"Ode" Essay, Research Paper
Here is Tate’s Full Essay
from Reason in Madness, 1938
On this first occasion, which will probably be the last, of my writing about my own
verse, I could plead in excuse the example of Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote about himself in
an essay called "The Philosophy of Composition." But in our age the appeal to
authority is weak, and I am of my age. What I happen to know about the poem that I shall
discuss is limited. I remember merely my intention in writing it; I do not know whether
the poem is good; and I do not know its obscure origins.
How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question
asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry. Of late I have not read any of
the genetic theories very attentively: years ago I read one by Mr. Conrad Aiken; another,
I think, by Mr. Robert Graves; but I have forgotten them. I am not ridiculing verbal
mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more
besides may have a great deal to do with it. Other psychological theories say a good deal
about compensation. A poem is an indirect effort of a shaky man to justify himself to
happier men, or to present a superior account of his relation to a world that allows him
but little certainty, and would allow equally little to the happier men if they did not
wear blinders–according to the poet. For example, a poet might be a man who could not get
enough self-justification out of being an automobile salesman (whose certainty is a fixed
quota of cars every month) to rest comfortably upon it. So the poet, who wants to be
something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions
of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect
automobile salesman. Everybody, alas, suffers a little … I constantly read this kind of
criticism of my own verse. According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have
been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I
set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society
has no use for.
Although a theory may not be "true," it may make certain insights available
for a while; and I have deemed it proper to notice theories of the genetic variety because
a poet talking about himself is often expected, as the best authority, to explain the
origins of his poems. But persons interested in origins are seldom quick to use them.
Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results. What is the poem,
after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why. The Why and
Where can never get beyond the guessing stage because, in the language of those who think
it can, poetry cannot be brought to "laboratory conditions." The only real
evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem. For some reason
most critics have a hard time fixing their minds directly under their noses, and before
they see the object that is there they use a telescope upon the horizon to see where it
came from. They are wood-cutters who do their job by finding out where ere the ore came
from in the iron of the steel of the blade of the ax that Jack built. I do not say that
this procedure is without contributory insights; but the insights are merely contributory
and should not replace the poem, which is the object upon which they must be focused. A
poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it
may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never
less than all.
Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment. Among
"critics" they have been useless and not quite disinterested: I have myself
found them applicable to the work of poets whom I do not like. That is the easiest way.
I say all this because it seems to me that my verse or anybody else’s is merely a way
of knowing something: if the poem is a real creation, it is a kind of knowledge that we
did not possess before. It is not knowledge "about" something else; the poem is
the fullness of that knowledge. We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can
restate. In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader
knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem. I have expressed
this view elsewhere in other terms, and it has been accused of aestheticism or art for
art’s sake. But let the reader recall the historic position of Catholicism: nulla salus
extra ecclesiam. That must be religionism. There is probably nothing wrong with art
for art’s sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry
written in England forty years ago. Religion always ought to transcend any of its
particular uses; and likewise the true art for art’s sake view can be held only by persons
who are always looking for things that they can respect apart from use (though they may be
useful), like poems, fly-rods, and formal gardens. . . . These are negative postulates,
and I am going to illustrate them with some commentary on a poem called "Ode to the
Confederate Dead."
II
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
. Society (and "nature" as modern society constructs it) appears to offer
limited fields for the exercise of the whole man, who wastes his energy piecemeal over
separate functions that ought to come under a unity of being. (Until the last generation,
only certain women were whores, having been set aside as special instances of sex amid a
social scheme that held the general belief that sex must be part of a whole; now the
general belief is that sex must be special.) Without unity we get the remarkable
self-consciousness of our age. Everybody is talking about this evil, and a great many
persons know what ought to be done to correct it. As a citizen I have my own prescription,
but as a poet I am concerned with the experience of "solipsism." And an
experience of it is not quite the same thing as a philosophical statement about it.
I should have trouble connecting solipsism and the Confederate dead in a rational
argument; I should make a fool of myself in the discussion, because I know no more of the
Confederate dead or of solipsism than hundreds of other people. (Possibly less: the dead
Confederates may be presumed to have a certain privacy; and as for solipsism, I blush in
the presence of philosophers who know all about Bishop Berkeley; I use the them here in
its strict etymology.) And if I call this interest in one’s ego Narcissism, I make myself
a logical ignoramus, and I take liberties with mythology. I use Narcissism to mean only
preoccupation with self; it may be either love or hate. But a good psychiatrist knows that
it means self-love only, and otherwise he can talk about it more coherently, knows more
about it than I shall ever hope or desire to know. He would look at me professionally if I
uttered the remark that the modern squirrel cage of our sensibility, the extreme
introspection of our time, has anything whatever to do with the Confederate dead.
