As the historical cliché has it, the North won the Civil War, and the South won the peace, reestablishing its customs, folkways, and racial “etiquette” even with the demise of African American slavery. Allen Tate was a member of the literary “Agrarians,” a loose collection of southern writers who coalesced in the 1920s. They produced I’ll Take My Stand (1930), a sociological and literary argument against American modernity, mourning the world that was lost when the Old South disappeared.

Tate was not naive enough to swallow the Lost Cause myth of southern moonlight and magnolias, but he was preoccupied, both poetically and politically, with the world that had been lost with the Confederacy’s defeat.