Allen Tate

Allen Tate was U.S. Poet Laureate from 1943 to 1944. Born in Kentucky, he attended Vanderbilt University, where he was the only undergraduate admitted as a member of the Fugitives, a group of white male Southern intellectuals that included Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and Donald Davidson, and who published a journal (Fugitive) and anthology (I’ll Take My Stand, 1930). The group was agrarian, conservative, religious, and for a while, very influential on American literature. Tate, like many others in the group, expressed white supremacist views that were openly anti-Semitic and racist.

Tate is the author of twelve books of poems, including The Swimmers (1970), The Winter Sea (1944), and Mr. Pope and Other Poems (1928). He published one novel, The Fathers (1938), and three biographies, of Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee. His multiple books of essays include Memoirs and Opinions (1975), The Man of Letters in the Modern World (1955), and On the Limits of Poetry (1948). He was editor of The Sewanee Review from 1944 to 1947, and taught at Princeton University and the University of Minnesota. Tate was mentor to a number of younger poets, including Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Randall Jarrell. He was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1966 to 1979.

Tate married Caroline Gordon in 1924. When Tate was named U.S. Poet Laureate, they moved to DC and lived with Brainard Cheney and Frances Neel Cheney in this house in 1943 to 1944. Gordon gave the house its nickname; “The Bird Cage” was the name of a whorehouse in one of Cheney’s novels.