Summary: Divided Allegiances establishes a place for Eleanor Ross Taylor (b. 1920) in post-war American poetry alongside her "Middle Generation" contemporaries and alongside women poets of subsequent generations whose work hers has influenced. Divided Allegiances makes extensive use of archival material in Taylor's own papers---including correspondence from numerous other writers, manuscripts of her published and unpublished work, and decades' worth of journals---to interrogate three successive phases of post-war American literary history. Each chapter examines a stage in Taylor's development as a writer, illustrates the importance to American poetry of her poems that arise from that stage, and revisits the dilemmas and conflicts of a particular literary group or movement. Chapter One narrates Taylor's encounter, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, with Fugitive-Agrarian writers Allen Tate and Donald Davidson. Many of Taylor's male contemporaries, including Lowell and Jarrell, began their careers under Tate's tutelage. Although Taylor's rural, fundamentalist upbringing in the 1920s immersed her in the pre-modern Southern traditions that were so crucial to Tate and Davidson's view of the past, her poems emphasize discontinuity between generations and dramatize the difficulty of apprehending meaning and value from the past. Chapter Two focuses on Taylor's friendship with the fiction writer Caroline Gordon. Gordon's short story "The Captive," based on accounts of a late eighteenth-century white female settler's captivity among a tribe of Comanches, inspired Taylor's dramatic monologues that draw on captivity narratives. Chapter Three examines Taylor's two-decades-long friendship with Randall Jarrell in the context of other mid-century alliances between male and female poets. The male writers in all three of these pairings acknowledged what each called a "debt" to the female writer's work. Taylor's poems of female entrapment offered Jarrell a model for his mid-century female persona poems. Chapter Four assesses the impact of Taylor's work on contemporary women poets. Taylor's poems treat the subject of motherhood with a candor and ambivalence uncommon in mid-century American poetry. In the early 1970s, Taylor's "Welcome Eumenides," commented obliquely on Taylor's own, often unsuccessful struggle to reconcile the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood with her literary vocation.