Tate's Selected Poems (1991) draws from all of his major collections to this date and provides an overview of his development as a poet. Tate won a Pulitzer Prize for this volume.

One of Tate's friends and a strong influence on his poetry, Bill Knott, published Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems, 1969-1999 in 2000. Knott's goofy vision of the world and his absurdist sense of humor are strikingly similar to Tate's.

Richard Howard's 1988 translation of Andre Breton's classic surrealist novel Nadja, first published in the 1920s, details the narrator's wanderings through the streets of Paris with a seemingly "mad" woman named Nadja. Breton uses his narrative to reflect on the nature of time, perception, space, and reality. Tate writes out of the surrealist tradition.

In 1977, Tate published a novel entitled Lucky Darryl: A Novel, which he wrote...