"Ode to the Confederate Dead" is a long poem by the American poet-critic Allen Tate.
[1] Heavily influenced by the work of T. S. Eliot, this Modernist poem takes place in a graveyard in the South where the narrator grieves the loss of the Confederate soldiers buried there.
Instead, Tate uses the graveyard and the dead Confederate soldiers as a metaphor for his narrator's troubled state of mind, and the poem charts the narrator's dark stream of consciousness, as he contemplates (or tries to avoid contemplating) his own mortality.
Tate wrote an essay, "Narcissus as Narcissus," in which he analyzes the poem with a close reading that is an important example of the close reading method practiced by Tate and the New Critics.
In the essay, Tate says that "Ode to the Confederate Dead" is "'about' solipsism, a philosophical doctrine which says that we create the world in the act of perceiving it; or about Narcissism, or any other ism that denotes the failure of the human personality to function objectively in nature and society.