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Sunday, May 29, 2011

Memorial Day is not victims’ day

Over at Contentions, I reflect upon Memorial Day by contrasting Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” to Robert Lowell’s thirty-years-later “For the Union Dead.” Twenty years in the South elevated Tate above Lowell in my estimation.
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1 comment:

  1. forchevilleJune 06, 2011 2:37 AM

    These poems are a generation apart in time and a cosmos apart in mentality.

    The sound on the 60s:

    "Colonel Shaw
    is riding on his bubble,
    he waits
    for the blessèd break.

    The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
    giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
    a savage servility
    slides by on grease."

    I still remember how good it once sounded in tutorials, although now it seems just a cheap score, gliding by on its own grease.

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