Considered one of the most prominent leaders and voices of the Southern Literary Renaissance, Allen Tate was known for his poetry, criticism, and ideas, and authored highly acclaimed essays, translations, and fictional works. Tate, a born and raised native of Winchester, Kentucky, grew up in a family where frequent moving was the normality. In spite of an inconsistent, erratic education due to multiple moves, Tate was influenced by his mother’s love of literature and read extensively on his own. He was eventually admitted to Vanderbilt University in 1918, where he thrived. Earning top honors and accumulating significant interest and awareness of the Southern culture and its delicacy, Tate became the only undergraduate to be admitted as a member of the Fugitives; an informal group established around the 1920s at Vanderbilt. The Fugitives comprised several of prominent Southern intellectuals, including John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Robert Penn Warren, and of course, Allen Tate. The Fugitives would meet weekly to discuss poetry and brainstorm tactics to defend the South’s lack of challenging literature.
Tate has written a number of critical works discussing and analyzing the South, its progress, the people, various revolutions, and more. He also served as Poet Laureate to the Library of the United States Congress from 1943 to 1944. In 1959, Tate published an essay known as “A Southern Mode of the Imagination,” recounting his theory on the shift of writing styles amongst Southerners during the Southern Literary Renaissance. Tate explains that Southerners, prior to World War I, were predominantly driven by the traditional Southern “mode of discourse,” also known as the rhetorical mode. This particular method of writing consisted of self-absorbed, pretentious, story-telling publications. Tate refers to the era of rhetorical writing as the “Old South,” for which he makes abundantly clear his rancor. He claims that “the very backwardness of Mississippi, and of the South as a whole, might partially explain the rise of a new literature,” and goes on to introduce the dialectical “New South.” The new publications consisted of high intellect, less bombast, and greater sophistication achieved by writers using the dialectical method in their compositions, quite the opposite of the rhetorical mode. Tate considers the dialectical mode to be a rival of the rhetorical and claims that “the Southerner has never been a dialectician.”
The cause of the Renaissance and the shift in mind and style, according to Tate, was due to a combination of the end of World War I and the realization that the Southerner’s finally “saw for the first time since 1830 that the Yankees were not to blame for everything.” The resistance between the North and the South was minimized and a sense of freedom throughout the South allowed for greater levels of creativity to be explored. In addition, the dialectical mode showed that the southerners were more apt to be critical of themselves, rather than place all of the blame on the Yankees like they had in the past. As a result, Tate believes that Southern writers experienced a shift in their “mode of imagination,” which gave them the capability of producing more meaningful and engaging work. Tate exemplified great confidence in William Butler Yeats’s proverb that “out of the quarrel with others, we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
Tate’s argument regarding the conditions that influenced the Southern Literary Renaissance is compelling, notably due to his involvement in the Renaissance. However, his explicit criticism apotheosizes the favorable dialectical method of the New South, while demoting the oratorical, self-absorbed and defensive rhetorical style of the Old South. Tate states that the Southern Renaissance “was more precisely a birth, not a rebirth.” Despite Tate’s view that the Southern rhetorical method of writing defined subordinate literature, many Southern writers of the literary renaissance era opted to collocate the dialectical and rhetorical modes of writing. Even still, Tate believed that thought-provoking and truthful literature was only to be accomplished through the use of the Northern dialectical mode.
The confidence in the power of the dialectical mode that Tate holds for Southern writers is easily reaffirmed by taking a look at the exceptional works produced during the great Renaissance. However, a test case of Tate’s theory can be supported right within his community, amongst his contemporaries and by the authors who are composing the new and compelling, intellectual literature themselves. Take, for example, Thomas Wolfe, a prominent and highly celebrated novelist of the early twentieth century. A contemporary of Tate’s, Wolfe was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and eventually, Harvard University. He wrote four prolonged novels as well as many short stories and dramatic works reflecting on the American and Southern culture that epitomized his sensitive, sophisticated, and hyper-analytical perspective. Throughout various entries in Wolfe’s “The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe,” particularly in “Boom Town” and “The Child by Tiger,” Wolfe combines both rhetorical and dialectical writing styles, and does so in such a way that discredits Tate’s theory that writers during the literary renaissance were purely reliant on dialectical techniques.
Originally published in 1934, Wolfe’s short story “Boom Town” is the story of a man named John Hawke, a prodigal son making a return to his hometown of Altamont. Upon his return, John quickly realizes that the hometown he had grown up to remember was no longer existent. The real estate speculation had become the center of life, and the town, “a spirit of drunken waste and wild destructiveness,” even including John’s mother. The thrill of real estate took over the entire town of Altamont, and slowly but surely the people sold their lands to gain profit. The community became entirely engrossed in this self-absorbed progression, resulting in a lack of introspection and excessive greed. Throughout such events, Wolfe demonstrates rhetorical and dialectical techniques in how he displays the community of Altamont. While the community itself is dialectically critical and subjective, Wolfe portrays the citizens of Altamont as having distinct rhetorical attitudes, as can be seen through the increasing greed of the townspeople.
