SOURCE: Koch, Vivienne. “The Poetry of Allen Tate.” The Kenyon Review 11, no. 3 (summer 1949): 355-78.

In the following essay, Koch differentiates Tate from the Fugitive poets and views him as a “poet of romantic sensibility who has tried with varying success to compress his talents into a chastely classical form.”

I should like to propose two revisions of the customary valuation put upon the poetry of Allen Tate. First, it has become increasingly evident with each new work that Mr. Tate is a fugitive from the Fugitives. The Fugitives were that talented group of Southern writers who, finding the Northern poetic climate of the early twenties too exacerbatingly modern, reaffirmed their allegiances with “tradition,” a term they took some care to define. While we commonly think of the Southerners as a group, and while in a loose personal sense this may be so, it is my belief that in...