Word: tate
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...amusing to remember that I'll Take My Stand was attacked more violently in the South than it was in the North," Tate recalls. "The Southerners asked questions like, 'Can these people really milk cows?' That was how they saw agrarianism...
...Although Tate is sceptical about the poet-activist ("Our friend Shelley thought if he put those tracts he wrote in toy boats in Hyde Park, and people read them, a great revolution would take place!"), he does include social criticism as part of his responsibility as man and poet. For him, I'll Take My Stand was as much a defense of poetry as a defense of the South...
...Tate's artistic demands on himself are even more stringent than his social demands. His early training was rigorous. "In his Advanced Composition class. Mr. Ransom would assign all of Shakespeare's sonnets for us to study," Tate remembers. "Then we'd have to write a Shakespearean sonnet of our own, then an Italian sonnet...
Poetic models continued to figure in Tate's development for some time. "I didn't read any of T.S. Eliot till 1920," he explains, "though I'd read some of Pound. When I read Eliot, I couldn't write anything for a long time. Critics have pointed out that I'd written Eliotic poems before I read Eliot. That often happens in a certain period; people begin to do the same thing independently. But Eliot was so much more mature, you see, and I was just a boy. He rather overwhelmed me. So for awhile, I had to avoid that...
...Although Tate's early work can, on occasion, be derivative or hesitant ("It begins in uncertainty," said one critic, "and attains meaning only during composition"), his more mature poems are unquestionably written in his own voice--elegant, allusive, densely packed like semi-precious stones inside a glass paperweight. His later poems show a solidity, a self-confidence, not always removed from stubborness...