Reviews for Collected Poems, 1919-1976

The average rating for Collected Poems, 1919-1976 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-06-01 00:00:00 Malyna Swyter Reading Allen Tate's _Ode to the Confederate Dead_ in 2017 is likely a more politically complex activity than Tate would have predicted nearly 90 years after he first published it in the height of the Jim Crow South. Perhaps it is naive to suggest the poem was ever less than a landmine, though I imagine a not-so-distant past where a liberal, educated white reader could enjoy it along strictly textual grounds (according to the dicta of New Criticism of course), leaving the mess of its unstated ugly ideas to a louder and less contemplative class of readers. The poet Robert Lowell, Allen Tate's sometime discipline, clearly sympathized with that latter class, even if he, a wealthy scion of aristocratic Boston, belonged very much more to the former; he set out to drop the atom bomb (yes, there's one in there) on Tate's work by composing an unstrung, anxious, and race-conscious answer entitled _For the Union Dead_. Clever Lowell snips off the Ode as if with rusty scissors. But that is a digression. The reader of Tate's poem today need not turn to Lowell for consolation, not if he is interested in understanding the fate of Confederate monuments today, the very physical kind, that cities like New Orleans are tearing down and groups of White Nationalists are attempting to protect. For Allen Tate did indeed write a monument and his monument cannot be dismantled and put in storage. Nor does it deserve to be expurgated from the canon--it is a beautiful poem, certainly much more beautiful than Lowell's bewildered answer to it. And it is a poem that can tell us a great deal about a literary stance toward the civil war and why it's seemingly impossible stop elevating the South's loss to the status of myth. The chief frustration a modern reader will encounter with the poem is it doesn't have black people. It doesn't have slavery. It doesn't even have cotton or tobacco. In terms of concrete historical, factual things mentioned it has a short litany of battles, lengthy observances of a graveyard, and a quick but fatal dose of Greek stuff. Of course Tate is at liberty to write about whatever he wants, but the fact that he wrote an ode to the Confederacy without so of a mention of the cause it was fighting for is a very deliberate choice. One may ascribe insidiousness to this choice, perhaps the same insidiousness that Tate embodies at the end of his poem in the form of the "gentle serpent" in the "mulberry bush" waiting for of us all to die, and while it is truly fair game to censure the Southern white man who wrote this poem nearly a hundred years ago, I will propose that Tate had another motive very much in mind. Tate's poem leverages a feeling everyone has had at a graveyard--the feeling of being cut off from the past. The bodies of the dead have never been closer, but as a member of the living, the observer feels caught up in himself and trapped in his own present, a "silence which / Smothers you, a mummy, in time." This sensation of dislocation becomes the intellectual and philosophical underpinning of the poem as the speaker struggles to articulate the horror before him but cannot commemorate it in any traditional sense. This failure of the tradition is not because the cause was unjust--a proposition the poem never entertains--but because the speaker's connection to it is completely severed. This emotion has another name: Trauma. Tate began working on his poem about half a century after the war's end. Civil war vets were a less common sight then than Vietnam vets are now merely because the vast majority couldn't leave their early graves. If Tate could not bring himself to contemplate the reasons for what happened, this was because the fact of the war itself and the sheer scale of its death and destruction made it impossible to consider much of anything else. Tate's speaker, with his carefully wrought language (echoing Milton's Lycidas to my ear), is in shock. Many odes and commemorations have been made despite trauma (or in fact very much because of it), and Tate's refusal to get past that initial flood of numbing pain and disorientation and his choice to instead revel in it is the poem's true conceit. Nobody can get past it, he suggests, and anyone who makes a serious attempt to actually feel the Confederate dead will end up in the same place--on their ass, more or less, reeling and grasping at existential questions. The existential questions that Tate raises must at least equal if not exceed the significance of an American slavery his poem cannot face. If not, the philosophy of the poem looks like an improvised moral shield with which to hold guilt at bay. If Tate's questions--and his answers--were a distraction then when originally published, it's likely they are a bigger distraction now. They are also where Tate's poem is