SOURCE: Gretlund, Jan Nordby. “The Man at the Gate.” In Frames of Southern Mind: Reflections on the Stoic, Be-Racial and Existential South, pp. 21-9. Portland: Odense University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Gretlund provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of “Ode to the Confederate Dead.”

Allen Tate began the “Ode to the Confederate Dead” in 1925, and the poem was first published in 1927. Since then it has been revised several times, and a so-called “final version” was published in 1937 in Tate's Selected Poems. Nevertheless the “Ode” was revised slightly for its inclusion in Poems: 1922-1947.¹ From its first version the poem has had the rigid formality that is characteristic of T. S. Eliot's poetry. This is not surprising, for among the Fugitive Poets at Vanderbilt University, it was Allen Tate who first came to know Eliot's work and adhered most strictly to his example. Tate's “Ode” is an intellectual...