ABSTRACT
The word ‘ode’ seems to promise a magniloquence to which few twentieth-century writers have aspired. At all events, they have been notably reluctant to incorporate it in the titles of their poems. Robert Bridges, Lascelles Abercrombie, and Laurence Binyon used it in connection with works that arouse little interest. The finest poem of the century to be so designated by its author is probably the ‘Ode to the Confederate Dead’ of Allen Tate. As a Southerner, Tate feels a kinship with those killed in the struggle against the Federal armies. An earlier Southerner, Henry Timrod, wrote immediately after the American Civil War an ‘Ode Sung on the Occasion of Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead, at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, S. C., 1867’. W. H. Auden again refuses to be too much in earnest when, he addresses the earth, ‘our Mother, the/nicest daughter of Chaos’, in an affectionate, mocking ‘Ode to Gaea’.
