Alive Together New and Selected Poems by Lisel Mueller

Author:Lisel Mueller [Mueller, Lisel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry
ISBN: 9780807121283
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 1996-10-04T18:30:00+00:00

The history of the South, Allen Tate declared, was the history of failure and defeat. Appomattox had been but one of many such moments throughout southern history and perhaps not the most serious or devastating. More important, Tate thought, was the almost complete spiritual failure of the southern people, demonstrated by the eagerness with which they made a religion of the "lost cause." They had little else to sustain them.

Southerners had put their faith in history, and in 1865, history disappointed them. Defeated in war, they could not certify their vision of the past or of the future. The victorious northerners could write history to suit themselves and could make of the future what they wanted. In the northern interpretation of events, southerners naturally became the villains responsible for all the evils that afflicted the nation. Consequently, after the war, southerners remained on the defensive, retreating into a self-willed isolationa "moral secession," Tate called itthat was more thoroughgoing after 1865 than it had been before. They convinced themselves that if only "those people over there" had let them alone, the vast southern paradise would have endured forever.

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