Louis D Rubin On free essay sample

Louis D. Rubin On Ode To The Confederate Dead Essay, Research Paper Louis D. Rubin, Jr. That verse form is # 8216 ; about # 8217 ; solipsism, a philosophical philosophy which says that we make the universe in the act of comprehending it ; or about Narcissism, or any other doctrine that denotes the failure of the human personality to work objectively in nature and society. That verse form, as Tate goes on to state about the Ode to the Confederate Dead, is besides about a adult male halting at the gate of a Confederate cemetery on a late fall afternoon. Thus the adult male at the graveyard and the Gravess in the graveyard become the symbol of the solipsism and the Self-love: Autumn is devastation in the secret plan Of a 1000 acres where these memories grow From the unlimited organic structures that are non Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row. Think of the fall that have come and gone! A symbol is something that stands for something else. We will write a custom essay sample on Louis D Rubin On or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page What I want to make is to indicate 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 sort of apprenticeship for their hereafter labours. They served the Muse of poesy. In a certain sense that is true, but the word apprenticeship is misdirecting in Tate # 8217 ; s case. Allen Tate did non go a poet simply in order to larn how to be an Agrarian. He was a poet while he was an Agrarian ; he continued to be a poet after his specific involvement in Agrarianism diminished, and now he has become an active communicant of the Roman Catholic Church and he is still a poet. One must take a firm stand that for Allen Tate poesy has neer been the apprenticeship for anything except poesy. Figure to yourself a adult male halting at the gate of a Confederate graveyard. . . , Tate writes in his essay Narcissus as Narcissus. He continues: . . . he pauses for a churrigueresque speculation on the depredations of clip, reasoning with the figure of the # 8216 ; blind crab. # 8217 ; This animal has mobility but no way, energy but from the human point of position, no purposeful universe to utilize it in. . . . The crab is the first hint of the nature of the moral struggle upon which the play of the verse form develops: the cut-off-ness of the modern # 8216 ; rational adult male # 8217 ; from the universe. The beastly wonder of an angel # 8217 ; s stare Turns you, like them, to lapidate, Transforms the heave air Till plunged into a heavier universe below You switch your sea-space blindly Heaving, turning like the blind crab. If the Confederate Ode is based upon a moral struggle affecting the cut-off-ness of the modern # 8216 ; rational adult male # 8217 ; from the universe, why did Tate choose as his symbol the Confederate cemetery? The reply lies in the history of the part 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 at that place was a symbolism in the South of his twenty-four hours cook for the request. It was the contrast, and struggle, between what the South was and traditionally had been, and what it was be givening toward. With the war of 1914-1918 the South re-entered the universe, Tate has written, # 8212 ; but gave a backward glimpse as it stepped over the boundary line: that backward glimpse gave us the Southern Renaissance, a literature conscious of the yesteryear in the present. What sort of state was the South upon which Tate and his coevalss of the early 1920s looked back at every bit good as observed around them? It was foremost of all a state with considerable historical consciousness, with instead more feeling for tradition and manners than existed elsewhere in the state. There had been a civil war merely a small over a half-century before, and the South had been severely beaten. Afterwards Southern leaders decided to emulate the ways of the vanquisher, and called for a New South of metropoliss and mills. Such Southern intellectuals as there were went along with the strategy. Work force of letters like Walter Hines Page and John Spencer Bassett preached that one time the provincialism of the Southern writer was thrown off, and the Southern adult male of letters was willing to bury Appomattox Court House and Chickamauga, so Southern literature would come into its ain. When it came to calculating a literary Renaissance in the South. Bassett and his friends were perfectly right, but they could non hold been more misguided about the signifier that it would take. What brought about the Renaissance # 8212 ; what there was in the clip and topographic point 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 twelve other Southern authors # 8212 ; was non the eager willingness to ape the ways of the Industrial East, but instead the repugnance against the necessity of holding to make so in order to populate among their fellow Southerners. By 1920 and thenceforth the South was changing, so that Tate # 8217 ; s modern Southerner standing at the gate of a Confederate military graveyard was forced to compare what John Spencer Bassett had one time termed the worn out thoughts of a disregarded system with what had replaced that system. And what had taken its topographic point was what Tate and his fellow Agrarians have been shouting out against of all time since: the industrial. commercially-minded modern civilisation, in which faith and ritual and tradition and order were quickly being superseded by the worship of acquiring and disbursement. Therefore the Confederate cemetery as the juncture for solipsism, and the