Collected Poems, 1919-1976

by Allen Tate, Christopher Benfey (Introduction)

One of the early-twentieth century Southern intellectuals and artists of the early twentieth century known as the Agrarians, Allen Tate wrote poetry that was rooted strongly in that region's past―in the land, the people, and the traditions of the American South as well as in the forms and concerns of the classic poets. In "Ode to the Confederate Dead"― generally recognized as his greatest poem―he delineates both the horror of the sight of rows of tombstones at a Confederate cemetery and the honor that such sacrifice embodies, resulting in "a masterpiece that could not be transcended" (William Pratt).

Genres: Poetry, Literature, Southern

240 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1978

About the author

Poetry of especially known American writer and editor John Orley Allen Tate includes "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (1926); a leading exponent of New Criticism, he edited the Sewanee Review from 1944 to 1946.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Tate

Reviews

[Dan Cassino · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tell you what, in 2025, it’s real hard to just roll past Odes to the Confederate Dead, an elegy for Jefferson Davis, and WWII era poems with some racial slurs. There are some interesting formalist elements in here, and Tate’s imagery is very well drawn, but the miasma of the unreconstructed South remains. Extra points off for this volume’s inclusion of juvenalia: there’s completeness, and there’s completeness. Printing a comprehensive volume of a poet doesn’t mean you have to include the Denny’s placemats they filled in.

[max · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading Allen Tate’s _Ode to the Confederate Dead_ in 2017 is likely a more politically complex activity than Tate would have predicted nearly 90 years after he first published it in the height of the Jim Crow South. Perhaps it is naive to suggest the poem was ever less than a landmine, though I imagine a not-so-distant past where a liberal, educated white reader could enjoy it along strictly textual grounds (according to the dicta of New Criticism of course), leaving the mess of its unstated ugly ideas to a louder and less contemplative class of readers.

The poet Robert Lowell, Allen Tate’s sometime discipline, clearly sympathized with that latter class, even if he, a wealthy scion of aristocratic Boston, belonged very much more to the former; he set out to drop the atom bomb (yes, there’s one in there) on Tate’s work by composing an unstrung, anxious, and race-conscious answer entitled _For the Union Dead_. Clever Lowell snips off the Ode as if with rusty scissors.

But that is a digression. The reader of Tate’s poem today need not turn to Lowell for consolation, not if he is interested in understanding the fate of Confederate monuments today, the very physical kind, that cities like New Orleans are tearing down and groups of White Nationalists are attempting to protect.

For Allen Tate did indeed write a monument and his monument cannot be dismantled and put in storage. Nor does it deserve to be expurgated from the canon--it is a beautiful poem, certainly much more beautiful than Lowell’s bewildered answer to it. And it is a poem that can tell us a great deal about a literary stance toward the civil war and why it’s seemingly impossible stop elevating the South’s loss to the status of myth.

The chief frustration a modern reader will encounter with the poem is it doesn’t have black people. It doesn’t have slavery. It doesn’t even have cotton or tobacco. In terms of concrete historical, factual things mentioned it has a short litany of battles, lengthy observances of a graveyard, and a quick but fatal dose of Greek stuff. Of course Tate is at liberty to write about whatever he wants, but the fact that he wrote an ode to the Confederacy without so of a mention of the cause it was fighting for is a very deliberate choice. One may ascribe insidiousness to this choice, perhaps the same insidiousness that Tate embodies at the end of his poem in the form of the “gentle serpent” in the “mulberry bush” waiting for of us all to die, and while it is truly fair game to censure the Southern white man who wrote this poem nearly a hundred years ago, I will propose that Tate had another motive very much in mind.

Tate’s poem leverages a feeling everyone has had at a graveyard--the feeling of being cut off from the past. The bodies of the dead have never been closer, but as a member of the living, the observer feels caught up in himself and trapped in his own present, a “silence which / Smothers you, a mummy, in time.” This sensation of dislocation becomes the intellectual and philosophical underpinning of the poem as the speaker struggles to articulate the horror before him but cannot commemorate it in any traditional sense. This failure of the tradition is not because the cause was unjust--a proposition the poem never entertains--but because the speaker’s connection to it is completely severed.

This emotion has another name: Trauma. Tate began working on his poem about half a century after the war’s end. Civil war vets were a less common sight then than Vietnam vets are now merely because the vast majority couldn’t leave their early graves. If Tate could not bring himself to contemplate the reasons for what happened, this was because the fact of the war itself and the sheer scale of its death and destruction made it impossible to consider much of anything else. Tate’s speaker, with his carefully wrought language (echoing Milton’s Lycidas to my ear), is in shock.