But when the doctor looks at literature it is a question whether he sees it: the sea
boils and pigs have wings because in poetry all things are possible–if you are man
enough. They are possible because in poetry the disparate elements are not combined in
logic, which can join things only under certain categories and under the law of
contradiction; they are combined in poetry rather as experience, and experience has
decided to ignore logic, except perhaps as another field of experience. Experience means
conflict, our natures being what they are, and conflict means drama. Dramatic experience
is not logical; it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak,
in criticism, of form. Indeed as experience, this conflict is always a logical
contradiction, or philosophically an antinomy. Serious poetry deals with the fundamental
conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but
reason does not relieve us of them. Their only final coherence is the formal re-creation
of art, which "freezes" the experience as permanently as a logical formula, but
without, like the formula, leaving all but the logic out.
Narcissism and the Confederate dead cannot be connected logically, or even
historically; even were the connection an historical fact, they would not stand connected
as art, for no one experiences raw history. The proof of the connection must lie, if
anywhere, in the experienced conflict which is the poem itself. Since one set of
references for the conflict is the historic Confederates, the poem, if it is successful,
is a certain section of history made into experience, but only on this occasion, and on
these terms: even the author of the poem has no experience of its history apart from the
occasion and the terms.
It will be understood that I do not claim even a partial success in the junction of the
two "ideas" in the poem that I am about to discuss. I am describing an
intention, and the labor of revising the poem–a labor spread over ten years fairly
exposes the lack of confidence that I have felt and still feel in it. All the tests of its
success in style and versification would come in the end to a single test, an answer, yes
or no, to the question: Assuming that the Confederates and Narcissus are not yoked
together by mere violence, has the poet convinced the reader that, on the specific
occasion of this poem, there is a necessary yet hitherto undetected relationship between
them? By necessary I mean dramatically relevant, a relation "discovered" in
terms of the particular occasion, not historically argued or philosophically deduced.
Should the question that I have just asked be answered yes, then this poem or any other
with its specific problem could be said to have form: what was previously a merely felt
quality of life has been raised to the level of experience–it has become specific, local,
dramatic, "formal"–that is to say, informed.
III
THE structure of the Ode is simple. Figure to yourself a man stopping at the gate of a
Confederate graveyard on a late autumn afternoon. The leaves are falling; his first
impressions bring him the "rumor of mortality"; and the desolation barely allows
him, at the beginning of the second stanza, the conventionally heroic surmise that the
dead will enrich the earth, "where these memories grow." From those quoted words
to the end of that passage be pauses for a baroque meditation on the ravages of time,
concluding with the figure of the "blind crab." This creature has mobility but
no direction, energy but from the human point of view, no purposeful world to use it in:
in the entire poem there are only two explicit symbols for the locked-in ego; the crab is
the first and less explicit symbol, a mere hint a planting of the idea that will become
overt in its second instance-the jaguar towards the end. The crab is the first intimation
of the nature of the moral conflict upon which the drama of the poem develops: the
cut-off-ness of the modern "intellectual man" from the world.
The next long passage or strophe, beginning "You know who have waited by the
wall," states the other term of the conflict. It is the theme of heroism, not merely
moral heroism, but heroism in the grand style, elevating even death from mere physical
dissolution into a formal ritual: this heroism is a formal ebullience of the human spirit
in an entire society, not private, romantic illusion–something better than moral heroism,
great as that may be, for moral heroism, being personal and individual, may be achieved by
certain men in all ages, even ages of decadence. But the late Hart Crane’s commentary, in
a letter, is better than any I can make; he described the theme as the "theme of
chivalry, a tradition of excess (not literally excess, rather active faith) which cannot
be perpetuated in the fragmentary cosmos of today–’those desires which should be yours
tomorrow,’ but which, you know, will not persist nor find any way into action."
