Editing Allen Tate (section)

===1960s===
"'Allen Tate Reads from His Own Works'" helped launch the Yale Series of Recorded Poets in 1960.  That year Tate edited ''Selected Poems of John Peale Bishop'' (Chatto & Windus), and ''The Fathers'' was reprinted (Eyre & Spottiswood and Swallow).  The ''[[The Times Literary Supplement|Times Literary Supplement]]'' said it was "possibly one of the great novels of our time'" and ''Encounter'' and the ''[[New Statesman]]'' published long review-articles by [[Frank Kermode]] and [[Janet Adam Smith]].  Tate said, "The British read the book as I conceived it--not as 'another Southern novel.'"  He received an honorary Litt.D. from the [[University of Kentucky]] in 1960.

Tate published ''Poems'' in 1960, adding two poems in [[terza rima]], "The Swimmers" and "The Buried Lake."  T. S. Eliot said Tate's were the best terza rima poems in English.

The Tates were invited to the [[inauguration of John F. Kennedy]] in 1961.  First Lady [[Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis|Jaqueline Kennedy]] told Tate, "Oh, I took your picture!" (she had once been a newspaper photographer).  Tate was awarded the Brandeis Creative Arts Medal in Poetry in 1961 for lifetime achievement.

When the issue of [[racial integration]] came to a new crisis in riots in 1962 at the [[University of Mississippi]], Tate, Davidson, Warren, and Charlie Foster, Tate's colleague and close friend from New England, exchanged views. Tate was "in favor of Negro rights" but thought "the Supreme Court has gone about it from the wrong end.  The vote is the thing; school integration, even for those who want it, will never be solidly based without the Negro vote."  He was annoyed "that the Southern Way of Life becomes a popular cause only when race relations are upset."

Italians awarded Tate the [[Dante Alighieri Society]]'s Gold Medal for 1962.  [[Carleton College]] awarded him an honorary Litt.D. in 1963.

The Tates spent their summer vacations in England and Italy, seeing among others the Eliots, Louis MacNeice, Yvor Richards, W. H. Auden, Graham Greene, the Joseph Franks, Edith Sitwell, the Herbert Reeds, the Roy Fullers, the C. Day Lewises, and the Stephen Spenders, who gave them a cocktail party in 1962.  Isabella met [[Natasha Spender]], with whom Tate had had an affair.  Tate remained friends with the Spenders until his death as well as with Elizabeth Hardwick, his other serious affair during his marriage with Gordon.

Tate brought "a procession of distinguished visitors to Minneapolis," Charlie Foster said, and the cocktail parties the Tates had for them allowed faculty and sometimes graduate students to meet them: it was "a kind of salon."

Isabella gave a large dinner party for Tate's 65th birthday, inviting 26 guests.  Tate was elected to the [[American Academy of Arts and Letters]], which had only 50 members, in 1964.  He was the subject of a long illustrated article leading off the arts section of the Sunday [[Star Tribune|Minneapolis ''Star'' ''Tribune'']] for Jan. 24, 1965.  It said Tate "is one Southern conservative who is not enamored with Barry Goldwater.  'Goldwater is a fine example of the complete decay of conservatism,' Tate said, his oversize head shaking sadly.  'I'd prefer the welfare state to his caricature.'"

Tate moved back into the Oak Grove Hotel after Gardner learned that he had been having an affair with a graduate student, Helen Heinz, a nun who was assistant director of nursing at a county hospital.  He edited a special Eliot issue of the ''Sewanee Review'', which was reissued as a book in 1966, ''T.S. Eliot, the Man and His Work.'' He was named the first Regents Professor of English at Minnesota. Gardner divorced Tate in March 1966; he and Helen were married in July in Tennessee.

Tate  was a visiting professor at the [[University of North Carolina at Greensboro]], fall 1966, and at [[Vanderbilt University]], spring 1967. For [[Francis Biddle]]'s 80th birthday dinner in Washington, Tate delivered a greeting speech in Latin. He sold his papers to the [[Firestone Library]] at Princeton; the proceeds would help build a new house for his retirement at Sewanee.  Twin sons, John and Michael, were born prematurely to the Tates in Nashville in August 1967.
  
Tate was elected president of the [[National Institute of Arts and Letters]].  He delivered the principal address at Ransom's 80th birthday celebration at [[Kenyon College]].  Upon his retirement from Minnesota in June 1968 the family moved to Sewanee.

While the Tates were at Lytle's for dinner one evening in July 1968, the babysitter allowed Michael to choke to death in his crib on a toy telephone while she was running him a bath. [[Walter Sullivan (novelist)|Walter Sullivan]], in his memoir of Tate, claims that the Tates broke off contact with Andrew Lytle afterwards.<ref>Robert C. Petersen, 'Sullivan, "Allen Tate: A Recollection" (Book Review)', ''Southern Quarterly'', 28:2 (Winter 1990), p. 62.</ref> Robert Lowell commemorated the infant boy's death in his poem "Michael Tate: August 1967–July 1968".<ref>Robert Lowell, ''Robert Lowell Notebook'' (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), p. 251. {{ISBN|9780374223250}}</ref>

Tate resigned as president of the National Institute in November 1968 because of the tiring trips to New York.  He edited ''The Complete Poems and Selected Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe'' (New American Library) and published ''[[Essays of Four Decades]]'' (Swallow and Oxford).  He received an honorary D.Litt. from [[University of North Carolina at Greensboro]] in 1969.  In December another son was born, Benjamin Lewis Bogan Tate.