Allen Tate and the Sewanee Review

Abstract

Allen Tate and the Sewanee Review Robert Buffington (bio) The autumn 1959 issue of this magazine published “Homage to Allen Tate: Essays, Notes and Verse in Honor of His Sixtieth Birthday.” John Crowe Ransom, Andrew Lytle, Robert Lowell, Herbert Read, R. P. Blackmur, Arthur Mizener, Howard Nemerov, T. S. Eliot, John Hall Wheelock, Francis Fergusson, Donald Davidson, Katherine Anne Porter, Mark Van Doren, Robert Fitzgerald, Anthony Hecht, Eliseo Vivas, and Reed Whittemore were the contributors. Ransom in his essay, “In Amicitia,” said of the Fugitive period he and Tate shared as poets that Tate, then still an undergraduate at Vanderbilt, “became confirmed among us as a critic whose quick unstudied judgment of a poem possessed authority.” It was “the most instant, and about the best, that we were going to find. … To couple the first impression of a writing with finality and decision is the indication of what Mr. Blackmur calls the executive power; that is, the capacity to carry on the business of literature, and for example to run a literary journal or to make anthologies. Both these professional areas of his later career were prefigured then.” Tate’s first connection with the Sewanee Review was his essay “Poetry and the Absolute,” accepted in 1925 but not published until a new editor, William S. Knickerbocker, Ph.D., found it waiting in galley proof and ran it in the winter of 1927. Although he never included it in any of his collections, because it was “too academic,” Tate was proud of the essay—his first in a literary journal—and mailed offprints to friends. He told Mark Van Doren, “I find that this—written two years ago—anticipates the point of view of [End Page 240] Ramon Fernandez”: “the attempt to give the poem a status equal to that of a cow or a toothbrush or any other object.” He met Dr. Knickerbocker, unexpectedly, in London in July 1929. He had just mailed his publisher the ms of Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall and gone from Paris to London to visit T. S. Eliot and other literary men. Knickerbocker called on him at the White Hall Hotel at Russell Square and asked him for introductions to Eliot and others. Having met Knickerbocker thus for the first time, Tate declined to introduce him to Eliot; but he agreed to write letters of introduction to Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, and John Gould Fletcher. Knickerbocker had worn Tate down with many earnest inquiries of his opinion; so in mailing him the letters of introduction Tate presumed to enclose a long letter of advice on editing the Sewanee Review, drawing on his “considerable experience with magazines.” His main theme was the payment of contributors; if the review paid a half cent per word, that would come to about $250 an issue or $1,000 a year. “Thinking over your program, I believe that you can make the S.R. the most important journal in America if you can get the University to see that payment for contributors is absolutely indispensable. … This is the most important practical problem confronting you. … Otherwise you will be doomed always to print a certain amount of second-rate stuff.” Tate advised him also to distribute three hundred to five hundred copies to prominent writers, from Upton Sinclair to André Gide, and to use rejection slips carefully: “You cannot afford to send a rejection slip to any writer who has the slightest claim upon editorial attention. It will ruin you. A beginner will put up with this because he is ambitious. But the kind of writer you want can usually place his stuff, and he will not linger with an editor who ignores him. We are too hard-boiled for that.” During the Agrarian period Tate and Donald Davidson thought of capturing the Sewanee Review for the movement, to which Knickerbocker proved to be hostile. The Agrarians found a friendly vehicle in the American Review (formerly the Bookman), a monthly that paid contributors. A movement, though, was not the proper business of a quarterly, Tate said. In “The Function of the Critical Quarterly,” published in the Southern Review in 1936, its second year, Tate said a quarterly’s business...