“Faulkner and the Southern Renaissance” - Dr. Glenn Arbery

On February 25, 2026, Dr. Glenn Arbery spoke to Valor Institute retreat participants about Faulkner’s relationship to the wider “Southern Renaissance” in twentieth-century American literature. Despite some general thematic similarities to Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and other writers of this movement, Faulkner did not share their gilded perception of Southern heritage, turning a much more critical eye to the past.

Transcript

I am glad that we ended with looking at Henry and Bond going to war. In fact, in that section of Absalom, Absalom! there are references to battles like the one at Shiloh, which was one that would have been particularly important to Faulkner, since it's fairly close to where he grew up in Oxford, Mississippi. Everything we're talking about with Faulkner eventually revolves around the Civil War. In fact, when you're talking about the South or you're talking about Southern literature, you're inevitably drawn to thinking about the Civil War and its aftermath.

I grew up in Georgia during the centennial of the Civil War. So when I was about, I guess, ten years old was when, I guess, 1961 was the beginning of the centennial of the Civil War. So for those next four years the Atlanta Journal-Constitution would come out with a weekly page from the edition of the paper a hundred years before. So whatever had been happening during that point of the Civil War would be fresh news, as it were. And so I kind of grew up with the Civil War on my mind. My grandfather was born 1874. The Reconstruction era was still very present to his childhood imagination. So it's difficult to explain to people from elsewhere what exactly it was like, having the Civil War as a kind of constant backdrop to things.

I was giving a talk last fall when I was trying to say I grew up in the civil rights era. But I said I grew up during the Civil War. This ripple of laughter. So what? Well, anyway. So there are many issues, and I'm going to talk about race more when I talk on Friday. But today what I want to try to do is to see Faulkner in the context of what's been called the Southern Renaissance. And this is a revival or really a kind of flowering of Southern literature, beginning in the 1920s and going up through the 1950s.

So you're thinking about a number of writers who are writing at this time, including Eudora Welty, who is a fellow Mississippian of Faulkner's. Caroline Gordon, whom we knew at the University of Dallas in her old age. She was married to Allen Tate, one of the poets we'll be looking at in a few minutes. John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, who wrote All the King's Men in the 1940s. Oh shoot, a number of others that are part of this period, culminating in the nineteen fifties — excuse me — with Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, others. But all this is part of the same movement that's going on in Southern literature. But it's important to distinguish what they were doing from anything like Gone With the Wind, which is also part of this phenomenon, but which kind of makes slavery benign, and it's kind of part of the moonlight and magnolia school of southern things that those who were part of what I'm calling the Southern Renaissance were trying to get around or put behind them.

So we're talking about the aftermath. This is about the time that Absalom, Absalom! is set, the first decade, but even in Faulkner going up into the decade or so after, this is a time of trying to come to terms with the southern past in some sort of new light. The South, it's just fair to say, was impoverished after the war. It was a defeated country. The landscape, as you'll see in descriptions in Absalom, Absalom!, was just wrecked. Both Joel Williamson, who is a biographer of Faulkner, and Richard King, who's written about the Southern Renaissance, described the South as a colony of the North after the Civil War, which is interesting. I mean, just to think of it as a metaphor, the North colonized the South. It wasn't any longer its own culture. It was something that sort of belonged to the North. And that would make southern literature post-colonial. But let's don't go there. What do you say?

In any case, there's been a lot written about what happened in the late nineteenth century to reconcile the North and the South. It's often considered that World War I sort of brought them finally back together again. But much of the writing about this said that the reconciliation between North and South really kind of depends on a forgetfulness about the situation of black people. David Blight has a very important book called Race and Reunion in which he explores this idea and makes the case that's just that. When you look at particularly the literature reconciling North and South, it's going to tend to be something like a romance in which the southern gentleman marries the northern girl.

