creation of the poem. The poem, therefore, does not depend upon science; science plays
only a relatively minor role. The relationship is obvious to the Agrarian belief in the
equality of the aesthetic pursuits with the scientific.
Tate and his colleagues have insisted in their poetry and criticism that the image
possesses a priority over the abstract idea. They have taken over the pioneering work done
by the Imagists and gone further. They have been instrumental in reviving contemporary
interest in the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, constructed as that poetry
is with complex imagery and metaphor. An idea, Ransom has written, "is derivative and
tamed," whereas an image is in the wild state: "we think we can lay hold
of image and take it captive, but the docile captive is not the real image but only the
idea, which is the image with its character beaten out of it." The image, Ransom
declared, is "a manifold of properties, like a field or a mine, something to be
explored for the properties." The scientist can use the manifold only by singling out
the one property with which he is concerned: "It is not by refutation but by
abstraction that science destroys the image. It means to get its ‘value’ out of the image,
and we may be sure that it has no use for the image in its original state of
freedom."
A poetry of abstract ideas, Tate and Ransom held, is a poetry of science, and as such
it neglects the manifold properties of life and nature. Just as an economist used only the
special interests of economics to interpret human activity, so the poetry of ideas was
concerned with only one part of the whole. This led to specialization and isolation,
fragmenting the balance and completeness of man and nature into a multitude of special
interests, cutting off men from the whole of life, destroying the unity of human
existence. And here we come again to Tate’s main theme in the Confederate Ode, "the
failure of the human personality to function objectively in nature and society,"
"the cut-off-ness of the modern ‘intellectual man’ from the world." It is a
constant refrain in Tate’s work. In 1928, for instance, we find these two sentences in a
review by Tate 0f Gorham Munson’s Destinations, in the New Republic: "Evasions
of intellectual responsibility take various forms; all forms seem to be general in our
time; what they mean is the breakdown of culture; and there is no new order in sight which
promises to replace it. The widespread cults, esoteric societies, amateur religions, all
provide easy escapes from discipline, easy revolts from the traditional forms of
culture." And 25 years later he is still saying just that, as in his recent Phi Beta
Kappa address at the University 0f Minnesota: "the man of letters must not be
committed to the illiberal specializations that the nineteenth century has proliferated
into the modern world: specializations in which means are divorced from ends; action from
sensibility, matter from mind, society from the individual, religion from moral agency,
love from lust, poetry from thought, communion from experience, and mankind in the
community from men in the crowd. There is literally no end to this list of dissociations
because there is no end, yet in sight, to the fragmenting 0f the western mind."
Modern man of the dissociated sensibility, isolated from his fellows, caught up in a
life of fragmented parts and confused impulses; thus Allen Tate’s Southerner waiting at
the gate of the Confederate cemetery contemplates the high glory of Stonewall Jackson and
the inscrutable foot-cavalry of a day when ancestors of that Southerner knew what they
fought for, and could die willingly for knowing it:
You know who have waited by the wall
The twilight certainty of an animal,
Those midnight restitutions of the blood
You know—the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze
Of the sky, the sudden call: you know the rage,
The cold pool left by the mounting flood,
Of muted Zeno and Parmenides.
You who have waited for the angry resolution
Of those desires that should be yours tomorrow,
You know the unimportant shrift of death
And praise the vision
And praise the arrogant circumstance
Of those who fall
Rank upon rank, hurried beyond decision—
Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall.
Times are not what they were, Tate’s Southerner at the gate realizes; it has become
almost impossible even to imagine such days:
You hear the shout, the crazy hemlocks point
With troubled fingers to the silence which
Smothers you, a mummy, in time.
Even the title of the poem stems from the irony of the then and now; "Not only are
the meter and rhyme without fixed pattern," Tate wrote, "but in another feature
the poem is even further removed from Pindar than Abraham Cowley was: a purely subjective
meditation would not even in Cowley’s age have been called an ode. I suppose in so calling
it I intended an irony: the scene of the poem is not a public celebration, it is a lone
man by a gate."
from Rubin, Southern Renascence. Copyright ? 1953 by the Johns Hopkins UP.