Ode To The Confederate Dead Comments

I have read 'Ode to the Confederate Dead' many times lately. I picture a sprawling graveyard in which the many confederate soldiers are buried. Row after row of headstones and spoiled statues 'a wing chipped here, an arm there'. What to say of the bodies buried and ' lost in the acres of the insane green? ' Having looked around the endless cemetery, ' Leave now/ The shut gate and the decomposing wall'. A great Southern free verse poem.

Why write a poem that requires effort to unravel and in that unraveling loses more of itself just as the reader substitutes more and more estimates and guesses of what it means? If a poet intends this as a test of the reader's ability to unravel what he wrote, why not become a teacher instead, where he or she can administer tests on a weekly basis?

can't figure where Tate stands - nice lyric deadpan eliotic versification though -