Helmet of Fire: American Poetry in the 1920s 263war of inner human tensions and oppositions—the split between body and
soul, desire and need, illusion and reality, emotion and rational intellect. His
most characteristic poems enact a theme of thwarted love or else dramatize
and investigate the relentless inevitability of death and how we respond to it.
The tragedy of Ransom’s characters is their inability to accept their own
duality, oscillating between extremes, paralyzed and tortured—as the
equilibrists are—by opposing forces in their own natures. The only
reconciliation they can find is in their own death. Despite his playfulness and
wit, a Hardyesque fatalism runs through all of Ransom’s poems.
Ransom’s typical poetic strategy is to take a passionate subject and hold
it up at a certain distance, creating a feeling of balance and tension, emotions
held in check, fever and chills. He created a detached surface and linguistic
tension by mixing a raw, colloquial, and informal speech with an archaic and
elegant diction. And his central poetic mode was irony. He believed that
irony was the most inclusive response to human duality and in 1924 praised
it in the Fugitiveas “the rarest of the states of mind, because it is the most
inclusive; the whole mind has been active in arriving at it, both creation and
criticism, both poetry and science.”^29 Thus out of his own poetic practice
and experience, his idea of the proper response to man’s perception of his
difference from nature, Ransom began to define the term that would be the
foundation stone for New Criticism.
In the early twenties Allen Tate carried on what he called “an
impertinent campaign on Eliot’s behalf in the South.” Tate’s first book, Mr.
Pope and Other Poems,combines a traditional formality with a Modernist
subject matter and was heavily influenced by Eliot’s Poems.His style is
chiseled, concentrated, difficult. Tate arranged the poems under three
categories, “Space,” “Time,” and “History,” but they all deal with the same
essential theme—the suffering of the modern citizen who must live in a
world of bewildering complexity (with understanding divorced from reason)
and under the dispensation of a scientific and technological age.
Tate’s most important single poem, “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” is
a kind of Southern analogue to The Waste Land.As opposed to Ransom, who
thought The Waste Land“seemed to bring to a head all the specifically
modern errors,” Tate defended the way Eliot’s poem embraced “the entire
range of consciousness” and impersonally dramatized the tragic situation of
those who live in modern times.^30 Tate’s “Ode” treats that situation in
specifically Southern terms. The poem presents the symbolic dilemma of a
man who has stopped at the gate of a Confederate graveyard. He is trapped
in time, isolated, alone, self-conscious, caught between a heroic Civil War
past, which is irrecoverable, and the chaotic, degenerate present. In his essay