Leonard L. Tate

Leonard L. Tate. From the Heritage Center. "In the years to come, Grundy County will be remembered for one reason: that Leonard Tate lived here and wrote his poetry." These words of County Judge J.L. Rollins proclaim the significance of the Poet Laureate of Grundy County. , Leonard Tate was born April 19, 1912 in a log cabin set on a bluff in Beersheba Springs overlooking the Cumberland Plateau. He lived on this magnificent site until his death on November 30, 1989., Leonard Tate's family first came to Middle Tennessee in 1805. He was the son of William M. Tate and Martha Belle Smith Tate. His mother was the first librarian of Beersheba. He credited her for all in him that was good., Leonard Tate attended Grundy County High School. There he began writing verse, encouraged by his English teacher. He graduated in 1932. This was his only formal education. In a letter to the editor of the Chattanooga Times in 1940 he wrote:,

"I have never had a moment's literary training of any kind in my life. I write merely because I love it and want to. In short, I have worked alone always, since there is no one else here who writes or is interested in writing for publication. Consequently, I have had very little to encourage me in my loneliness. I think sometimes if it were not for the inspiration I derive from these hills I love that I could not carry on."

, Despite his isolation, Tate was published in more than 50 national periodicals including Country Gentlemen, Poetry Digest, The Bard, and Anthology of Verse. There were 108 poems published in Shadows in the Wind, a privately printed collection. The Beersheba Springs Historical Society in 1990 published posthumously a collection of his poems in "All the Lost Octobers and Other Poems." The collection spans his writing career and was published to honor him and to make certain that his poetry was preserved. , The critic, Kim Worthington, writing about Leonard noted:,

"We found a gentle poet at his work , Upon a Mountain in the land of sun , Where purple peaks rise up against a sky , That in its glory would not be outdone. , The circumstance of his existence there , Completed a solitary life apart , But, Oh, the beauty of the place , It was no wonder he had a poet's heart."

, Dr. Herschel Gower, author and former professor of English and American Literature at Vanderbilt University, in the introduction to "All the Lost Octobers and Other Poems", observed:, "Leonard Tate was a gifted conventional poet, and with this Volume he will be established as the poetic voice of the Cumberland Plateau. By conventional, I mean he was a practitioner of the prosody, meter, rhyme, and verse patterns that he inherited in traditional English verse from Chaucer through Shakespeare to the present. Except for a handful of pieces in free verse, Leonard kept the metrical rhythms and rhyme patterns that he learned from a long line of established predecessors., "It would be difficult to account for Leonard's very considerable gifts: being born into a musical family, his acute sensibility, his communication with the real world, his feel for intangibles, his glimpses of infinity. He was a man for whom the real world existed at his front door and he loved every sight, sound, and touch of it. No taste or fragrance eluded him. Nothing in Nature was wasted on him, as the poems attest. Because his heart was open to all the wonders, he was able to see the world and see it whole and sing his anthems."