I don't know if you know Henry James's novel The Bostonians, which is about feminists in Boston. There's — gosh, I forget the main character's name, but the girl who gets married is a very fiery feminist speaker, but she falls in love with this Southerner, interestingly named Ransom. And he wins her over, and there's elements of force — I mean, I don't mean to say that he forces her into marriage, but there's a very strong masculine dimension to Ransom that eventually sort of overwhelms this girl. But it's a strange kind of reconciliation between North and South. And it seems important that the male be southern and that the female be northern. We could speculate about why that works. Owen Wister's novel The Virginian is set in Wyoming, but it's the southerner wooing the New England, New Hampshire girl Molly Stark, and winning her, and it's a sort of reconciliation of North and South in the West, which is another kind of version of this.

But in the Southern society, things were not so pleasant and there was certainly a reversion to the old racist standards with the Jim Crow laws, and much of this following from Plessy versus Ferguson. You know that decision? I was just reading about it. It's made in 1896 by the Supreme Court. A man named Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth black, unrecognizably black, got onto a streetcar somewhere, I believe, in New Orleans or somewhere in Louisiana that was supposed to be restricted for white people, and he had to tell them that he was black so that they could evict him and then he could take it to court. He actually lost. The Supreme Court decided that it was legal and fair to have segregated things. So segregation sort of follows from this decision.

But in any case, the South that comes from the early 20th and lasting well up into the civil rights era was pretty powerfully based on racial codes. That's the South I grew up in. Again, I'll say more about that on Friday. But the Southern Renaissance, as I've said, tries to deal with the realities of the situation more than had been done in the moonlight and magnolia era. So in the early 1900s not much was going on.

I hope there's a sheet there you see from called the Sahara of the Bozart. Do y'all have that? Maybe you can grab it off the table if you see it. This was an essay that H. L. Mencken wrote. So this would be from the book edition in 1920, beginning: "Alas for the South, her books have grown fewer. She never was much given to literature." So this is Mencken commenting. "In the lamented J. Gordon Coogler, author of these elegiac lines, there was the insight of a true poet. He was the last bard of Dixie, at least in the legitimate line. Down there, a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe player, a dry point etcher or a metaphysician. It is indeed amazing to contemplate so vast of vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether. Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupendous region of fat farms, shoddy cities, and paralyzed cerebrums. One could throw in France, Germany, and Italy, and still have room for the British Isles. And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the progress it babbles of, it is almost as sterile artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first rate men than all the states south of the Potomac. There are probably single square miles in America. If the whole of the late Confederacy were to be engulfed by a tidal wade tomorrow, the effect upon the civilized minority of men in the world would be but little greater than that of a flood on the Yangtze Kiang. It would be impossible in all of history to match so complete a drying up of a civilization."

Okay, you get the drift. Mencken is lamenting, as he goes on to say, what used to be a very vital southern culture that actually led to or gave most of the ideas to the founding generation of this country. As he puts it, "in the South there were men of delicate fancy, urbane instinct, and aristocratic manner, in brief superior men, in brief gentry," and so on. But all of that is gone, by nineteen twenty, according to Mencken.

So the reaction to this devastating assessment of what the South is like was largely to be seen at first in the men at Vanderbilt, who came to be known as the Fugitive Poets and who later wrote the book I'll Take My Stand, which was the sort of testimony or manifesto of the agrarian movement. Louise Cowan always taught, when she taught Southern literature, that Mencken's view was part of the motivation for the fugitive poets at Vanderbilt in particular. I don't know if these poets are as well known as they were some time ago. But the principal poets of this group, which met informally in sessions not unlike this one, would read their poems, they would critique each other, they were very harsh in terms of what they expected good poetry to be. And the principal ones were John Crowe Ransom, who taught at Vanderbilt; Donald Davidson, who was nearly Ransom's age, that is, one of the older members of the group; Allen Tate, who was — I think Faulkner was maybe two years older than Tate. Tate was born in 1899. Robert Penn Warren, who was a little younger. And then in the years immediately after the agrarian movement — which went from about nineteen twenty to twenty-four when they were publishing, excuse me, not the agrarian movement, the fugitive poets, were publishing a magazine in Nashville called The Fugitive. And the poems that were published there came out of the work of this group as they wrote these poems and submitted them to each other's judgment. So it wasn't just the writing itself, it was also a kind of critical school that was developing as they worked on each other's things.