failure of the human personality to work objectively in nature and society, because for Tate there could be no inquiry about where the immature Southern author should stand in the affair. The agricultural community that had been the Southern manner of life was with all its mistakes immensely preferred to what was taking topographic point now. As he wrote in 1936, the Southern adult male of letters can non allow himself to look upon the old system from a strictly societal point of position, or from the economic position ; to him it must look better than the system that destroyed it, better, excessively, than any system with which the modern contrivers, Marxian or any colour, wish to replace the present order. Surveying the heroic yesteryear and the empty nowadays, the immature Southerner could merely experience himself in isolation from what were now his part # 8217 ; s ways. In the words of the Confederate Ode, What shall we state who count our yearss and bow Our caputs with a commemorial suffering In the ribboned coats of inexorable felicitousness, What shall we say to the castanetss, dirty, Whose verdurous namelessness will turn? The ragged weaponries, the ragged caputs and eyes Lost in these estates of the insane viridity? The grey thin spiders come, they come and go ; In a tangle of willows without visible radiation The remarkable screech-owl # 8217 ; s tight Invisible lyric seeds the head With the ferocious mutter of their gallantry. We shall state merely the foliages Flying, dip and expire We shall state merely the foliages whispering In the unlikely mist of twilight That flies on multiple wing. . . . We are, that is, inadequate, cut off, stray ; we can non even conceive of how it was. All we can see is the foliages blowing about the headstones. So Mr. Tate # 8217 ; s modern Southerner felt. The Ode to the Confederate Dead dates from about 1926, and that was the twelvemonth, Tate recalls, that he and john Crowe Ransom began dallying with the thought of making something about the Southern state of affairs, a undertaking which shortly led to programs for the book entitled I # 8217 ; ll Take My Stand, in which Tate, Ransom, and ten other Southerners set forth Agrarian advocates for what they felt was an progressively industrialized, progressively misled South. The cardinal statement was stated in the first paragraph of the debut, which Ransom composed and to which all the participants gave acquiescence: All the articles bear in the same sense upon the book # 8217 ; s title-subject: all tend to back up a Southern manner of life as against what may be called the American or, predominating manner ; and all every bit much as agree that the best footings in which to stand for the differentiation are contained in the phrase, Agrarian versus Industrial. The job that the 12 Agrarians felt confronted the modern South was the same job, so, as that which Mr. Tate # 8217 ; s modern adult male at the cemetery gate faced. And in a really definite sense, I # 8217 ; ll Take My Stand represented their recommendations for a solution, in a peculiar clip and topographic point, of the cardinal moral job of the Ode to the Confederate Dead. The Agrarians declared in their symposium that industrialism was marauding, in that it was based on a construct of nature as something to be used. In so making, industrialism threw adult male out of his proper relationship to nature, and to God whose creative activity it was. The Agrarian wrangle, they declared, was with applied scientific discipline, which in the signifier of industrial capitalist economy had as its object the captivity of human energies. Since all activity was measured by the yardstick of fiscal addition, the industrial spirit neglected the aesthetic life. It had the consequence of brutalising labour, taking from it any possibility of enjoyment. It must be remembered that most of the Agrarians were talking non as economic experts or sociologists or regional contrivers or even as professional philosophers ; they were talking as work forces of letters. They believed that an Agrarian civilisation was the manner of life which permitted the humanistic disciplines to be an built-in and valuable societal activity, and non, as Ransom put it, intercalary and non-participating experiences. Donald Davidson wrote of the Agrarians that they sought to coerce, non so much a theory of economic sciences as a doctrine of life, in which both economic sciences and art would happen their natural topographic points and non be disassociated into abstract agencies and abstract terminals, as the pseudo-culture of the world-city would dissociate them. In an Agrarian community aesthetic activity would non be low-level to economic sciences. The creative person would be a on the job member of society, non a individual someway set apart from the mundane being of his neighbours. Nature, faith and art would be honored activities of day-to-day life, and non something otiose and outmoded, to be indulged when concern permitted. Knowledge # 8212 ; letters, acquisition, gustatory sensation, the integrated and rich comprehensiveness of emotion and mind # 8212 ; would be carried to the bosom, as Tate said in the Confederate Ode, and non an unassimilated, discordant pudding stone of fragments. In the words of the verse form, What shall we say who have knowledge Carried to the bosom? Shall we take the act To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave In the house? The famished grave? lt ; /p > Shall we, he is inquiring, who still possess this full cognition and who live in a universe from which we are