Vol. 23 No. 10 · 24 May 2001
pages 30-31 | 2575 words
‘I intend to support white rule’
Ian Hamilton
- Allen Tate: Orphan of the South by Thomas Underwood
Princeton, 447 pp, £21.95, December 2000, ISBN 0 691 06950 6
When Allen Tate died in 1979, Simon and Schuster speedily commissioned a biography, to be written, they announced, by Ned O’Gorman, a poet of some reputation and a friend of two of Tate’s three wives. O’Gorman, it would seem, got going in the usual way, writing to all the obvious Tate contacts and attempting to interview key intimates. He also trawled through at least some of the vast cache of Tate material (57 boxes, 30 cubic feet) that sits in Princeton’s Firestone Library – sold to the university by Tate in 1967. By the mid-1980s, O’Gorman felt ready to put pen to paper: ‘So one day the biographer has enough to begin. And he begins to write and discovers, as I have discovered, that lies, deceptions, half-truths, fake truths, family loyalties, friendships, literary feuds get in the way and render even a birth date suspect.’
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 23 No. 11 · 7 June 2001
From Stan Smith
According to Ian Hamilton (LRB, 24 May), in the late 1920s Allen Tate 'took to describing himself as Modernism's gift to the Old South'. More than this, he can be credited with the invention of the term 'Modernism', at least as a sobriquet for the Eliot/Pound literary revolution. The word seems first to have been used in this sense in correspondence between Tate and fellow editors of the Fugitive in the early 1920s, and appears in print in a Fugitive editorial on 'The Future of Poetry' by John Crowe Ransom in February 1924. When Tate's protégée Laura Riding introduced the word to British culture in 1927, in her joint study with Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, it was rapidly taken up by the clique around Auden, and subsequently surfaces in the writings of Spender, MacNeice and others from this school. Via this route and, in the United States, through the criticism of another graduate of the Vanderbilt/Fugitive stable, Randall Jarrell, the epithet entered academia in the late 1950s and by the mid-1960s had become standard usage. In a sense, then, it is the Old South which invented 'Modernism', described as late as 1937 by Ezra Pound as 'a movement to which no name has ever been given'.
Stan Smith
Nottingham Trent University