I want to look at a couple of those poems in a few minutes. But also, right in the middle of the twenties, as the fugitives were making their mark, the Scopes trial took place. This was in Tennessee, you remember this, the "Monkey Trial" as it was called, and it cast another sort of harsh light on the South. The South looked very backward, resistant to science and so on. And in effect, this, like Mencken's criticism, pushed some of the Southerners into a more thoughtful defense of what the South was and what it had been. So the book I'll Take My Stand came out of a number of the fugitive poets and some others that they recruited to their cause getting together to defend the South and its agrarian system against the industrialism of the North.

There are a lot of people who malign the book, and its argument is not all that novel, it's not that profound a critique of industrialism. You see lots of critiques that sort of go in the same direction. But this book had a sort of disproportionate impact. And I think it was because it was one of the non-communist reactions to the industrial world that actually got a good deal of traction. One of the criticisms made of it is that very few of those involved were actually farming. They weren't agrarian in practice, unlike say Wendell Berry, who is kind of the contemporary inheritor of this agrarian point of view. So there were more academics; they were sort of promoting a general idea of agrarianism that was more in the head than in practice.

Was there a relation between the fugitive agrarians and Faulkner? Certainly I don't think there was any; I don't think you could ever say that they influenced Faulkner. I think Faulkner was already doing what he was doing at the same time they were working in Tennessee on their project. There are only a few occasions when they ever met each other, I think, in conferences or things like that. One of those, early on, generated the story that Caroline Gordon told us when we knew her at the University of Dallas, and I've seen referenced in other biographies since then, which was that Faulkner met Allen Tate, and Caroline Gordon was there with him, and Faulkner was so drunk that he threw up all over her dress. This is the memory of Faulkner that came through for that particular couple, at least. Faulkner did have some issues, I guess, with drinking.

But that aside, I want to go to one of the later writings of Donald Davidson called Why the Modern South Has a Great Literature. As I mentioned, Davidson is one of this group from the very beginning of the fugitive agrarians, and a very good poet, a sort of good formal poet. Less known than the others, he did not embrace literary modernism, unlike Allen Tate. John Crowe Ransom was sort of in the middle, but Davidson was probably the most conservative of the whole group. He was the one that stayed in the South, kept teaching at Vanderbilt after Ransom had left and Tate had gone. And Cleanth Brooks — do you know Cleanth Brooks, by any chance? Cleanth Brooks was the one who wrote the first big book on Faulkner. But he had been known before that as a critic of poetry and as one of the principal influences on the school of criticism that came to be called the New Criticism. So he and Robert Penn Warren — you know his name, right? Robert Penn Warren and Brooks were teaching at LSU. Which, by the way, the first headmaster of LSU — anybody know who that was?

Yeah, it was Sherman. William Tecumsey Sherman. Anyway, he was there until the war started. But in any case, Brooks and Warren wrote a textbook called Understanding Poetry. It came out in the late 30s and just revolutionized the way literature was taught across the country. But Cleanth Brooks was a student at Vanderbilt under these men, and his effect later on criticism was pretty profound in terms of reading lyric poetry in particular.

But Donald Davidson stayed in the South, as I mentioned, and one of his later writings was a reflection back on what had been happening in these previous two or three decades. So he calls it — I think it's a talk he gave in Mississippi — called Why the Modern South Has a Great Literature. Much of the essay he writes in a kind of satirical vein, not to say sarcastic, because he's talking about sociological accounts about what constitutes a good human life. And he goes through all of these, and he's particularly concerned to mock this man named Howard W. Odum, who taught at the University of North Carolina and had all these sociological statistics about Mississippi, where our guest Davidson was talking. And the statistics prove that Mississippi was the most backward place in the entire United States, because it was at the bottom of all these rankings. And he holds up against these statistics that these years between nineteen twenty and nineteen thirty were also the formative years of William Faulkner. So why is it that all these places in the north that have great sociological statistics in terms of their flourishing aren't producing anybody of anywhere close to the caliber of William Faulkner?