progressively cut off by its insulation and isolation, in which we have mobility but no way, energy but no mercantile establishment # 8212 ; shall we wait for decease, or better still, tribunal it? In one sense, the plan put frontward in I # 8217 ; ll Take My Stand constituted an reply to that inquiry. But for all the book # 8217 ; s effectivity ( and 23 old ages subsequently it is having more attending from immature Southerners than of all time before in its history ) , it would be a error to believe that the Agrarian plan was the lone, or even the most of import, statement of the jobs of modern adult male as Tate and his co-workers saw them. One must ever retrieve that Tate, Ransom, Davidson and Warren were poets chiefly, non societal scientists. The topographic point to look for Allen Tate # 8217 ; s ultimate statement of positions is in his poesy. Cleanth Brooks has pointed out the relevancy of Tate # 8217 ; s poesy to this cardinal moral job. Not merely is this so in respect to capable affair, nevertheless ; we find it implicit in the poetics as good. What is the most obvious feature of the poesy 0f Tate and his co-workers? I think we find it stated, and recognized, from the really outset, in the first reappraisals of the anthology, Fugitives, published in 1928. Fleeting poesy makes one clearly experience that one of the serious and cardinal defects of 19th century poesy was that it was excessively easy, one critic wrote. Mr. Ransom, Mr. Tate and Miss [ Laura ] Riding are non for those who read and run, another referee asserted. The poet John Gould Fletcher, himself shortly to fall in the Agrarians in the symposium, declared in a reappraisal that the Fugitive poets had become the chief urge in America in the leading of a school of rational poesy replacing the free poetry experiments of the older school. The sort of poesy that Allen Tate was composing, so, represented a disciplined, rational, hard poesy, necessitating of the reader, in Tate s ain words, the fullest co-operation of all his rational resources, all his cognition of the universe, and all the continuity and watchfulness that he now thinks of giving to scientific surveies. It was hence a direct challenge to the attitude that aesthetic concerns were a subsidiary, harmless activity for those who read and run. It claimed for art as of import and as demanding a function in human personal businesss as that played by scientific discipline and concern. As Ransom wrote, art is a calling, exactly as scientific discipline is a calling. It is every bit serious, it has an attitude as official, it is as studied and back-to-back, it is by all means as hard, it is no less of import. Another feature of Tate # 8217 ; s poesy is its concentrated usage of image and metaphor, as in the concluding lines of the Confederate Ode: Leave now The shut gate and the break uping wall: The soft snake, green in the mulberry shrub, Riots with his lingua through the stillness # 8212 ; Sentinel of the grave who counts us all Of those lines Tate says that the shutting image, that of the snake, is the ancient symbol of clip, and I tried to give it the credibleness of the platitude by puting it in a mulberry shrub # 8212 ; with the swoon hope that the silkworm would someway be explicit. But clip is besides decease. If that is so, so infinite, or the Becoming, is life ; and I believe there is non a individual spatial symbol in the verse form. . . Why, though, if that is all that Tate meant, did he non compose something like the followers: Let us go forth the cemetery now. Time runs public violence there And clip brings decease to bear And wears it on its forehead. The reply is that those lines are merely the abstract statement of what Tate was stating # 8212 ; and non even that, because Tate was non merely declaring that one should non remain in a cemetery because it reminds one of clip and clip brings decease. Such a statement represents simply the message of the lines. Its intent would be to give direction refering the class of action to be followed at a graveyard gate. One may make up ones mind that it is true, which is another manner of stating that the thought expressed is in agreement with the findings of scientific discipline ; or that it is false, in which instance the advice is non-scientific and non an advantageous footing for action. If the former, the poet is non stating anything startling, and surely a clinical psychologist could show much more convincing cogent evidence of the cogency of the action than the poet would be making. And if one decides that the advice is non scientifically plausible, so what else remains? The lines contain nil but the advice ; the significance represents the lines # 8217 ; exclusive ground for being. Tate # 8217 ; s lines, nevertheless, do non merely give advice ; they do non establish their entreaty on their adaptability to advocate. They are non dependent upon any scientific cogent evidence of their propriety. Both entirely and in the context of the Ode they create their ain cogency. They do non feign to be representative of scientific cognition and cogent evidence ; they are their ain cognition and cogent evidence. They are about snakes and mulberry shrubs and close Gatess and break uping walls, and non advice to graveyard visitants. Tate # 8217 ; s poem International Relations and Security Network # 8217 ; t a mere pseudo-scientific statement, and it doesn # 8217 ; t depend upon a paraphrasis of a scientific statement, and its cogency is neither verifiable nor questionable by scientists. It city manager may non incorporate a statement of