February 2, 2001

'Allen Tate: Orphan of the South'

By NINA C. AYOUB

Allen Tate never finished his autobiography. He began but faltered, fearing "the terrible fluidity of self-revelation." Perhaps, for the Southern poet, revisiting his early decades was too painful.

But those are the realms traveled in Thomas A. Underwood's Allen Tate: Orphan of the South (Princeton University Press). It takes the poet from birth, in 1899, to a turning point, in 1938. That year Tate completed The Fathers, a novel of the South that allowed him finally to come to terms