So it's in this essay that Davidson also gives a kind of explicit treatment of the kind of moment that he thinks explains in large part what was going on in the south of the early 20th century. And I hope you have this sheet. This is page 82. It says Why the Modern South Has a Great Literature.

Given what's happened in the South, Davidson wants to say that it's surely the most advanced, given the literary excellence of what was going on in this part of the Southern Renaissance. But Davidson gives this take on it, starting on the bottom of page 83. "I prefer to describe the South of the past three decades as, on the whole, a traditional society which had arrived at a moment of self-consciousness favorable to the production of great literary works. A traditional society is a society that is stable, religious, more rural than urban, and politically conservative. Family, blood kinship, clanship, folk ways, custom, community in such a society supply the needs that in a non-traditional or progressive society — where am I? — are supplied at great cost by artificial devices like training schools and government agencies. A traditional society can absorb modern improvements up to a certain point without losing its character. If modernism enters to the point where the society is thrown a little out of balance, but not yet completely off balance, the moment of self-consciousness arrives. Then a process begins that at first is enormously stimulating, but that if it continues unchecked may prove debilitating and destructive in the end."

And he goes on on the next page to list some of the places where he sees this as having happened. So Greece in the 5th century BC, Rome of the Late Republic, Italy in Dante's time, England in the 16th century — all of them are having these new influences come in that throw it a little off balance but also make it aware of what the tradition had been that's now being challenged. "The invasion seems always at first to force certain individuals into an examination of their total inheritance that perhaps they would not otherwise have undertaken. They begin to compose literary works in which the whole metaphysic of the society suddenly takes dramatic or poetic or fictional form. Their glance is always retrospective, but their point of view is always thoroughly contemporary. Thus Sophocles and his Oedipus Tyrannus looks back at an ancient Greek myth, but he dramatizes it from the point of view of a fifth century Athenian who may conceivably distrust the leadership of Pericles. This is what I mean by the moment of self consciousness," and so on.

So what I find particularly compelling here is that he sees the same thing happening in the South of the early twentieth century. The traditional society, which is beset or heavily influenced by all kinds of modernizing influences and which comes to this new understanding of itself. And his example is William Faulkner. But I like the comparison here. "Such a writer as William Faulkner, and such are many of his southern contemporaries. In sixteenth century England there was also a kind of William Faulkner, a country boy from the insignificant village of Stratford. Handicapped from the beginning by his ridiculous countryfied name, William Shakespeare. That he also had a country accent, not unlike a southern accent, seems apparent from what the printers have left of his original spelling. He did not have a college education."

Neither did Faulkner, right? Faulkner went to Oxford, the University of Mississippi, for a semester or two, but I think he always got kicked out or didn't do his work or whatever. By the way, he worked as the postmaster at the University of Mississippi for two or three years, and apparently spent most of his time reading the magazines that were coming in for other people. Sometimes he would actually deliver the mail. But there were many complaints about it. I think he wrote one entire novel while he was supposed to be delivering the mail. And he finally got fired, and he had this famous line when he left: "Well, at least now I won't have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch with two cents to mail a letter." So, anyway, not the model employee. But I just love Davidson's comparison of Shakespeare to Faulkner. Shakespeare didn't have the college education either.

And Ben Jonson, of course, said he had smaller Latin and less Greek. "But whatever new learning he needed he readily acquired, perhaps in the very process of composing poems and plays." And he had that other kind of knowledge that Davidson is talking about here, that knowledge carried to the heart. If you would look back on page 82 in Davidson's essay, he says a little bit about this. This is about 10 lines up from the bottom of the page. "It's a knowledge that possesses the heart rather than a knowledge achieved merely by the head. A knowledge that pervades the entire being, as the grace of God pervades the heart and soul. In the phrase of Allen Tate's famous poem, Ode to the Confederate Dead, it is knowledge carried to the heart. Negatively it relieves the individual from the domination of the mob, the insolence of rulers, the strife of political factions," and so on.