“The Child by Tiger” is another one of Wolfe’s short stories that skillfully embodies the rhetorical and dialectical modes of writing together. As told from the perspective of a young boy, Spangler, recounted are appalling sprees of violence and lynching by a man who was once admired by all, but then suddenly turned gruesome and horrifying. Dick Prosser is first characterized as a kind, gentle, and hard-working man who was loved by all of the children. An African American servant to the Shepperton family and a man of many talents, it seemed as if Prosser knew just about everything about anything: cooking, boxing, shooting, religion,
whatever it was, he was as always willing to mentor the young children and keep them safe while doing so. His room was always spotless, just as the barracks are in the military. He claimed that he had just recently been discharged from the military, though that was never fully confirmed. The neighborhood boys admired him dearly, as did his employers, and, according to Spangler, “it seemed to us boys that there was very little that Dick Prosser could not do…there was nothing he did not know.” Despite ultimate adoration, there was an unclear, dark mystery dwindling inside of Prosser. The children were often left feeling troubled when Prosser would suddenly appear, as the narrator recalls a “feeling a shadow at our backs and, looking up.” It was Dick Prosser. There is also mention that he spoke to them in a strange, moaning tone of voice that the kids tried to laugh and joke away but were not able to do so.
One day, when the boys were playing in the basement of the Shepperton’s home where Dick’s room was, they noticed that the bedroom door was open. They peeked in, only to find a large rifle lying there. When Dick arrived home and found the boys taking a look, he asked the boys if they would keep a secret about the gun, which the boys considered their “solemn vow.” That night, a snowstorm swept in and Dick Prosser had gone mad. He killed nine people. Motive? Unclear.
“What the hammer? What the chain?” The narrator asks himself these questions, puzzled by how a man he once so greatly adored could carry out such a horrific act. How did this happen? What remained a mystery and wonder, even with all the rumors and conversations, meant nothing in the end. Wolfe’s use of the dialectical questions that the narrator is asking himself calculates definite rhetorical answers, concluding that “he came from darkness” and “came out of the heart of darkness.” Based on this conclusion, it seems as if Wolfe is suggesting that Prosser’s actions were influenced by how he was treated as an African American man in the South. Although Wolfe uses the dialectical mode in “The Child by Tiger” more than he does in “Boom Town,” it is far too improbable to say that he forwent the rhetorical mode of the Old South entirely.
Returning to Tate’s “A Southern Mode of the Imagination,” Tate acknowledges Wolfe’s contribution to the Southern Literary Renaissance, even though reluctantly. Wolfe produced a level of prose that Tate naturally despised, regardless of if he were a critic or a modernist. Another example of a writer from the literary renaissance who was clearly dialectical but still utilized the rhetorical mode, is William Faulkner, who Tate briefly mentions in his essay.
Tate demonstrates a great amount of respect for Faulkner, acknowledging is his well-deserved status as a legend and influential writer. Tate states, though, that “no writer of Faulkner’s power could emerge from a literary and social vacuum.” Faulkner is an excellent example of a writer who has taken the techniques of dialectical writing to tackle highly intellectual material. He is without a doubt a modernist and very willing to be critical of the South. The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner’s fourth published novel, is highly favorable for its innovative style, content and use of modern writing techniques. Faulkner’s incorporation of the modernistic dialectical mode and inferior, complex psychological analysis provided a window for him to go beyond the conventional view of race relations regarding the South. Although he does primarily use the dialectical mode in his novel, he is not yet entirely free of the conventional attitudes of the South, and therefore still refers back to some rhetoric in his work.
Following World War I and throughout the Southern Literary Renaissance, writers emerged the rhetorical and dialectical modes and the entire world became fortunate to witness the vast literature produced. It is natural to assume that when two contrary, yet successful approaches are combined, the level of success increases, and in this case, literary movements of highly acclaimed works are born as a result. Similar to a team, where each member differs on their strengths and weaknesses, but come together to balance out and support one another in order to create a level of success that would not have been otherwise possible, the same goes for the rhetorical and dialectical modes of writing. Despite Tate’s attempt at identifying the components leading to the rise of highly psychological and critical works, he mistakenly claims that the writers of the Southern Literary Renaissance exclusively relied on dialectical methods, while they instead leveraged both rhetorical and dialectical modes of writing to nourish their works.