Many odes and commemorations have been made despite trauma (or in fact very much because of it), and Tate’s refusal to get past that initial flood of numbing pain and disorientation and his choice to instead revel in it is the poem’s true conceit. Nobody can get past it, he suggests, and anyone who makes a serious attempt to actually feel the Confederate dead will end up in the same place--on their ass, more or less, reeling and grasping at existential questions.

The existential questions that Tate raises must at least equal if not exceed the significance of an American slavery his poem cannot face. If not, the philosophy of the poem looks like an improvised moral shield with which to hold guilt at bay. If Tate’s questions--and his answers--were a distraction then when originally published, it’s likely they are a bigger distraction now. They are also where Tate’s poem is weakest. Below is the poem’s third strophe where the speaker invokes his most charged vocabulary, and if you forgive the cherry-picking, they include “restitutions”, “animal”, “blood”, “rage”, “angry”, and “arrogant”:

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.

Even setting Zeno and Parmenides aside, the passage is confusing. Only when we get to the “arrogant circumstance” are we once again tethered to the soldiers of the poem. While it’s a stretch to say the dead mens’ circumstances were arrogant, it’s safe to concede the Civil War had its share of arrogance to go around. Re-reading the passage on the assumption Tate’s speaker is addressing the dead directly, the emotions make sense. The Confederate troops certainly knew and felt most of the things discussed in the passage above, even if the reader at first cannot--the “cold pool” we assume to be to dying in a pool of blood, the “desires that should be yours tomorrow” never were fulfilled occurred because of the “shrift of death”.

The problem with this reading is that it’s wrong. The “you” is not the dead. It’s the second person knows who the dead are and knows their feelings, presumably because he is a Southern man in a Confederate graveyard. Those feelings of rage and unfulfilled promise are his that he shares with the dead, possibly more than he shares with anyone else. The restitution he seeks is not 20 acres and a mule but restitution from the North for crimes against the South.

Zeno and Parmenides sit in the center of this strophe waiting to entrap unwary readers. Tate has placed at the heart of his poem a thicket of pre-socratic philosophy that constipates his strongest and most direct expression of wounded white Southern pride. These two Greek dudes never “mounted a flood”. Tate just injects them as water-makers and in doing so dilutes his more vivid battlefield bloodbath imagery. All of a sudden the water isn’t blood and it isn’t real, it’s imaginary water from a prehistory of ideas. To make matters worse this pair do not feature in English poetry prior to Tate (as far as I know), so there is no specific allusion he is making. Without resorting to external sources, a reader can be forgiven for not understanding their significance here, even if versed enough in ancient thought to have heard of them. They are a mythology private to Allen Tate.

Other critics--Tate included--have written in detail on the relationship between Greek philosophy and these dead Confederate men of the poem. If you are interested I refer you to these essays. It is possible there is something there I am missing. But I doubt it is equivalent to what Tate himself has missed by failing to mention slavery in his poem.

This is the problem we are facing today. Some monuments to the Confederacy can serve a necessary function of remembering the trauma of a war that nearly ended the American experiment. We cannot and must not erase the record of the horrific loss of human life on the Southern side, nor must the North condescend to the South when the North today still has a long way to go toward racial equality. But we cannot stand idle as monuments glorify and mythologize the Southern cause while obscuring its moral bankruptcy.

_Ode to the Confederate Dead_--the passage I pick on aside--is a triumph of poetic craft which conjures postwar trauma as effortlessly today as when it was first written. It bears witness with keen observation and a rich phrasing that is hard to match in contemporary poetry. For this it needs to be celebrated and studied. But it is also one monument whose deconstruction is long past due.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tate is one of those singular poets that defy school and description, to my mind, like Wallace Stevens or April Bernard. His poetry is in turns downright haunting, chock-full of surreal and eclectic energy, and so darn catchy you'll just re-read them over and over again. Atypical for my tastes, Tate is a rhyming poet, too, but it never comes across lame.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the Fugitives and the Southern Agrarians when I was in my teens and early 20s – especially Warren and Ransom – but Tate was the one whose work I didn’t delve into as much, beyond “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” The most shocking thing about this poetry, reading it closely now in my 40s, is how it is so steeped in classical form and content that it feels inauthentic and out-of-place in Tate's contemporary America, not to mention our own. (Tate would have agreed with the out-of-place declaration, at least, since the point of his poetry was to express just that sentiment that modernity had left a population unable or unwilling to connect with their past.) I can only compare it to the verse being published in the 18th century translated into English from European writers. But even that comparison is flimsy, since those works may have had the classical influence, but certainly were not laced with pop culture in the way Tate’s poems reference American football formations, hammering locomotive engines, or trout fishing maps.

