Louis D Rubin On

Louis D. Rubin On "Ode To The Confederate Dead" Essay, Research Paper

Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

That poem is ‘about’ solipsism, a philosophical doctrine which says that we

create the world in the act of perceiving it; or about Narcissism, or any other ism that

denotes the failure of the human personality to function objectively in nature and

society."

That poem, as Tate goes on to say about the "Ode to the Confederate Dead," is

also about "a man stopping at the gate of a Confederate graveyard on a late autumn

afternoon." Thus the man at the cemetery and the graves in the cemetery become the

symbol of the solipsism and the Narcissism:

Autumn is desolation in the plot

Of a thousand acres where these memories grow

From the inexhaustible bodies that are not

Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row.

Think of the autumns that have come and gone!

A symbol is something that stands for something else. What I want to do is to point out

some of the relationships between the "something" and the "something

else."

Richard Weaver has written of the Nashville Agrarians that they "underwent a

different kind of apprenticeship for their future labors. They served the muse of

poetry." In a certain sense that is true, but the word "apprenticeship" is

misleading in Tate’s instance. Allen Tate did not become a poet merely in order to learn

how to be an Agrarian. He was a poet while he was an Agrarian; he continued to be a poet

after his specific interest in Agrarianism diminished, and now he has become an active

communicant of the Roman Catholic Church and he is still a poet. One must insist that for

Allen Tate poetry has never been the apprenticeship for anything except poetry.

"Figure to yourself a man stopping at the gate of a Confederate cemetery . . .

," Tate writes in his essay "Narcissus as Narcissus." He continues: ".

. . he pauses for a baroque meditation on the ravages of time, concluding with the figure

of the ‘blind crab.’ This creature has mobility but no direction, energy but from the

human point of view, no purposeful world to use it in. . . . The crab is the first

intimation of the nature of the moral conflict upon which the drama of the poem develops:

the cut-off-ness of the modern ‘intellectual man’ from the world."

The brute curiosity of an angel’s stare

Turns you, like them, to stone,

Transforms the heaving air

Till plunged into a heavier world below

You shift your sea-space blindly

Heaving, turning like the blind crab.

If the Confederate Ode is based upon a moral conflict involving "the cut-off-ness

of the modern ‘intellectual man’ from the world," why did Tate choose as his symbol

the Confederate graveyard. The answer lies in the history of the region in which Allen

Tate and his fellow Fugitives and Agrarians grew up. Tate was born and reared in the Upper

South, and he attended college in Nashville, Tennessee, and there was a symbolism in the

South of his day ready for the asking. It was the contrast, and conflict, between what the

South was and traditionally had been, and what it was tending toward. "With the war

of 1914-1918 the South re-entered the world," Tate has written, "—but gave

a backward glance as it stepped over the border: that backward glance gave us the Southern

renascence, a literature conscious of the past in the present."

What kind of country was the South upon which Tate and his contemporaries of the early

1920s looked back at as well as observed around them. It was first of all a country with

considerable historical consciousness, with rather more feeling for tradition and manners

than existed elsewhere in the nation. There had been a civil war just a little over a

half-century before, and the South had been badly beaten. Afterwards Southern leaders

decided to emulate the ways of the conqueror, and called for a New South of cities and

factories. Such Southern intellectuals as there were went along with the scheme. Men of

letters like Walter Hines Page and John Spencer Bassett preached that once the

provincialism of the Southern author was thrown off, and the Southern man of letters was

willing to forget Appomattox Court House and Chickamauga, then Southern literature would

come into its own. When it came to forecasting a literary renascence in the South. Bassett

and his friends were absolutely right, but they could not have been more mistaken about

the form that it would take. What brought about the renascence—what there was in the

time and place that made possible an Allen Tate and a William Faulkner and a Donald

Davidson and a John Ransom and a Robert Penn Warren and an Andrew Lytle and three dozen

other Southern writers—was not the eager willingness to ape the ways of the

Industrial East, but rather the re

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