In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem.

Warren and Tate were invited to join a group of young Southern poets under the leadership of John Crowe Ransom; the group were known as the Fugitive Poets and later as the Southern Agrarians. Tate and Lytle had attended Vanderbilt together prior to collaborating at The University of the South. This collection--which brought together work from two recent volumes Poems: 1928-1931 (1932) and the privately printed The Mediterranean and Other Poems (1936) as well as the early Mr.

John Orley Allen Tate (November 19 1899 – February 9 1979) was an American poet essayist social commentator and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1943 to 1944.