors forced Tate’s family to frequently relocate, and at the age of twelve, Tate traveled very sporadically with his mother after his parents’ divorce. Tate studied the violin at the Cincinnati, Ohio Conservatory of Music in 1916, but in 1917 left the school and one year later enrolled at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee. There he began meeting with a literary group based at the school that called themselves the Fugitive Poets; in 1922 he founded and edited the short-lived magazine Fugitive, inspired by the ideas and writings of the group.

Upon graduating from Vanderbilt, Tate moved to New York City. He was married with a young daughter by 1925 when he began writing for prestigious journals such as the New Republic. He also edited … [He then went on to work at the Library of Congress, edit the Sewanee Review, lecture throughout Europe, and teach at New York University] …obscure magazines and worked as a janitor while he connected with other writers and honed his craft. Soon Tate’s first two books were published; a collection of his poems, Mr. Pope and Other Poems and a biography, Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier, both debuted in 1928. The author accepted a Guggenheim Fellowship that year to study abroad in London and Paris, where he met authors such as T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway.

Tate’s works that were published immediately after his time in Europe were mainly essays, many of which were included in the publication I’ll Take My Stand (1930) in which Tate defended the Southern United States’ traditionally agricultural economy. The author, as he had recently moved his family to a farm in Clarksville, Tennessee, took a wary position on the spreading industrialization of the North.

Tate continued to publish works of both poetry and prose for the next five decades, including The Mediterranean and Other Poems (1936), On the Limits of Poetry: Selected Essays, 1928-1948 (1948), and The Swimmers and Other Selected Poems (1971). He also taught at various universities and colleges, and from 1939 to 1942 he stayed at New Jersey’s Princeton University as the poet in residence. He then went on to work at the Library of Congress, edit the Sewanee Review, lecture throughout Europe, and teach at New York University.

Tate’s final appointment was to the University of Minnesota where he taught for seventeen years until he retired in 1968. By that time, he had divorced his first wife, married and divorced Isabella Gardner, married Helen Heinz and fathered three sons by her. Tate died in 1979 in Nashville, Tennessee.