So Davidson sees this kind of knowledge of the heart as being another thing that distinguishes Southern literature from the more abstract workings of, I guess, some of the northern contemporaries of the same time. Knowledge carried to the heart. What does that mean? As Davidson points out, this is a line from the poem written by Allen Tate called Ode to the Confederate Dead. I don't know if y'all have read these poems before, or if this area of Southern literature is at all known to you. What I'd like to do is look at a few of the stanzas in Ode to the Confederate Dead. And then I want to turn to John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson's own poetry to get a sense of what it might look like to have a piety toward the South, what a Southern piety might actually look like.

I don't think we're seeing it in Faulkner. It's not the same kind of thing. And I think some of the differences will emerge as we look particularly at Ransom and at Davidson. Tate, I think, was more a man after Faulkner's own heart, in this sense — very much sensing the complexity of things, but also I feel like Tate is closer in his own character and his own thinking to somebody like Quentin Compson. He's struggling with it. He feels a kind of inadequacy in his own person next to those heroic figures of the southern past. You get a lot of that, I guess particularly in The Sound and the Fury, but you also sense it quite a bit in Absalom, Absalom! How do you even imagine a contemporary figure like Thomas Sutpen in the South? I think the problem that Faulkner's pointing to, certainly by 1936, is that characters like Thomas Sutpen are emerging all over the world as ideologues and as strong men taking over traditional societies. But Tate seems more to have turned inward, more self-examining.

I just want to read a few stanzas and point out a couple of things about both Faulkner and these other writers, which is that when they mention the name of a battle, they expect you to have a whole context for that. So all right, let's just start at the beginning of the poem. I'll skip some. "Ode to the Confederate Dead. Row after row, with strict impunity, the headstones yield their names to the element." It's just like what we were just reading about Judith's letter to Setman. "The wind whirrs without recollection. In the riven troughs the splayed leaves pile up, of nature the casual sacrament, to the seasonal eternity of death. Then driven by the fierce scrutiny of heaven to their election in the vast breath, they sough the rumour of mortality."

So, going on to think of the seasons — well, I'll skip down, because this seems like Tate is imagining the circumstance of these Confederate soldiers who are being called into the battle at a certain moment. All right, skip down. "You who have waited by the wall, the twilight certainty of an animal, those midnight restitutions of the blood — you know the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze of the sky, the sudden call. You know the rage, the cold pool left by the mounting flood, of muted Zeno and Parmenides. You who have waited for the angry resolution of those desires that should be yours tomorrow, you know the unimportant shrift of death, and praise the vision and praise the arrogant circumstance of those who fall, rank upon rank, hurried beyond decision, here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall."

I wonder if Faulkner knew this poem. There's so much about the gate at Sutpen's Hundred and about passing the gate and what that might mean, that I wonder if he's not drawing on some of the symbolic resonance that Tate achieves here. All right, here's the direct meditation on the Confederacy. "Turn your eyes to the immoderate past. Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising, demons out of the earth, they will not last. Stonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp, Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run, lost in that orient of the thick and fast, you will curse the setting sun."

The rest of the poem is sort of this meditation not on the Confederate dead, interestingly, right? Tate doesn't mention any, unlike Rosa Coldfield with her eulogies for particular people. Tate's meditation is much more interior, I would say, much more in keeping with some of T. S. Eliot's poetry — some of the imagery of The Waste Land, of Prufrock, other things emerge here. But what you don't get is any kind of celebration of the Confederacy or any kind of sense of exaltation or of the lost cause or any of these ideas — which I think makes it in some ways more in keeping with what we see in Faulkner.

