It's Allen Tate!
Remarkably, Allen Tate is referenced in a total of nineteen "Writers at Work" interviews, published by The Paris Review. However, he missed the opportunity to speak for himself, as the subject of his own. Thankfully everyone (Robert Giroux, Robert Lowell, Robert Bly, and a few more) had really nice things to say about him and he sounds like a pretty neat guy.
There’s no Writers at Work interview with Allen Tate—who was born today in 1899—but his name seems to pop up in nearly everyone else’s. By my count, he has cameos in nineteen of our interviews; he shuffles onstage to offer an apercu or to help someone or to drink or to be carried down a flight of stairs. And then he leaves.
Tate ran in many circles, in part because his teaching allowed him to move around so much. At one point or another he crossed paths with an astonishing number of his fellow writers: Robert Penn Warren and Robert Lowell, most prominently, but also Randall Jarrell, John Gould Fletcher, John Crowe Ransom, John Berryman, and Andrew Lytle. His walk-ons in The Paris Review interviews testify to his influence not just as a poet but as a friend. If you read these mentions of him in succession, as a kind of patchwork oral history, you get a strangely gratifying secondhand sense of the man, as if someone had painted his portrait based only on a description. [...]
Get ready for some very sweet mentions at The Paris Review Daily.