And so Tate’s poetry hangs suspended between the modern and the ancient: a stodgy classicist writing about the antebellum South in terms of The Anabasis and The Aeneid in the era of air travel and (later) rockets. This makes his late turn – specifically “The Swimmers” – a bit surprising, not only because it was unexpected to see such a direct critique of lynching from one of the Agrarians, but because the poem is starkly contemporary compared to his earlier verse. It’s the kind of poem I imagined Warren would write (later in his life) rather than Tate. It makes me wonder why he isn’t more known for that one than “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” at least in this century.

At first it may seem surprising that Tate was friends with T. S. Eliot, especially due to his early atheism, but then on second thought, it all makes sense: the late Catholic turn, the classical obsession, and the feeling of being alienated from modern America. In the twenty-first century, his poetry is even more an expression of a lost and discontented past, since I can’t imagine many readers, even in the South, connecting with this verse. I don’t feel the same about Warren and, to a lesser extent, Ransom.

[EJ Daniels · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of Allen Tate's poetry and translations captures the full range of his remarkable and significant literary career. It is a much-needed addition to the world of American poetry.

Arranged in broad epochs, Collected Poems presents Tate's work chronologically, except for his translations, which appear in their own chapter, and his very early or unfinished works. While not authoritative and sadly lacking in footnotes, this bare-boned approach does allow the majesty of Tate's poetry to stand out on its own.

Tate will be of the greatest significance for those interested in 20th century American poetry with a strongly Southern bent; fans of both of the Fugitives and the Agrarians will, naturally, find much to enjoy.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A human “Being all infinite, function depth and mass/ Without figure, a mathematical shroud,” yet a man who insisted on living a life so small, stunted by his racist beliefs, solipsistic temperament, and demented nostalgia for the antebellum South. Still, Tate managed to write some mighty fine poetry.

Favorite Poems:
“The Subway”
“The Wolves”
“Last Days of Alice”
“Aeneas at Washington”

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

I especially liked "The Mediterreanean" and "Aeneas at Washington." Some poems, however, were obscure and despair-posturing to the point of folly.

[Dave Franklin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Allen Tate’s poetic legacy has evolved sweepingly over time: admiration for his classicism, indifference to his oeuvre, and disfavor toward his social views. Despite his technical virtues, he was a man of his era and rooted in the post-bellum South. Tate’s “Collected Poems” is a compendium of his poetry written between 1919 and 1976.

Tate was born in Kentucky in 1899 and was associated with the Agrarian and Modernist literary movements. He attended Vanderbilt University, with poet and novelist, Robert Penn Warren, author of “All the King’s Men.” Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, was involved with the Fugitives, a group critical of the New Deal from an agrarian perspective and supportive of the South’s segregationist politics. Later, Tate changed his views on race, and furthermore, supported black writers like Ralph Ellison. He then died in 1979 at the age of 79.

As a poet, his reputation is mixed. Tate eschewed free verse. Tate preferred classicism and formalism in poetry. His early poetry displayed a few basic forms: blank verse, quatrains, and the sonnet. His technical mastery is evident. Consider the opening stanza of his “Ode to the Confederate Soldier”:

Row after row with strict impunity

The headstones yield their names to the element,

The wind whirrs without recollection;

In the riven troughs the splayed leaves

Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament

To the seasonal eternity of death;

Then driven by the fierce scrutiny

Of heaven to their election in the vast breadth,

They sought the rumour of mortality.

Tate can summon the historic past to evoke the felt present. History’s contingencies may not be escapable but are not fully determinative. This collection contains some forgettable entries, but a number of these poems are some of the best of the twentieth century. In addition to the aforementioned "Ode to the Confederate Dead," one should note: "The Mediterranean," "Sonnets of the Blood," "Aeneas at Washington," “Seasons of the Soul,” and "The Swimmers."

James Dickey held Tate in high esteem. He wrote: “Tate’s situation has certain perhaps profound implications for every man in every place and every time. And they are more than implications; they are the basic questions, the possible solutions to the question of existence. How does each of us wish to live his only life?”