But if you'll flip over the page, I want to look at a couple of poems by John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson that I think attempt to get at what the southern piety might be. There is a passage here, maybe it's on the other side of one of your sheets, but it's from Tocqueville, you see it? I don't want to read through the whole thing, but I think if you look at it, you'll see that it's about the difference between what Tocqueville sees on one side of the Ohio River. The side of the north — it's a famous passage when he's talking about the three races and democracy in America. On one side of the Ohio, the northern side, he sees all this industry thriving, people working hard, and on the other side — let's see. Maybe I do need the exact passage there. He's talking about the — yeah, I got it. On the last paragraph on the page.

"Upon the left bank of the Ohio, labor is confounded with the idea of slavery. Upon the right bank it is identified with that of prosperity and improvement. On the one side it is degraded, on the other it is honored. On the former territory no white laborers can be found, for they would be afraid of assimilating themselves to the Negroes. On the latter, no one is idle, for the white population extends its activity and its intelligence to every kind of employment. Thus the men whose task it is to cultivate the rich soil of Kentucky are ignorant and lukewarm, while those who are active and enlightened either do nothing or pass over into the State of Ohio, where they now work without dishonor."

So one of the things we had said — I think you brought this up earlier — was that the gentleman is one who doesn't labor, right? So Tocqueville, pointing to — if you're going down the Ohio to the left bank — is pointing to the place where everything shows the marks of slavery. So I wonder if Ransom doesn't have this passage in mind, especially because of his putting the scene here of the Mississippi, the bank sinister, of the Ohio, the bank sinister. So he's defining where the Ohio and the Mississippi come together at the tip of Kentucky, and looking over into Kentucky and seeing this land which apparently is not flourishing in the way that the one on the right side of the river is.

Okay, I want to read through this, and I would love to hear some speculation. I don't know if that's kosher in these, but — "Tawny are the leaves turned, but they still hold. It is the harvest; what shall this land produce? A meagre hill of kernels, a runnel of juice; Declension looks from our land. It is old. Therefore let us assemble, dry, grey, spare, and mild as yellow air. I hear the creak of a raven's funeral wing. The young men would be joying in the song of passionate birds. Their memories are not long. What is it thus rehearsed in sable? Nothing. Trust not but the old endure, and shall be older than the scornful beholder. We pluck the spindling ears, and gather the corn. One spot has special yield. On this spot stood heroes, and drenched it with their only blood. And talk meets talk, as echoes from the horn of the hunter; echoes are the old men's arts. Ample are the chambers of their hearts."

So the whole first part of the poem seems to be about this decline, the fact that everything is now given over to the old. So the turn in the poem is back towards something that seems to be a kind of aristocratic ritual, which is the fox hunt, right? "Here come the hunters, keepers of a right, the horn, the hounds, the lank mares coursing by, under quaint archetypes of chivalry. And the fox, lovely ritualist, in flight, offering his unearthly ghost to quarry, and the fields themselves to harry. Resume, harvesters, the treasure is full bronze, which you will garner for the lady, and the moon could tinge it no yellower than does this noon. But the grey will quench it shortly, the fields, men, stones. Pluck fast, dreamers; prove as you rumble slowly, not less than men, not wholly. Bear the arm too, dainty youths, and bend the knees under bronze burdens. And by an autumn tone as by a grey, as by a green, you will have known your famous lady's image. For so have these, and if one say that easily will your hands more prosper in other lands, angry as wasp music be your cry then. Forsake the proud lady of the heart of fire, the look of snow, to the praise of a dwindled choir, song of degenerate spectres that were men. The sons of the fathers shall keep her, worthy of what these have done and love. True, it is said of our lady, she ageth, but see, if you peep shrewdly, she hath not stooped. Take no thought of her servitors that have drooped, for we are nothing. And if one talk of death, why the ribs of the earth subsist frail as a breath, if but God wearyeth."

Wonderful last lines. Any thoughts? The surprise here seems to be the lady. Why the lady, right? Who is the lady? I don't think it's Our Lady. I don't think this is a Marian poem. But it certainly seems to evoke the chivalrous idea of the lady. And for some reason, Ransom associates this idea with the South, as though the real beauty of the South had been in this sense of chivalry that it had, this defense of the lady, this honor of the lady, which does not characterize the North and never did. So it's as though the real appeal that will keep the young men — where is it? — "if one say that easily will your hands more prosper in other lands." It would be easy for you to go elsewhere and prosper more. But in doing so you forsake the proud lady, who is this land, this South, that deserves the best of what the young can give it.

