As a young man he wrote: "The negro race is an inferior race....miscegenation due to a white woman and a negro man" threatened the white family. "Our purpose..is to keep the negro blood from passing into the white race."
David Yezzi says Tate held the conventional social views of a white Southerner in 1934: an "inherited racism, a Southern legacy rooted in place and time that Tate later renounced."
Edges
I’ve often wondered why she laughed
On thinking why I wondered so;
It seemed such waste that long white hands
Should touch my hands and let them go.
And once when we were parting there,
Unseen of anything but trees,
I touched her fingers, thoughtfully,
For more than simple niceties.
But for some futile things unsaid
I should say all is done for us;
Yet I have wondered how she smiled
Beholding what was cavernous.
Allen Tate
TS
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