The Patriot Poets by Stephen J. Adams;

Author:Stephen J. Adams; [Adams;, Stephen J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780773555952
Publisher: McGillQueensUP
Published: 2018-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

To return to the period of Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead”: the young Tate, having confronted his own epistemological and spiritual uncertainties about the Southern past, seems to have set out deliberately to repair them, arriving at both his own personal understanding of the war and a considered outlook on current politics. Tate read much history, spending a great deal of intellectual effort on a review of Spengler’s Decline of the West, that once modish work that sees recurrent patterns in the rise and fall of civilizations. He was also impressed by Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, a work that addresses the rise of scientific thought through the past three centuries, concluding with Whitehead’s own version of “process theology.” Most important, Tate undertook the writing of two Civil War biographies for popular consumption, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis. Tate was not a historian, as Rubin points out; the biographies are polemical. He had already decided what the lives “were supposed to mean,” and he mainly worked “at fitting the biographical material into his thesis” (Wary Fugitives, 98). Nonetheless, the background reading and the writing got Tate’s hands dirty with historical detail. How much of this understanding – quite apart from his silenced racism – can be read backward into Tate’s “Ode” is a question each reader must decide. Tate’s visit to England in 1928, with its quasi-feudal class-determined society, triggered a brief resurgence of American egalitarianism, and he declared himself a “confirmed democrat” (Singal, War Within, 242). But Tate’s ultimate pointe d’arrivée was a political position deeply critical of democracy.

When asked in April 1927 to write a biography of Stonewall Jackson, writes Underwood, Tate was ecstatic: “The project turned out to be the first stage in his decade-long quest for a new Southern father” (Allen Tate, 128). But though the first biography gave Tate “opportunity to vent his hostility to Northerners who wrote Southern history” (131), Jackson is a relatively one-dimensional figure.25 The second biography, however, Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall (completed in July 1929), turned from conventional military history to the heart of Confederate politics and Confederate failure. Both books are filled more with military narrative than actual biography, but, unlike Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis has rarely been an object of Southern hagiography. His conduct of the war revealed not only personal character flaws, but the flaws of the Confederacy itself, and Tate’s openly partisan biography was forced to confront both.

Tate’s two biographies coincide with the development of his celebrated, or notorious, agrarianism and his editing of the twelve essays in I’ll Take My Stand (1930). Since these agrarian essays have been widely discussed and the biographies very little, my excursus from Tate’s poetry here focuses on Jefferson Davis and Tate’s Civil War. The dates must be observed precisely: first, these views were fully articulated after, not during, the composition of the “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” Second, these views, particularly the critiques of Northern industrialism and finance capitalism, were formed before, not after, the great stock market crash in October 1929.

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