“Cold pastoral”: Irony and the eclogue in the poetry of the Southern Fugitives

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”.