Allen Tate

From Philosopedia

Tate, Allen (19 November 1899 - 9 February 1979)

John Orley Allen Tate was the Tennessee-born writer of metaphysical poetry, editor of Fugitive (1922–1925) and of Sewanee Review (1944–1946). He taught English at the University of Minnesota.

Asked about humanism, Tate went on record in 1951:

I have written two essays on the general subject, or at least touching it, and I should think that my views could be partly derived from them: first, “Humanism and Naturalism” in Reactionary Essays (Scribner, 1936), and “The Hovering Fly” in On The Limits of Poetry (Swallow-Morrow, 1948). A third essay, in the latter volume and entitled “Techniques of Fiction,” touches upon literary aspects of naturalism.

It is difficult to make a short statement on the literary value of naturalistic humanism that could have much value; it would be merely ad hoc, without supporting argument. In general, I should say, humanism cannot maintain itself as naturalism; for man, if he is to remain human, must have access to truths of which unaided he is not capable. The great literary “naturalists,” Flaubert and Joyce, were overtly anti-Christian; but the configuration of meaning in both is supra-rational. I need not allude to Joyce’s idea of “epiphanies,” or to the Christian allegory implicit in Un Coeur Simple, to say nothing of the death-scene of Emma Bovary.

This is a very large subject. I may add that there has been a great deal of misunderstanding of literary naturalism in our time, as it comes to us from Flaubert, James, and Joyce. These men embodied the symbol in the natural object, and thus returned to the kind of symbolism that Dante gives us, rather than the symbolism of Bunyan, which is superimposed upon the natural order of experience. The naturalism represented by the influence of Zola seems to me to have come to a dead-end.

A Catholic, nevertheless he was quoted by his biographer Thomas A. Underwood's Allen Tate: Orphan of the South as believing,

I am an atheist, but a religious one - which means there is no organization for my religion

Tate died in Nashville, Tennessee, leaving behind Caroline Gordon (whom he married in 1925 and divorced in 1959), their one daughter (Nancy, born 1925), a second wife (Isabella Gardner, married in 1959 and divorced), and a third wife (Helen Heinz, whom he married in 1966, three sons).

{WAS, 16 February 1951}