weakest. Below is the poem's third strophe where the speaker invokes his most charged vocabulary, and if you forgive the cherry-picking, they include "restitutions", "animal", "blood", "rage", "angry", and "arrogant": You know who have waited by the wall The twilight certainty of an animal, Those midnight restitutions of the blood You know--the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze Of the sky, the sudden call: you know the rage, The cold pool left by the mounting flood, Of muted Zeno and Parmenides. You who have waited for the angry resolution Of those desires that should be yours tomorrow, You know the unimportant shrift of death And praise the vision And praise the arrogant circumstance Of those who fall Rank upon rank, hurried beyond decision-- Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall. Even setting Zeno and Parmenides aside, the passage is confusing. Only when we get to the "arrogant circumstance" are we once again tethered to the soldiers of the poem. While it's a stretch to say the dead mens' circumstances were arrogant, it's safe to concede the Civil War had its share of arrogance to go around. Re-reading the passage on the assumption Tate's speaker is addressing the dead directly, the emotions make sense. The Confederate troops certainly knew and felt most of the things discussed in the passage above, even if the reader at first cannot--the "cold pool" we assume to be to dying in a pool of blood, the "desires that should be yours tomorrow" never were fulfilled occurred because of the "shrift of death". The problem with this reading is that it's wrong. The "you" is not the dead. It's the second person knows who the dead are and knows their feelings, presumably because he is a Southern man in a Confederate graveyard. Those feelings of rage and unfulfilled promise are his that he shares with the dead, possibly more than he shares with anyone else. The restitution he seeks is not 20 acres and a mule but restitution from the North for crimes against the South. Zeno and Parmenides sit in the center of this strophe waiting to entrap unwary readers. Tate has placed at the heart of his poem a thicket of pre-socratic philosophy that constipates his strongest and most direct expression of wounded white Southern pride. These two Greek dudes never "mounted a flood". Tate just injects them as water-makers and in doing so dilutes his more vivid battlefield bloodbath imagery. All of a sudden the water isn't blood and it isn't real, it's imaginary water from a prehistory of ideas. To make matters worse this pair do not feature in English poetry prior to Tate (as far as I know), so there is no specific allusion he is making. Without resorting to external sources, a reader can be forgiven for not understanding their significance here, even if versed enough in ancient thought to have heard of them. They are a mythology private to Allen Tate. Other critics--Tate included--have written in detail on the relationship between Greek philosophy and these dead Confederate men of the poem. If you are interested I refer you to these essays. It is possible there is something there I am missing. But I doubt it is equivalent to what Tate himself has missed by failing to mention slavery in his poem. This is the problem we are facing today. Some monuments to the Confederacy can serve a necessary function of remembering the trauma of a war that nearly ended the American experiment. We cannot and must not erase the record of the horrific loss of human life on the Southern side, nor must the North condescend to the South when the North today still has a long way to go toward racial equality. But we cannot stand idle as monuments glorify and mythologize the Southern cause while obscuring its moral bankruptcy. _Ode to the Confederate Dead_--the passage I pick on aside--is a triumph of poetic craft which conjures postwar trauma as effortlessly today as when it was first written. It bears witness with keen observation and a rich phrasing that is hard to match in contemporary poetry. For this it needs to be celebrated and studied. But it is also one monument whose deconstruction is long past due.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-01-02 00:00:00 Shirley Bradford This collection of Allen Tate's poetry and translations captures the full range of his remarkable and significant literary career. It is a much-needed addition to the world of American poetry. Arranged in broad epochs, Collected Poems presents Tate's work chronologically, except for his translations, which appear in their own chapter, and his very early or unfinished works. While not authoritative and sadly lacking in footnotes, this bare-boned approach does allow the majesty of Tate's poetry to stand out on its own. Tate will be of the greatest significance for those interested in 20th century American poetry with a strongly Southern bent; fans of both of the Fugitives and the Agrarians will, naturally, find much to enjoy.