A Great Seizure of Poems

When they were leaving Princeton in 1942, Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon decided to spend the next year in Monteagle, Tennessee, where they both had always been able to write. Caroline was eager that her husband get back to writing. He couldn’t write in the East, he told John Peale Bishop, where “I forget who I am. I had a nightmare recently in which I couldn’t remember my name.” He had recently turned down a teaching job at lsu; he had had enough of academia for a while, and their combined advances from publishers came to $200 more for the year than lsu’s offer. He would get monthly installments for a novel from Putnam’s, which had published The Fathers, and Caroline had an advance from Scribner’s for her sixth novel, The Women on the Porch. In June they moved into a large Victorian cottage in the Monteagle Assembly, with their seventeen-year-old daughter, Nancy, and their dachshund and two cats. In July Robert (“Cal”) Lowell and his wife, Jean Stafford, joined them, renting the apartment on the other side of the cottage. Stafford was also writing a novel, “Boston Adventure”; Lowell planned to write a biography of his great-great grandfather, Jonathan Edwards. They all moved together in September to a large house that had the only furnace in the summer community, though it smoked.

Tate was late on the first installment of his novel but promised Putnam’s at least 150 pages by October 15. Every morning when he sat down at his typewriter he had “an hour’s struggle with the war before I can get into the world of my novel,” he said, “and sometimes the war wins.” Although soon to turn forty-three, he was having “another attack of the jitters” about his draft status, he wrote Bishop. (He had earlier been rejected for a navy commission because of a bad shoulder.) “It all looks worse from day to day. . . . We shall be like some of Tiberius’ legions on the German frontier—toothless, our hair long and gray. . . . At the age of 67 I expect to be assigned, as a private, to the inspection of whore-houses in Sumatra.”

At the end of October he received a circular from the Dial Press soliciting poems for an anthology to be called “War Poems of the United Nations”: “All the poems must make their contribution to defeating the Axis.” Although he didn’t “as a rule reply to circular letters,” he replied to this one to explain why he couldn’t contribute: “All poetry, if it is poetry, is anti-Axis, and all poetry which is a mere call to action, however desperately necessary the action may be, is pro-Axis, particularly if it fails to invite us to look at reality.” The New Republic published his letter November 16, with his prefatory remarks: “We have already had some good war poetry, we may get some great war poetry, but I cannot allow myself to see the poet’s grimly manufacturing morale. The spectacle would break my own.” On the back of a draft of his letter he wrote in longhand a draft of a sonnet, beginning “Give me this day a faith not personal, / As follows; the American people fully armed / With insurance policies, restless and harmed, / Battle the world but themselves not at all.” He returned in the next lines to “the boy of ten (the liar)” of the “Sonnets at Christmas” (1934); the boy is told by his father that he may be president—“Nobody said that I could be a plumber, / Carpenter, clerk, bishop, or bombardier.”

That fall he “felt a seizure of poems coming on.” In contrast “every line” of his novel was “hell.” The only part that satisfied him was the first page—“a fine opening. I believe, for a novel that somebody else ought to write.” In mid-November he said “to hell with it” and put it aside to write poems. The sonnet he wrote on the back of his letter became, after revision, the third in a sequence of four entitled...