Tex Norman

America's Second Poet Laureate 1943-1944



Posted: Tuesday, October 07, 2008

by

  Allen Tate (1899-1979) Tate, born in Kentucky and graduated from Vanderbilt University, was a poet and a literary critic, who wrote at least 20 books and received many honors, including the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1956. He was the founding editor of The Fugitive, from 1922 to '25, a magazine of poems published in Nashville by a group of Southern poets. Tate is noted for his poem "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (1927).

 

The second Poet Laureate of the United States was John Orley Allen Tate, but went exclusively by Allen Tate in his literary career.  Mr. Tate was born near Winchester, Kentucky.  Mr. Tate wrote one novel The Fathers (1938),.that is a loose depiction of his early years with a father who left the family and allowed his mother and three boys to flounder.

Mr. Tate had musical ambitions, and studied the violin  at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music although he failed to achieve his ambitions and this disappointment is alluded to in his 1953 poem "The Buried Lake."

 

Mr. Tate  enrolled at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and while there he helped launched a poetry journal called  Fugitive in 1922. Tate thus became a founding editor of the poetry journal whose three-year run heralded the literary renascence of the South.

Tate received a letter in 1922 from Hart Crane, and in that letter Mr. Crane stated that he hear some similarities between the poems of Tate and the poems of T. S. Eliot.  This letter motivated Tate  to buy a copy of Eliot's Poems and he immediately identified with the works of Mr. Elliot.

In 1922 Mr. Tate came down with tuberculosis, a disease that, at that time in our history was extremely serious, and often deadly.  The TB forced Tate to withdraw from Vanderbilt and he went to the mountains of North Carolina to recuperate.   Mr. Tate returned to the university in 1923 and during his last semester his roommate was Robert Penn Warren. 

After receiving his Bachelor's degree, Mr. Tate moved to New York City, where he met Hart Crane. Mr. Tate married Caroline Gordon, in New York in May 1925.  The couple had a daughter, Nancy, born in September of 1925 (which goes to show that the first child can come any time, but the second child always takes 9 months).  Between 1925 and 1928, Tate wrote freelance articles and reviews for such periodicals as the Nation and the New Republic, did editorial work for the publisher of pulp romance magazines, and performed janitorial functions in the building.  The Tates actually shared a house with Hart Crane, in rural Patterson, New York, during the winter of 1925. Tate later wrote the introduction to White Buildings (1926).Crane's first volume of poetry.

Tate soon published his own work:

1928   Mr. Pope and Other Poems, and a biography, Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier.

 

1929   Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall

1932  Poems: 1928-1931 

1936  The Mediterranean and Other Poems

1937  Selected Poems

1938  The Feathers (a novel)

1942-43  Mr. Tate became the Poet In Residence at Princeton

1943 Mr. Tate he became the Consultant In Poetry at the Library of Congress

1944  Mr. Tate became the editor of the Sewanee Review

1948 he served on the jury that awarded, in February 1949, the controversial first Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound for his Pisan Cantos.

1949  On the Limits of Poetry: Selected Essays, 1928-1948

            Poems, 1922-1947.

 

1950  Mr. Tate became a convert to Roman Catholicism.

1951 Tate accepted a tenured position at the University of Minnesota, and he remained there until he retired in 1968. 

1953  The Forlorn Demon: Didactic and Critical Essays

1956 Tate received the Bollingen Prize

1959  Mr. Tate and his wife divorced

1966 Tate married Helen Heinz one of his former students at Minnesota.

1967 Tate and his new wife had twin sons.

1968  One of the twin boys died in an accident.

1969  Tate and his second wife had another son.

1979 Allen Tate died in Nashville.

Tate's papers are at the Firestone Library, Princeton University.

One of Allen Tate's most notable works follows: 
 
Ode to the Confederate Dead   by  Allen Tate Poet Laureate 1943-1944

 

Row after row with strict impunity

The headstones yield their names to the element,

The wind whirrs without recollection;

In the riven troughs the splayed leaves

Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament

To the seasonal eternity of death;

Then driven by the fierce scrutiny

Of heaven to their election in the vast breath,

They sough the rumour of mortality.


Autumn is desolation in the plot

Of a thousand acres where these memories grow

From the inexhaustible bodies that are not

Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row.

Think of the autumns that have come and gone!--

Ambitious November with the humors of the year,

With a particular zeal for every slab,

Staining the uncomfortable angels that rot

On the slabs, a wing chipped here, an arm there:

The brute curiosity of an angel's stare

Turns you, like them, to stone,

Transforms the heaving air

Till plunged to a heavier world below

You shift your sea-space blindly

Heaving, turning like the blind crab.


     Dazed by the wind, only the wind

     The leaves flying, plunge


You know who have waited by the wall

The twilight certainty of an animal,

Those midnight restitutions of the blood

You know--the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze

Of the sky, the sudden call: you know the rage,

The cold pool left by the mounting flood,

Of muted Zeno and Parmenides.

You who have waited for the angry resolution

Of those desires that should be yours tomorrow,

You know the unimportant shrift of death

And praise the vision

And praise the arrogant circumstance

Of those who fall

Rank upon rank, hurried beyond decision--

Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall.


     Seeing, seeing only the leaves

     Flying, plunge and expire


Turn your eyes to the immoderate past,

Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising

Demons out of the earth they will not last.

Stonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp,

Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run.

Lost in that orient of the thick and fast

You will curse the setting sun.


     Cursing only the leaves crying

     Like an old man in a storm


You hear the shout, the crazy hemlocks point

With troubled fingers to the silence which

Smothers you, a mummy, in time.


                               The hound bitch

Toothless and dying, in a musty cellar

Hears the wind only.


                         Now that the salt of their blood

Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea,

Seals the malignant purity of the flood,

What shall we who count our days and bow

Our heads with a commemorial woe

In the ribboned coats of grim felicity,

What shall we say of the bones, unclean,

Whose verdurous anonymity will grow?

The ragged arms, the ragged heads and eyes

Lost in these acres of the insane green?

The gray lean spiders come, they come and go;

In a tangle of willows without light

The singular screech-owl's tight

Invisible lyric seeds the mind

With the furious murmur of their chivalry.


     We shall say only the leaves

     Flying, plunge and expire


We shall say only the leaves whispering

In the improbable mist of nightfall


That flies on multiple wing:

Night is the beginning and the end

And in between the ends of distraction

Waits mute speculation, the patient curse

That stones the eyes, or like the jaguar leaps

For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim.



What shall we say who have knowledge

Carried to the heart?  Shall we take the act

To the grave?  Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave

In the house?  The ravenous grave?


                                   Leave now

The shut gate and the decomposing wall:

The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,

Riots with his tongue through the hush--

Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!
Tex Norman is a social worker, currently working at the Oklahoma DHS Abuse and Neglect hotline. He interviews people reporting abuse and/or neglect of children and vulnerable adults and writes a narrative. The narratives (and demographics) are used to initiate investigations of the allegations. He says it is like writing 8 to 10 stories a day. In August 2012, he will have been married to Kathie for 40 years. He has a son Ryan who earned a PhD from Princeton and he is now a scientist doing research in molecular biology. Tex spends his free time working as an artist and writer. He has one art site, and a blog that might be of interest: http://tex-norman.artistwebsites.com/ and http://collagepoetrybytex.blogspot.com/
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