The structure then is the objective frame for the tension between the two themes,
"active faith" which has decayed, and the "fragmentary cosmos" which
surrounds us. (I must repeat here that this is not a philosophical thesis; it is an
analytical statement of a conflict that is concrete within the poem.) In contemplating the
heroic theme the man at the gate never quite commits himself to the illusion of its
availability to him. The most that he can allow himself is the fancy that the blowing
leaves are charging soldiers, but he rigorously returns to the refrain: "Only the
wind"–or the "leaves flying." I suppose it is a commentary on our age that
the man at the gate never quite achieves the illusion that the leaves are heroic men, so
that he may identify himself with them, as Keats and Shelley too easily and too
beautifully did with nightingales and west winds. More than this, he cautions himself,
reminds himself repeatedly of his subjective prison, his solipsism, by breaking off the
half-illusion and coming back to the refrain of wind and leaves-a refrain that, as Hart
Crane said, is necessary to the "subjective continuity"
These two themes struggle for mastery up to the passage,
We shall say only the leaves whispering
In the improbable mist of nightfall–
which is near the end. It will be observed that the passage begins with a phrase taken
from the wind-leaves refrain -the signal that it has won. The refrain has been fused with
the main stream of the man’s reflections, dominating them; an d he cannot return even to
an ironic vision of the heroes. There is nothing but death, the mere naturalism of death
at that–spiritual extinction in the decay of the body. Autumn and the leaves are death;
the men who exemplified in a grand style an "active faith" are dead; there are
only the leaves.
Shall we then worship death . . .
… set up the gr
In the house? The ravenous grave
that will take us before our time? The question is not answered, although as a kind of
morbid romanticism it might, if answered affirmatively, provide the man with an illusory
escape from his solipsism; but he cannot accept it. Nor has he been able to ha have in his
immediate world, the fragmentary cosmos. There is no practical solution, no solution
offered for the edification of moralists. (To those who may identify the man at the gate
with the author of the poem I would say: He differs from the author in not accepting a
"practical solution," for the author’s personal dilemma is perhaps not quite so
exclusive as that of the meditating man.) The main intention of the poem has been to make
dramatically visible the conflict to concentrate it, to present it, in Mr. R. P.
Blackmur’s phrase, as "experienced form"–not as a logical dilemma.
The closing image, that of the serpent, is the ancient symbol of time, and I tried to
give it the credibility of the commonplace by placing it in a mulberry bush-with the faint
hope that the silkworm would somehow be implicit. But time is also death. If that is so,
then space, or the Becoming, is life; and I believe there is not a single spatial symbol
in the poem. "Sea-space" is allowed the "blind crab"; but the sea, as
appears plainly in the passage beginning, "Now that the salt of their blood …
" is life only in so far as it is the source of the lowest forms of life, the source
perhaps of all life, but life undifferentiated, halfway between life and death. This
passage is a contrasting inversion of the conventional
… inexhaustible bodies that are not
Dead, but feed the grass
the reduction of the earlier, literary conceit to a more naturalistic figure derived
from modern biological speculation. These "buried Caesars" will not bloom in the
hyacinth but will only make saltier the sea.
The wind-leaves refrain was added to the poem in 1930, nearly five years after the
first draft was written. I felt that the danger of adding it was small because, implicit
in the long strophes of meditation, the ironic commentary on the vanished heroes was
already there, giving the poem such dramatic tension as it had in the earlier version. The
refrain makes the commentary more explicit, more visibly dramatic and renders quite plain,
as Hart Crane intimated, the subjective character of the imagery throughout. But there was
another reason for it, besides the increased visualization that it imparts to the dramatic
conflict. It "times" the poem better, offers the reader frequent pauses in the
development of the two themes, allows him occasions of assimilation; and on the
whole–this was my hope and intention–the refrain makes the poem seem longer than it is
and thus eases the concentration of imagery –without, I hope, sacrificing a possible
effect of concentration.
