John Orley Allen Tate was born in Clark County, Kentucky. After an uneven preparatory education, he entered Vanderbilt University in September 1918. During the course of his studies, he became a student of John Crowe Ransom, who remembers Tate in those days as a student who "was reading Baudelaire and Mallarme ... [and] already quoting de Gourmont on the 'dissociation of ideas.'" Tate was the only undergraduate invited by Donald Davidson to join the Fugitives and to work on their literary journal. Writing under the pseudonym Henry Feathertop, Tate published poems in the Fugitive that already showed the influence of his reading of French poets.

Moreover, Tate seems to have derived his attitude toward writing from the French. As Andrew Lytle says of him, "He, more than any other writer, has upheld this professionalism of letters. This attitude is obviously more French than English and is, I feel, unique...