And even those images of the special fertility of the soil coming from those places where blood has been spilled — that seems part of the same praise of a vision of the South that omits the whole question of slavery but sort of reframes it in this way of defending the older order that goes back long into Europe, into feudal Europe, and into the idea of chivalry and courtesy and all those things we associate with the Middle Ages. This really had been a southern claim, that the South, rather than the North, was keeping that older, more generous, more beautiful tradition of Europe that had sort of vanished in the industrial economic self-seeking of others. Of course, again, the irony is it leaves out slavery. So what do you do with it? And that's, again, I think, one of the things Faulkner doesn't do — leave it out, right?

So all right, now the one I really want to focus on — I think it's more immediately accessible, in that you're not trying to figure out symbols, so to speak — is Lee in the Mountains. In his late years after the war, Lee became president of a college. Which I don't recommend to anybody. But no — he was president of a college which later became Washington and Lee. But at the time, he brought up the enrollment. Who wouldn't want to go to a college with Robert E. Lee as the president? But he very much did not emphasize the liberal arts curriculum, by the way, so we don't want to praise him too much. But here is Lee in the Mountains. It's Davidson reflecting in Lee's kind of voice on what the state of his mind and soul would have been during these years. So I'm going to read this in its entirety, and then we can think about the ending.

"Walking into the shadows, walking alone, where the sun falls through the ruined boughs of locust, up to the President's office, hearing the voices whisper, Hush, it is General Lee, and strangely hearing my own voice say, Good morning, boys, don't get up. You're early. It's long before the bell. You will have long to wait on these cold steps. The young have time to wait. But soldiers' faces under their tossing flags lift no more by any road or field, and I am spent with old wars and new sorrow. Walking the rocky path where steps decay and the paint cracks and grass eats on the stone. It is not General Lee, young man. It is Robert Lee in a dark civilian suit who walks, an outlaw fumbling for the latch, a voice commanding in a dream where no flag flies. My father's house is taken, and his hearth left to the candle droppings, where the ashes whirl at a chimney breath on the cold stone. I can hardly remember my father's look. I cannot answer his voice as he calls farewell in the misty mounting, where riders gather at gates. He was old then. I was a child. His hand held out for mine, some daybreak snatched away as he rode out, a broken man."

Lee's father was a Revolutionary War hero who was then later dishonored and had to flee. So it was something that Lee's whole aspiration was to try to make up for the harm to the family name that his father had done.

"Now let his lone grave keep, surer than cypress roots, the vow I made beside him. God too late unseals to certain eyes the drift of time and the hopes of men and a sacred cause. The fortune of the leaves goes with the land, whose sons will keep it still. My mother told me much. She sat among the candles, fingering the memoirs, now so long unread, and as my pen moves on across the page, her voice comes back, a murmuring distillation of old Virginia times, now faint and gone, the hurt of all that was, and cannot be. Why did my father write? I know he saw history clutched as a wraith out of blowing mist where tongues are loud, and a glut of little souls laps at the too much blood in the burning house. He would have his say, but I shall not have mine. What I do is only a son's devoir to a lost father. Let him only speak. The rest must pass to men who never knew, but on a written page the strike of armies, and never heard the long Confederate cry, charge through the muzzling smoke, or saw the bright eyes of the beardless boys go up to death. It is Robert Lee who writes with his father's hand. The rest must go unsaid, and the lips be locked."

One of the things you would want after the Civil War is something like the memoirs of Robert E. Lee. We got Sherman's memoirs, we got Grant's, never got anything from Lee, right? So what Davidson is musing on is what accounts for Lee's silence. Why didn't he try to justify himself as Jefferson Davis did ad nauseam? Why the tacitness?

