Examples of New Criticism of Poetry
As a member of the Southern Agrarians, Allen Tate merged his voice with the voices of others, such as Robert Penn Warren, supporting a return to the simpler way of life in existence before industrialization. The Southern Agrarians wanted to bring back the Old South's supposed glory days of large, fa 
mily-owned plantations and happy laborers singing in the fields enjoying being one with nature. Tate views these ideas from an interesting perspective in "Ode to the Confederate Dead." ( Allen Tate, pg 1782). Warren looks at the same subject matter in his "Founding Fathers, Early-Nineteenth-Century Style, Southeast U.S.A." (Robert Penn Warren, pg 1766).
To the New Critics, poetry was a special kind of discourse, a means of communicating feeling and thought that could not be expressed in any other kind of language. It differed from the language of science or philosophy, but it conveyed equally valid meanings. Such critics set out to define and formalize the qualities of poetic thought and language, utilizing the technique of close reading with special emphasis on the connotative and associative values of words and on the multiple functions of figurative language, symbol, metaphor, and image in the work.
Tate views nature as something disturbing and yet natural. The numerous images of decay, death and destruction throughout the ode give the reader a melancholic sense of how pointless trying to turn the clock back would be. The sky resembles old, faded gray Confederate uniforms. Headstones endure the relentless elements. Angels slowly disintegrate. Grass continues growing, but only because dead men provide sustenance. Dead leaves blowing in the wind provide the only significant movement in the cemetery. Tate uses these bleak images of nature subtly to suggest that the once glorious Old South society is now dead and decaying, and looking back is inane. There is nothing left in the past. It is gone.
To the New Critics, poetry was a special kind of discourse, a means of communicating feeling and thought that could not be expressed in any other kind of language. It differed from the language of science or philosophy, but it conveyed equally valid meanings. Such critics set out to define and formalize the qualities of poetic thought and language, utilizing the technique of close reading with special emphasis on the connotative and associative values of words and on the multiple functions of figurative language, symbol, metaphor, and image in the work.
Tate views nature as something disturbing and yet natural. The numerous images of decay, death and destruction throughout the ode give the reader a melancholic sense of how pointless trying to turn the clock back would be. The sky resembles old, faded gray Confederate uniforms. Headstones endure the relentless elements. Angels slowly disintegrate. Grass continues growing, but only because dead men provide sustenance. Dead leaves blowing in the wind provide the only significant movement in the cemetery. Tate uses these bleak images of nature subtly to suggest that the once glorious Old South society is now dead and decaying, and looking back is inane. There is nothing left in the past. It is gone.