Реферат: 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

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