SOURCE: Arbery, Glenn Cannon. “Dante in Bardstown: Allen Tate's Guide to Southern Exile.” Thought 65, no. 256 (March 1990): 93-107.

In the following essay, Arbery determines the influence of Dante on Tate's work.

Of the writers born in 1899 who achieved world wide recognition—among them Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Allen Tate—Tate is probably now the least familiar to readers. He never became the center of a cult of bull fighting, he did not invent a word such as “nymphet” and he did not write the hall of mirrors fiction that would fascinate a Michel Foucault or a Jacques Derrida. He has dropped from favor partly because, as Louise Cowan has said, he “may well be the most difficult poet of the twentieth century, more difficult even than Pound or Eliot” (372), and partly because he is associated with the New Criticism, which is now treated by post-structuralist...