Tate, Allen - Robert S. Dupree (essay date 1983)

Robert S. Dupree (essay date 1983)

SOURCE: Dupree, Robert S. “The Buried City.” In Allen Tate and the Augustinian Imagination: A Study of the Poetry, pp. 31-52. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.

[In the following essay, Dupree regards the theme of failed civilization, especially that of the Southern Confederacy, as central to Tate's poetry.]

In his essay “Homer and the Scholars,” George Steiner has noted the central importance of the city in the first works of Western literature:

At the core of the Homeric poems lies the remembrance of one of the greatest disasters that can befall man: the destruction of a city. A city is the outward sum of man's nobility; in it, his condition is most thoroughly humanized. When a city is destroyed, man is compelled to wander the earth or dwell in the open fields in partial return to the manner of a beast. That is the central realization of the Iliad....

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