All right, let me read the rest. "The rest must go unsaid, and the lips be locked. If all were told, as it cannot be told, if all the dread opinion of the heart now could speak, now in the shame and torment lashing the bound and trampled states. If a word were said, as it cannot be said, I see clear waters run in Virginia's Valley, and in the house the weeping of young women rises no more. The waves of grain begin, the Shenandoah is golden with a new grain, the Blue Ridge, crowned with a haze of light, thunders no more. The horse is at plough. The rifle returns to the chimney crotch, and the hunter's hand. And nothing else than this? Was it for this that on an April day we stacked our arms, obedient to a soldier's trust, to lie ground by heels of little men, forever maimed, defeated, lost, impugned? And was I then betrayed? Did I betray?"

I hope you're following the historical Appomattox and all this.

"If it were said, as it still might be said, if it were said, and a word should run like fire, like living fire into the roots of grass, the sunken flag would kindle on wild hills, the brooding hearts would waken, and the dreams stir like a crippled phantom under the pines, and this torn earth would quicken into shouting beneath the feet of the ragged bands. The pen turns to the waiting page, the sword bows to the rust that cankers and the silence. Among those boys whose eyes lift up to mine, within grey walls where droning wasps repeat a hollow reveille, I still must face day after day the courier with his summons once more to surrender, now to surrender all. Without arms or men I stand, but with knowledge only, I face what long I saw before others knew, when Pickett's men streamed back, and I heard the tangled cry of the Wilderness wounded, bloody with doom. The mountains, once I said, in the little room at Richmond by the huddled fire. But still the President shook his head. The mountains wait, I said, in the long beat and rattle of siege at cratered Petersburg. Too late we sought the mountains, and those people came. And Lee is in the mountains now, beyond Appomattox, listening long for voices that will never speak again, hearing the hoofbeats that come and go and fade, without a stop, without a brown hand lifting the tent flap, or a bugle call at dawn, or ever on the long white road the flag of Jackson's quick brigades. I am alone, trapped, consenting, taken at last in mountains. It is not the bugle now, or the long roll beating. The simple stroke of a chapel bell forbids the hurtling dream, recalls the lonely mind. Young men, the God of your fathers is a just and merciful God, who in this blood once shed on your green altars measures out all days and measures out the grace whereby alone we live, and in his might he waits, brooding within the certitude of time to bring this lost, forsaken valor, and the fierce faith undying, and the love quenchless, to flower among the hills to which we cleave, to fruit upon the mountains whither we flee, never forsaking, never denying his children, and his children's children forever, unto all generations of the faithful heart."

No. That's a southern piety. You see what I mean. Lee is explicitly refusing the option of trying to stir things back up. Peace has come. But he could do it, right? He knows he could do it. If he sent out the word, people would rally; there would be the guerrilla troops that keep going, like Mosby's Raiders in Virginia. But what I think is interesting toward the end of the poem is this kind of faith that all of what they did, all of the virtue that these soldiers showed, will somehow get its reward, get its recompense. Again, there's nothing here about slavery, about the issues of the war. But I think Davidson makes you feel that thing that was there in the South that was felt so chivalric, and so heroic, to the men who did it.

You see Rosa Coldfield in the novel praising these soldiers. And even Sutpen she has to praise because he was brave, right? So the bravery, all that — what was all that for? And to have Lee as the speaker of it, I think, is particularly telling and moving. Lee was the great beneficiary of the reunion of North and South. He was the one that everybody agreed was the great noble man — that whole reputation has been assaulted and undercut. I find it sad, because I grew up with Robert E. Lee as kind of the paragon of what human virtue looked like. But many that I know find it just hard to credit that there could be anything to admire in this man.

So I think Davidson gives us a very telling testimony, at least, of what that admiration might look like. And again, it's something you don't see Faulkner doing. There is a kind of praise for — I mean, Lee is assumed to be the kind of judge of all good, because he in his own hand gives Sutpen a citation for valor. But you don't see Faulkner really praising the Southern cause. You don't see him praising the generals who fought for it.

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