scientific truth, but that would at most be a part, merely one of a figure of parts, involved in the whole creative activity of the verse form. The verse form, hence, does non depend upon scientific discipline ; scientific discipline dramas merely a comparatively minor function. The relationship is obvious to the Agrarian belief in the equality of the aesthetic chases with the scientific. Tate and his co-workers have insisted in their poesy and unfavorable judgment that the image possesses a precedence over the abstract thought. They have taken over the pioneering work done by the Imagists and gone farther. They have been instrumental in resuscitating modern-day involvement in the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century, constructed as that poesy is with complex imagination and metaphor. An thought, Ransom has written, is derivative and tamed, whereas an image is in the wild province: we think we can put keep of image and take it confined, but the docile prisoner is non the existent image but merely the thought, which is the image with its character beaten out of it. The image, Ransom declared, is a manifold of belongingss, like a field or a mine, something to be explored for the belongingss. The scientist can utilize the manifold merely by singling out the one belongings with which he is concerned: It is non by defense but by abstraction that scientific discipline destroys the image. It means to acquire its # 8216 ; value # 8217 ; out of the image, and we may be certain that it has no usage for the image in its original province of freedom. A poesy of abstract thoughts, Tate and Ransom held, is a poesy of scientific discipline, and as such it neglects the manifold belongingss of life and nature. Merely as an economic expert used merely the particular involvements of economic sciences to construe human activity, so the poesy of thoughts was concerned with merely one portion of the whole. This led to specialisation and isolation, break uping the balance and completeness of adult male and nature into a battalion of particular involvements, cutting off work forces from the whole of life, destructing the integrity of homo being. And here we come once more to Tate # 8217 ; s chief subject in the Confederate Ode, the failure of the human personality to work objectively in nature and society, the cut-off-ness of the modern # 8216 ; rational adult male # 8217 ; from the universe. It is a changeless chorus in Tate # 8217 ; s work. In 1928, for case, we find these two sentences in a reappraisal by Tate 0f Gorham Munson # 8217 ; s Destinations, in the New Republic: Evasions of rational duty take assorted signifiers ; all signifiers seem to be general in our clip ; what they mean is the dislocation of civilization ; and there is no new order in sight which promises to replace it. The widespread cults, esoteric societies, recreational faiths, all supply easy flights from subject, easy rebellions from the traditional signifiers of civilization. And 25 old ages subsequently he is still stating merely that, as in his recent Phi Beta Kappa reference at the University 0f Minnesota: the adult male of letters must non be committed to the intolerant specialisations that the 19th century has proliferated into the modern universe: specialisations in which agencies are divorced from terminals ; action from esthesia, affair from head, society from the person, faith from moral bureau, love from lecherousness, poesy from idea, Communion from experience, and world in the community from work forces in the crowd. There is literally no terminal to this list of dissociations because there is no terminal, yet in sight, to the break uping 0f the western head. Modern adult male of the dissociated esthesia, isolated from his chaps, caught up in a life of disconnected parts and baffled urges ; therefore Allen Tate # 8217 ; s Southerner waiting at the gate of the Confederate graveyard contemplates the high glorification of Stonewall Jackson and the cryptic foot-cavalry of a twenty-four hours when ascendants of that Southerner knew what they fought for, and could decease volitionally for cognizing it: You know who have waited by the wall The dusky certainty of an animate being, Those midnight damagess of the blood You know # 8212 ; the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze Of the sky, the sudden call: you know the fury, The cold pool left by the climb inundation, Of muted Zeno and Parmenides. You who have waited for the angry declaration Of those desires that should be yours tomorrow, You know the unimportant shrift of decease And praise the vision And praise the chesty circumstance Of those who fall Rank upon rank, hurried beyond determination # 8212 ; Here by the drooping gate, stopped by the wall. Timess are non what they were, Tate # 8217 ; s Southerner at the gate realizes ; it has become about impossible even to conceive of such yearss: You hear the cry, the brainsick hemlocks point With troubled fingers to the silence which Clutters you, a ma, in clip. Even the rubric of the verse form stems from the sarcasm of the so and now ; Not merely are the metre and rime without fixed form, Tate wrote, but in another characteristic the verse form is even further removed from Pindar than Abraham Cowley was: a strictly subjective speculation would non even in Cowley # 8217 ; s age have been called an ode. I suppose in so naming it I intended an sarcasm: the scene of the verse form is non a public jubilation, it is a lone adult male by a gate. from Rubin, Southern Renascence. Copyright? 1953 by the Johns Hopkins UP.