Essays of Four Decades

by Allen Tate

This classic collection of nearly fifty essays by one of the century's most acclaimed poets and literary critics speaks poignantly to the concerns of today's students, teachers, and general literature readers alike. It covers the broad sweep of Tate's critical concerns: poetry, poets, fiction, the imagination, language, literature, and culture.

Genres: Essays, Criticism, Southern, Literary Criticism

640 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Poetry of especially known American writer and editor John Orley Allen Tate includes "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (1926); a leading exponent of New Criticism, he edited the Sewanee Review from 1944 to 1946.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Tate

Reviews

[Laura]

This was a superb collection of essays on literature, poetry, the role of the poet in society, the role of the critic, and the place humanities has in higher education. For the most part I found Tate to be keenly insightful, although at times I was fatigued by his tedious criticism of the critics. Tate's essays have enhanced my approach to poetry.

[Diann Blakely]

ALLEN TATE: ORPHAN OF THE SOUTH is Thomas A. Underwood’s first volume of what promises to be an exhaustive (and, in the proposed Volume II, uncomfortable) study. Several reviews of Underwood’s book have noted how previous biographers have run aground on the rocky shoals of Tate’s personal life: Compulsive philandering, Catholicism, and the creative process aren’t, after all, very easy to reconcile on an intellectual basis, though they seem to recur frequently, and in even more bizarre combinations, in many artists’ lives. Similarly, ISI Books’ reissue of Tate’s ESSAYS OF FOUR DECADES contains pieces that are not only brilliant, but disturbingly brilliant for those who tend to dismiss the former Fugitive/Agrarian on the basis of his creepy biases and reactionary politics.













(originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE)