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Biography Allen Tate

U.S. Consultant in Poetry, 1943-1944

Allen Tate, U.S. Consultant in Poetry, 1943-1944. Photo credit: Gonville de Ovies.

Allen Tate was born in Winchester, Kentucky, in 1899. He was the author of 14 poetry collections, including Mr. Pope and Other Poems (1928), Selected Poems (1937), and Collected Poems, 1919-1976 (1977). He also wrote two biographies, a novel, and more than 15 books of prose. The recipient of a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation as well as the Bollingen Prize from Yale University, Tate served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1943-1944. He was the founding editor of The Fugitive, a magazine of verse published out of Nashville, Tennessee, and named for a group of Southern poets. From 1944-1946, Tate was the editor of The Sewanee Review. He taught at Kenyon College, the Southwestern College in Tennessee, Princeton University, the University of North Carolina, New York University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Minnesota. He died in 1979.

Audio Recordings of Allen Tate

Selected Works at the Library of Congress