Allen Tate/ T.S. Eliot Symposium

T.S. Eliot (1888 – 1965) was born in St. Louis Missouri and educated at Harvard and later at the Sorbonne and at Merton College, Oxford. He became a British citizen in November of 1927, the same year he converted to Anglicanism; even so he always acknowledged the profound influence of his American roots on his writing.

He was a poet, a playwright, and a critic and received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948, and a commemorative stone installed in 1967 in the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey in London. He is generally regarded as the most influential poet of the twentieth century having published such masterpieces as:

The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock, The Wasteland, Ash Wednesday, The Four Quartets, Murder in the Cathedral, and O’Possum’s Book of Practical Cats which was the basis for the hit musical Cats.

Allen Tate (1899 - 1979) graduated from Vanderbilt in 1922. He was invited to join the Fugitive poets and later went on to join the Agrarian group and contributed to both I’ll Take My Stand (1930) and Who Owns America? (1936). He taught at a number of universities including Princeton and the University of Minnesota, and was editor of The Sewanee Review from 1944 - 46. Tate was a distinguished teacher, critic, novelist and poet and was honored in many ways for his work including holding the Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress from 1943 - 44. Allen Tate’s friendship with T.S. Eliot spanned thirty- six years, and his work to bring together the essays honoring Eliot is his enduring tribute to this great poet.