Edna St. Vincent Millay

ONE of Allen Tate\'s recent essays, \"A Southern Mode of the Imagination, \" mentions an amiable old calumny against Kentucky: that it seceded from the Union after the fighting was over. Lincoln had promised not to disturb the institution of slavery in Kentucky if Kentucky stayed in the Union, and the promise was kept. Loyal to the Union throughout the Civil War, Kentucky was only nominally in the Union from December 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, until about the time of World War I, when the South generally began to look outside itself and see, Tate says, \"for the first time since about 1830 that the Yankees were not to blame for everything.\" John Orley Allen Tate (to give him his full name), born in Winchester, Clark County, Kentucky, on November 19, 1899, is thus by origin an American for whom the ordinary doubleness of loyalty to region and nation is intensified. There is, indeed, another view of Tate, Tate as professional southerner, born too late to be a Confederate soldier and regretting it all his life, continuously refighting die Civil War in his imagination, and employing his talents to glorify a way of life that scarcely existed. This view is of value because it asks to be corrected, and that is what I propose to do: first by bringing together the biographical data, and looking at the early work and some of the poems of the period 1922-38; then by turning to the fiction, particularly The Fathers (1938, 1960), and the essays; and finally by looking at some of the poems written since 1938.