IV
I HAVE been asked why I called the poem an ode. I first called it an elegy. It is an
ode only in the sense in which Cowley in the seventeenth century misunderstood the real
structure of the Pindaric ode. Not only are the meter and rhyme without fixed pattern, but
in another feature the poem is even further removed from Pindar than Abraham Cowley was: a
purely subjective meditation would not even in Cowley’s age have been called an ode. I
suppose in so calling it I intended an irony: the scene of the poem is not a public
celebration, it is a lone man by a gate. The dominant rhythm is "mounting, the
dominant meter iambic pentameter varied with six-, four-, and three-stressed lines; but
this was not. planned in advance for variety. I adapted the meter to the effect desired at
the moment. The "Lycidas," but other r models could have served. The rhymes in a
given strophe I tried to adjust to the rhythm and the texture. of feeling and image. For
example, take this passage in the second strophe:
Autumn is desolation in the plot
Of a thousand acres where these memories grow
From the inexhaustible bodies that are not
Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row.
Think of the autumns that have come and gone!-
Ambitious November with the humors of the year,
With a particular zeal for every slab,
Staining the uncomfortable angels that rot
On the slabs, a wing chipped here, an arm there:
The brute curiosity of an angel’s stare
Turns you, like them, to stone,
Transforms the heaving air
Till plunged to a heavier world below
You shift your sea-space blindly
Heaving, fuming like the blind crab.
There is rhymed with year (to many persons, perhaps, only a half-rhyme), and I hoped
the reader would unconsciously assume that he need not expect further use of that sound
for some time. So when the line, "The brute curiosity of an angel’s stare,"
comes a moment later, rhyming with year-there I hoped that the violence of image would be
further reinforced by the repetition of a sound that was no longer expected. I wanted the
shock to be heavy; so I felt that I could not afford to hurry the reader away from it
until he had received it in full. The next two lines carry on the image at a lower
intensity: the rhyme, "Transforms the heaving air," prolongs the moment of
attention upon that passage, while at the same time it ought to begin dissipating the
shock, both by the introduction of a new image and by reduction of the "meaning"
to a pattern of sound, the ere-rhymes. I calculated that the third use of that sound (stare)
would be a surprise, the fourth (air) a monotony. I purposely made the end words of
the third from last and last lines below and crab-delayed rhymes for row and slab, the
last being an internal and half-dissonant rhyme for the sake of bewilderment and
incompleteness, qualities by which the man at the gate is at the moment possessed.
This is elementary but I cannot vouch for its success. As the dramatic situation of the
poem is the tension that I have already described, so the rhythm is an attempt at a series
of "modulations" back and forth between a formal regularity, for the heroic
emotion, and a broken rhythm, with scattering imagery, for the failure of that emotion.
This is "imitative form," which Yvor Winters deems a vice worth castigation. I
have pointed out that the passage, "You know who have waited by the wall,"
presents the heroic theme of "active -faith"; it will be observed that the
rhythm, increasingly after "You who have waited for the angry resolution," is
almost perfectly regular iambic, with only a few initial substitutions and weak endings.
The passage is meant to convey a plenary vision, the actual presence, of the exemplars of
active faith: the man at the ate at that moment is nearer to realizing them than at any
other in the poem; hence the formal rhythm. But the vision breaks down; the wind-leaves
refrain supervenes; and the next passage, "Turn your eyes to the immoderate
past," is the irony of the preceding realization. With the self-conscious historical
sense he turns his eyes into the past. The next passage after this, beginning, "You
hear the shout …" is the failure of the vision in both phases, the pure realization
and the merely historical. He cannot "see" the heroic virtues; there is wind,
rain,and leaves. But there is sound; for a moment he deceives himself with it. It is the
noise of the battles that he has evoked. Then comes the figure of the rising sun of those
battles; he is "lost" in that orient of the thick and fast, and he curses his
own moment, "the setting sun." The "setting sun" I tried to use as a
triple image, for the decline of the heroic age and for the actual scene of late
afternoon, the latter being not only natural desolation but spiritual desolation as well.
Again for a moment he thinks he hears the battle shout, but only for a moment; then the
silence reaches him.
Corresponding to the disintegration of the vision just described there has been a
breaking down of the formal rhythm. The complete breakdown comes with the images of the
mummy" and the "hound bitch." (Hound bitch because the hound is a hunter,
participant of a formal ritual.) The failure of the vision throws the man back upon
himself, but upon himself he cannot bring to bear the force of sustained imagination. He
sees himself in random images (random to him, deliberate with the author) of something
lower than he ought to be: the human image is only that of preserved death; but if he is
alive he is an old hunter dying. The passages about the mummy and the bitch are
deliberately brief–slight rhythmic stretches. (These are the only verses I have written
for which I thought of the movement first, then cast about for the symbols.)
