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Thomas Hubert

Thomas H. Hubert, a native of Tennessee who grew up in Alabama, is a retired scholar, poet, and business person living near Raleigh, North Carolina. He received a Ph. D. in English from the University of Georgia in 1975 with a concentration in American literature; his dissertation was on Allen Tate’s poetry. During the academic phase of his career, he taught at universities in the south and midwest.

Southern Poetic Wisdom Blog

Southern Poetic Wisdom

When little sister fell down the well, We retrieved her by pulley, rope, and bucket. She, bruised, wet, learned a lesson. Maybe. Doves fly over as hunters blast away; Nothing falls but droppings in one eye. ‘I can’t see Jack-squat, Billy Bob.’ Hook from my fly-cast catches the wife’s ear lobe, And screaming like a banshee, she falls out of…
Thomas Hubert
July 9, 2024
The Lost Cause Reconsidered Once More Blog

The Lost Cause Reconsidered Once More

  On a website devoted to publishing scholarly articles, I recently did a search for “The Lost Cause” and unsurprisingly found a plethora of articles on that theme relating mostly to the aftermath of the American War of 1861-65. Also unsurprisingly, many of these apparently set about to examine the issue with a view toward debunking that effort as futile,…
Thomas Hubert
February 9, 2022
“A Divinity That Shapes Our Ends”: Providence and the American War of 1861-1865 Blog

“A Divinity That Shapes Our Ends”: Providence and the American War of 1861-1865

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,/ Rough-hew them how we will.” -  Hamlet V, ii, 10-11 “I could see that there was two Providences, and a poor chap would stand considerable show with the widow’s Providence, but if Miss Watson’s got him there warn’t no help for him any more.” – Huckleberry Finn, Ch. 3 That the concept of…
Thomas Hubert
November 22, 2021
Virginia and Alabama Blog

Virginia and Alabama

Lexington, Virginia January 2002 Driving up, then down the mountain hairpins into Lexington,By daylight, moonlight, headlight (only one),I smell the moist ancient earth rising up to greet meThis January evening that seems almost like spring.Incredible! Time has collapsed around me. I sit on a wooden bench on the lawn of the Holiday Inn ExpressIn shirt sleeves accompanied only by Jack…
Thomas Hubert
December 17, 2020
Allen Tate’s Confederate Ode: Who are the Living and the Dead? Blog

Allen Tate’s Confederate Ode: Who are the Living and the Dead?

 Then Lytle asked: Who are the dead? Who are the living and the dead? Allen Tate, “The Oath” Over the decades since its first publication in 1927 Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” has probably received more critical and popular attention than any of his other poems. Tate himself alludes to some of it in his own commentary on the…
Thomas Hubert
July 24, 2019