born Nov. 19, 1899, Winchester, Ky., U.S.
died Feb. 9, 1979, Nashville, Tenn.
U.S. poet and novelist.
While attending Vanderbilt University Tate helped found The Fugitive (192225), a poetry magazine concentrating largely on the South, and contributed to I'll Take My Stand (1930), a Fugitive manifesto defending the region's conservative agrarian society. From 1934 he taught at several institutions, including Princeton University and the University of Minnesota, becoming a leading exponent of the New Criticism . He emphasized the writer's need for tradition, which he found in Southern culture and later in Roman Catholicism, to which he converted in 1950. His best-known poem is "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (1926).