ABSTRACT
Ode to the Confederate Dead Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead" was first published in Fugitives: An Anthology of Verse (January 1928) and later that year in Tate's first collection, Mr. Pope, and Other Poems. Its appearance with the work of Tate's fellow Tennessee-based poets emphasizes its position as a key text of the Southern Renaissance. Inspired by T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" (1922), it is a High Modernist treatment of man's deteriorating relationship with his own history and culture and rapidly became Tate's most influential poem. It has strong thematic affinities with Paul Valery's Le Cimetiere marin (1920; The Graveyard by the Sea) and influenced Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead." After extensive revision (including the addition of the refrain about falling leaves that acts as a continuing reminder of human mortality) its final version appeared in Tate's Selected Poems (1937). In 1938 Tate wrote "Narcissus as Narcissus," an essay that defines in detail the predicament of the poem's narrator:
That poem is "about" solipsism, a philosophical doctrine which says that we create the world in the act of perceiving it; or about Narcissism, or any other ism that denotes the failure of the human personality to function objectively in nature and society.
