It’s the birthday of poet and critic Allen Tate (1899-1979), whose poetry was somewhat formal, intellectual, and rooted in the South, and who looked exactly like someone your parents would have bought life insurance from.

Tate was born in Winchester, Kentucky, and attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville. While there, he joined a group of poets called The Fugitives and started a literary magazine called—wait for it—The Fugitive. (Poets. *sigh*) Tate was a huge T.S. Eliot fan and his poems from the start showed Eliot’s influence. After Vanderbilt, Tate did a brief stint in his brother’s coal office and blew $700 shipping coal to the wrong city and that was the end of his business career. (So, probably a good thing that none of our parents did buy life insurance from him.) He instead went into teaching and editing, teaching at universities like Princeton and the University of Minnesota (go Golden Gophers!) and editing magazines like Telling Tales and The Kenyon Review (KR is huge) and eventually The Sewanee Review (also huge). He became closely aligned with the Agrarians, Southerners critical of modern industrial life, which Tate felt eroded intellectual thought.

Tate is best known for the poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead” (1926, revised 1930), which expresses the isolation of a man caught between a heroic past and a chaotic industrial present. His poetry in general is filled with classical allusions, and one critic claimed that Tate was “the most difficult poet of the twentieth century.” In 1950, Tate converted to Catholicism; he felt that “art could not survive without religion.” He married three times and had a daughter with his first wife and three sons with his third, including twins, but one of the twins died in an accident as an infant. The poet Robert Lowell wrote about this son’s death in a couple of poems, and Tate ended their friendship over this.

Tate’s poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead” begins:

Row after row with strict impunity

The headstones yield their names to the element,

The wind whirrs without recollection;

In the riven troughs the splayed leaves

Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament

To the seasonal eternity of death…

(Read the entire poem here.)

Have a briskly cold but beautifully sunny Monday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.