Allen Tate, Author at The Imaginative Conservative

About Allen Tate

John Orley Allen Tate (November 19, 1899 – February 9, 1979), known professionally as Allen Tate, was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and Poet Laureate from 1943 to 1944. Tate was invited to join an informal literary group of young Southern poets under the leadership of John Crowe Ransom; the group was known as the Fugitives. Tate contributed to the group's magazine The Fugitive. He was a member of the movement known as Southern Agrarianism and contributed to its seminal work, I'll Take My Stand.

On Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher”

By Allen Tate|2026-01-18T16:07:18-06:00January 18th, 2026|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Christianity, Cluny, Edgar Allan Poe, Literature, Timeless Essays|

In "The Fall of the House of Usher," Edgar Allan Poe takes the Gothic setting, with all its machinery and décor, and the preposterous Gothic hero, and transforms them into the material of serious literary art. “Commentary on Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher,” from The House of Fiction, edited by Caroline Gordon and [...]

“Stranger”

By Allen Tate|2017-10-29T12:29:13-05:00October 29th, 2017|Categories: Poetry, Southern Agrarians|

This is the village where the funeral Stilted its dusty march over deep ruts Up the hillside covered with queen’s lace To the patch of weeds known finally to all. […]