“Cold pastoral”: Irony and the eclogue in the poetry of the Southern Fugitives
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2008
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
This article attempts to analyze a shift in the ancient genre of pastoral in the poetry of the Southern
modernists, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, a shift that seeks to account for the historical penetration
of nature and that is often aestheticized as the ironical counter-text of the “cold” pastoral.
Drawing upon the models of pastoral found in Lewis P. Simpson and William Empson, the article
argues that the essential trick of the old pastoral – the implication, as Empson calls it, of a beautiful
relation between rich and poor – does not work within nineteenth-century Southern literature because
the black resists being turned into a gardener in the garden. The article then examines Tate’s
“The swimmers”, a poem that narrates Tate’s discovery as a young child of the aftermath of a lynching,
as an expression of this unworkability in an idiom of what Tate called “pastoral terror”.
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Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 44 (2008), pp. 539-548