SOURCE: Dupree, Robert S. “The Buried City.” In Allen Tate and the Augustinian Imagination: A Study of the Poetry, pp. 31-52. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.

In the following essay, Dupree regards the theme of failed civilization, especially that of the Southern Confederacy, as central to Tate's poetry.

In his essay “Homer and the Scholars,” George Steiner has noted the central importance of the city in the first works of Western literature:

At the core of the Homeric poems lies the remembrance of one of the greatest disasters that can befall man: the destruction of a city. A city is the outward sum of man's nobility; in it, his condition is most thoroughly humanized. When a city is destroyed, man is compelled to wander the earth or dwell in the open fields in partial return to the manner of a beast. That is the central realization of...