Реферат: Louis D Rubin On

for art as important and as demanding a role in human affairs as that played by science

and business. As Ransom wrote, art "is a career, precisely as science is a career. It

is as serious, it has an attitude as official, it is as studied and consecutive, it is by

all means as difficult, it is no less important."

Another characteristic of Tate’s poetry is its concentrated use of image and metaphor,

as in the concluding lines of the Confederate Ode:

Leave

now

The shut gate and the decomposing wall:

The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,

Riots with his tongue through the hush—

Sentinel of the grave who counts us all

Of those lines Tate says that "the closing image, that of the serpent, is the

ancient symbol of time, and I tried to give it the credibility of the commonplace by

placing it in a mulberry bush—with the faint hope that the silkworm would somehow be

explicit. But time is also death. If that is so, then space, or the Becoming, is life; and

I believe there is not a single spacial symbol in the poem. . . "

Why, though, if that is all that Tate "meant," did he not write something

like the following:

Let us leave the graveyard now.

Time runs riot there

And time brings death to bear

And wears it on its brow.

The answer is that those lines are simply the abstract statement of what Tate was

saying—and not even that, because Tate was not simply declaring that one should not

remain in a graveyard because it reminds one of time and time brings death. Such a

statement represents merely the "message" of the lines. Its purpose would be to

give instruction concerning the course of action to be followed at a cemetery gate. One

may decide that it is "true," which is another way of saying that the