Реферат: Louis D Rubin On

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