Quite a few people this side of the Grolier bookshop, not otherwise philistines, have recently admitted that they don't read poetry the way they used to. Too difficult, they argue; takes too much patience. There's too much of it, and most of it isn't applicable to our lives, anyway. Rather see a Fellini movie or listen to a rock orgy on the radio.

Allen Tate's life and work are a challenge to people who have stopped reading poems and an inspiration to those who have not. His creative voice, at times distinctly Southern, speaks of much more than a single region of the country. He speaks with quiet authority, from powerful inner pressure, not to please crowds or win notoriety, though his eighteen published volumes of poetry, criticism, biography and fiction have brought him many honors.

As a poet, Tate looks at the modern man who has been cut off from his past and whose heart has been overwhelmed by his mind. As a man, he has always striven to be the kind of poet who does not forget his past and who speaks from heart and mind with equal feeling.

At seventy-one, his poetic voice is strong and his speaking voice mellow, as if he just sipped a special elixir--tea and honey, perhaps. Sitting in Robert Fitzgerald's office before his afternoon reading at Boylston auditorium. Tate looks every bit the Southern gentleman--debonair, impeccably dressed, a hint of Basil Ransom, years after The Bostonians, but with the high forehead and thin, tapered fingers reserved for artists and poets.

His vitality belies a long career whose roots are with Edgar Allen Poe and Rudyard Kipling, whose growth shows the influence of John Crowe Ransom and T.S. Eliot and whose maturity, in turn, affected Theodore Roethke and John Berryman. It is somehow easier to believe Tate has had three children in the past four years than to realize Robert E. Lee and James Meredith could figure in his imagination simultaneously.

"We used to play Civil War," he says, reminiscing about his childhood in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky, "but we could never find anybody willing to be a Yankee. We'd shoot at imaginary enemies."

He leans forward a little as he shares other memories. "My Mother had two pictures on the wall facing her bed. One was a beautiful steel engraving of Robert E. Lee, which I still have, and the other was a photograph of her father. To her, they were just alike, her heroes.

"I remember when I first went to New York after graduating from Vanderbilt, my mother, who was unreconstructed, said, 'I don't want you to go up there. You'll marry one of those Yankee girls. I'd much rather you married an English or a French girl'...The feeling was very strong. My older brother used to say that my mother didn't know that slavery had been abolished."

Loyalty to the South he'd inherited and devotion to the South he invisioned were crucial to Tate's intellectual development. As an undergraduate at Vanderbilt after the first World War, he became part of a group of literati called the Fugitives, including John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren, deeply dedicated to Southern regionalism, but "fleeing from nothing faster than the high caste Brahmins of the Old South."

"The Fugitive meetings were rather informal," Tate remembers. "They didn't start out as meetings for reading our poems: they were just philosophical discussions, aesthetics, that sort of thing. Gradually, people began to bring poems to read, and when a large group of poems had accumulated, we decided to publish a little magazine.

"The Nashville papers ridiculed the first issue when it was published, and the Chancellor of the University refused to subscribe to it. I think Radcliffe Squires (Tate's biographer) makes a rather amusing remark about that. He says, 'Looking at the first issue, one wonders why anybody expected anything of these people.'"

Nevertheless, the nucleus of the group's members (John Ransom, Donald Davidson, "Red" Warren, and Tate) not only improved on their initial, poetic promise, but by 1930 had sketched a credo for the South, with the anthology I'll Take My Stand, urging agrarianism over industrialism and warning the South against becoming a replica of the North. "The culture of the soil," wrote Ransom, "is the best and most sensitive of vocations."

"It's amusing to remember that I'll Take My Stand was attacked more violently in the South than it was in the North," Tate recalls. "The Southerners asked questions like, 'Can these people really milk cows?' That was how they saw agrarianism.

"Still, I rather think that I'll Take My Stand could be read with profit today. We didn't set out to be prophets, but we prophesied many of the evils that have overwhelmed us today--urbanism, pollution, the anonymity of the ghetto, the decline of the religious community."

Although Tate is sceptical about the poet-activist ("Our friend Shelley thought if he put those tracts he wrote in toy boats in Hyde Park, and people read them, a great revolution would take place!"), he does include social criticism as part of his responsibility as man and poet. For him, I'll Take My Stand was as much a defense of poetry as a defense of the South.