I believe the term modulation denotes in music the uninterrupted shift from one key to
another: I do not know the term for change of rhythm without change of measure. I wish to
describe a similar changes in verse rhythm; it may be convenient to think of it as
modulation of a certain kind. At the end of the passage that I have been discussing the
final words are "Hears the wind only." The phrase closes the first main division
of the poem. I have loosely called the longer passages strophes, and if I were e hardy
enough to impose the classical organization of the lyric ode upon a baroque poem, I should
say that these words bring to an end the Strophe, after which must come the next main
division, or Antistrophe, which was often employed to answer the matte r set forth in the
Strophe or to present it from another point of view. And that is precisely the
significance of the next main division, beginning: "Now that the salt of their blood
. . ." But I wanted this second division of the poem to arise out of the collapse of
the first. It is plain that it would not have suited my purpose to round off the first
section with some sort of formal rhythm; so I ended it with an unfinished line. The next
division must therefore begin by finishing that line, not merely in meter but with an
integral rhythm. I will quote the passage:
The hound bitch
Toothless and dying, in a musty cellar
Hears the wind only.
Now that the salt of their blood
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea,
Seals the malignant purity of the flood. . . .
The caesura, after only, is thus at the middle of the third foot. (I do not give a full
stress to wind, but attribute a "hovering stress" to wind and the first syllable
of only.) The reader expects the foot to be completed by the stress on the next word, Now,
as in a sense it is; but the phrase, "Now that the salt of their blood," is also
the beginning of a new movement; it is two "dactyls" continuing more broadly the
falling rhythm that has prevailed. But with the finishing off of the line with blood, the
mounting rhythm is restored; the whole line from Hears to blood is actually an iambic
pentameter with liberal inversions and substitutions that were expected to create a
counter-rhythm within the line. From the caesura on, the rhythm is new; but it has -or was
expected to have- an organic relation to the preceding rhythm; and it signals the rise of
a new statement of the theme.
I have gone into this passage in detail–I might have chosen another– not because I
think it is successful, but because I labored with it; if it is a failure, or even an
uninteresting success, it ought to offer as much technical instruction to other persons as
it would were it both successful and interesting. But a word more: the broader movement
introduced by the new rhythm. was meant to correspond, as a sort of Antistrophe, to the
earlier formal movement beginning, "You know who have waited by the wall." It is
a new formal movement with new feeling and new imagery. The heroic but precarious illusion
of the earlier movement has broken down into the personal symbols of the mummy and the
hound; the pathetic fallacy of the leaves as charging soldiers and the conventional
"buried Caesar" theme have become rotten leaves and dead bodies wasting in the
earth, to return after long erosion to the sea. In the midst of this naturalism, what
shall the man say? What shall all humanity say in the presence of decay ? The two themes,
then, have been struggling for mastery; the structure of the poem thus exhibits the
development of two formal passages that contrast the two themes. The two formal passages
break down, the first shading into the second ("Now that the salt of their blood the
second one concluding with the figure of the jaguar which is presented in a distracted
rhythm left suspended from a weak ending -the word victim. This figure of the jaguar is
the only explicit rendering of the Narcissus mot if in the poem, but instead -of a youth
gazing into a pool, a predatory beast stares at a jungle stream, and leaps to devour
himself.
The next passage begins:
What shall we say who have knowledge
Carried to the heart?
This is Pascal’s war between heart and head, between finesse and geometry. Should the
reader care to think of these lines agathering up of the two themes, now fused, into a
final statement, I should see no objection to calling it the Epode. But upon the meaning
of the lines from here to the end there is no need for further commentary. I have talked
about the structure of the poem, not its quality. One can no more find the quality of
one’s own verse than one can find its value, and to try to find either is like looking
into a glass for the effect that one’s face has upon other persons.
If anybody ever wished to know anything about this poem that he could not interpret for
himself, I suspect that he is still in the dark. I cannot believe that I have illuminated
the difficulties that some readers have found in the style. But then I cannot, have never
been able to, see any difficulties of that order. The poem has been much revised. I still
think there is much to be said for the original barter instead of yield in the second
line, and for Novembers instead of November in line fifteen. The revisions were not
undertaken for the convenience of the reader but for the poem’s own clarity, so that,
word, phrase, line, passage, the poem might at worst come near its best expression.