SOURCE: Bishop, Ferman. “Mr. Pope and Other Poems.” In Allen Tate, pp. 61-74. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1967.

In the following essay, Bishop provides a reading of several of Tate's early poems, maintaining that it was his ability “to incorporate the tone of his age into the rhythms of his poetry that made his work so promising for the future.”

The astonishing outpouring of brilliance that marked the beginnings of the Fugitive group resulted in a number of published volumes: John Crowe Ransom had four books by 1927; Donald Davidson, two; Ridley Wills, two; Stanley Johnson, one. Allen Tate, with only a privately printed undergraduate volume to his credit, must have felt the competition. In 1923, while he was teaching in West Virginia, he prepared a volume of poems for publication, but the financial difficulties of his publisher prevented its appearance.¹ Yet it was probably not entirely by accident that...