He was the first undergraduate to be invited to join a group of men who met regularly to read and discuss their poetry: they included John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson on the faculty; James M. Frank, a prominent Nashville businessman who hosted the meetings; and Sidney Mttron Hirsch, a mystic and playwright, who presided.

A. Bryant, was "to demonstrate that a group of southerners could produce important work in the medium [of poetry], devoid of sentimentality and carefully crafted," and they wrote in the formalist tradition that valued the skillful use of meter and rhyme.

[3] When Robert Penn Warren left Southwestern College to accept a position at Louisiana State University, he recommended Tate to replace him.

Tate made his debut as a critic in the weekly book page Davidson edited for the Nashville Tennessean, publishing 29 reviews there during 1924.

"[5] In his essay "The Fallacy of Humanism" (1929), Tate criticized the humanists of his time for creating a value system without investing it with any identifiable source of authority.

During two months in New York, Tate secured a publisher for a symposium on the South and agrarianism that he and Ransom, Davidson, Andrew Lytle, and others had been planning.

[9] Meeting at Benfolly and in Nashville, Tate, Ransom, Davidson et al. completed work on their symposium, I'll Take My Stand by Twelve Southerners, published in 1930.

During this time, Tate also became the de facto associate editor of The American Review, which was published and edited by Seward Collins.

He objected to Collins's open support of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, and condemned Fascism in an article in The New Republic in 1936.

In 1938 Tate published his only novel, The Fathers, which drew upon knowledge of his mother's ancestral home and family in Fairfax County, Virginia.

During 1940 through 41 he was also a regular panelist, with Mark Van Doren and Huntington Cairns, on the popular CBS radio program Invitation to Learning and sometimes a guest the following year.

Lytle was teaching history at the nearby University of the South and was made editor of the Sewanee Review for a year; Tate helped him by getting poems and articles from Wallace Stevens, William Meredith (poet), and others.

He initiated recordings of 16th and 17th century English lyrics and modern American poetry from Emily Dickinson to Karl Shapiro for Books for the Blind.

Shapiro, then stationed in Australia, mixing some compositional advice with high praise ("May I list here certain poems that for me are already placed among the best poetry of our time?

Publishing Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, John Peale Bishop, Malcom Cowley, Mark Van Doren, Randall Jarrell, R. P. Blackmur, John Berryman, Dylan Thomas, Peter Taylor, and others, he greatly increased the magazine's circulation and made it one of the foremost quarterlies in the English language.

[12][13][14] In 1951, six weeks after his baptism, Tate, writing "as a Catholic," published a letter in The New York Times objecting to Cardinal Francis Spellman's banning the Italian film The Miracle.

Tate was one of six U.S. delegates in 1952, including William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, and W. H. Auden, to the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris.

Later in 1952, the U.S. State Department sent Tate to the UNESCO Conference on the Arts in Venice; in Rome he had an audience with Pope Pius XII.

"Homage to Allen Tate," honoring his 60th birthday, was published in the Autumn 1959 Sewanee Review, including contributions by Ransom, Lytle, Cowley, Eliot, Blackmur, Porter, Van Doren, Davidson, and Lowell.

That year Tate edited Selected Poems of John Peale Bishop (Chatto & Windus), and The Fathers was reprinted (Eyre & Spottiswood and Swallow).

The Tates spent their summer vacations in England and Italy, seeing among others the Eliots, Louis MacNeice, Yvor Richards, W. H. Auden, Graham Greene, the Joseph Franks, Edith Sitwell, the Herbert Reeds, the Roy Fullers, the C. Day Lewises, and the Stephen Spenders, who gave them a cocktail party in 1962.

Tate moved back into the Oak Grove Hotel after Gardner learned that he had been having an affair with a graduate student, Helen Heinz, a nun who was assistant director of nursing at a county hospital.

While the Tates were at Lytle's for dinner one evening in July 1968, the babysitter allowed Michael to choke to death in his crib on a toy telephone while she was running him a bath.

He edited The Complete Poems and Selected Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe (New American Library) and published Essays of Four Decades (Swallow and Oxford).

Tate gave the annual Joseph Warren Beach Memorial Lecture at the University of Minnesota in 1970 and read at the Poetry International Festival in London.

He and Helen spent two weeks in Italy; in Florence he attended the dinner celebrating Alfredo Rizzardi's translation of Ode to the Confederate Dead and Other Poems.

At Sewanee the program included Denis Donoghue, Cleanth Brooks, Howard Nemerov, William Jay Smith, Radcliffe Squires, Walter Sullivan, Louis Rubin, and Lewis Simpson.

[21][22][23] Underwood (p. 291) doesn't, however, quote Lincoln Kirstein's reply to Tate's letter (see the 1930)s: "The most lucid and carefully thought out attitude that I have ever seen in regard to the whole business."

According to the critic Ian Hamilton, Tate and his co-agrarians had been more than ready at the time to overlook the anti-Semitism of the American Review in order to promote their 'spiritual' defense of the Deep South's traditions.

"[26] However, his views on race were not passively incorporated; Thomas Underwood documents Tate's pursuit of racist ideology: "Tate also drew ideas from nineteenth-century proslavery theorists such as Thomas Roderick Dew, a professor at The College of William and Mary, and William Harper, of the University of South Carolina — "We must revive these men, he said.