Ode to the Confederate Dead

"Ode to the Confederate Dead" is a long poem by the American poet-critic Allen Tate. It was first published in The American Caravan: A Yearbook of American Literature in 1927, and then collected in Tate's first book of poems, Mr. Pope and Other Poems, in 1928. It is one of Tate's best-known poems and considered by some critics to be his most important. Heavily influenced by the work of T. S. Eliot, this Modernist poem takes place in a graveyard in the South where the narrator grieves the loss of the Confederate soldiers buried there. However, unlike the "ode" to the Confederate dead written by the 19th-century American poet Henry Timrod, Tate's "Ode" is not a straightforward ode. Instead, Tate uses the graveyard and the dead Confederate soldiers as a metaphor for his narrator's troubled state of mind, and the poem charts the narrator's dark stream of consciousness, as he contemplates (or tries to avoid contemplating) his own mortality.

Influence

Robert Lowell's poem "For the Union Dead" referred to, and was partly a response to, Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead".

External links

• Complete text of "Ode to the Confederate Dead" at Poets.org