Elegy for the Native Guards

Trethewey’s poem, as indicated by her epigraph, is inspired by Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” Tate was inspired by T. S. Eliot; he is even referred to as the Eliot of the South. Both Tate and Eliot were modernist poets. Modernism is a literary movement from the early 20th century that emphasized breaking with the past traditions of poetry and creating challenging, detailed new poetry. Tate was an important figure in New Criticism, which, according to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, is a “distillation of modernist ideas about literature” and focused on “the structural and linguistic features that distinguish [poetry] from other types of writing” (936). These features make poetry more complex than prose. Tate and other members of this movement believed poetry should be distinct from history; that is, it should offer a different kind of knowledge than historical study does.

Trethewey, on the other hand, is interested in exploring history--especially the construction of history--and uses elements that many modernists deplored, such as a given rhyme scheme. Her poems about the Civil War include a great deal of hauntology: the persistent presence of aspects from the past that can be compared to a ghost haunting.