Реферат: Louis D Rubin On

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 revulsion against the necessity of having to do so in

order to live among their fellow Southerners. By 1920 and thereafter the South was

changing, so that Tate’s modern Southerner standing at the gate of a Confederate military

cemetery was forced to compare what John Spencer Bassett had once termed "the worn

out ideas of a forgotten system" with what had replaced that system.

And what had taken its place was what Tate and his fellow Agrarians have been crying

out against ever since: the industrial. commercially-minded modern civilization, in which

religion and ritual and tradition and order were rapidly being superseded by the worship

of getting and spending.

Thus the Confederate graveyard as the occasion for solipsism, and the failure of the

human personality to function objectively in nature and society, because for Tate

there could be no question about where the young Southern writer should stand in the

matter. The agrarian community that had been the Southern way of life was with all its

faults vastly preferable to what was taking place now. As he wrote in 1936, "the

Southern man of letters cannot permit himself to look upon the old system from a purely

social point of view, or from the economic view; to him it must seem better than the

system that destroyed it, better, too, than any system with which the modern planners,

Marxian or any color, wish to replace the present order." Surveying the heroic past

and the empty present, the young Southerner could only feel himself in isolation from what

were now his region’s ways. In the words of the Confederate Ode,

What shall we say who count our days and bow

Our heads with a commemorial woe

In the ribboned coats of grim felicity,

What shall we say to the bones, unclean,