Chapter 22 - Whiteness

Summary

Due in part to Claudia Rankine’s invocation of Robert Lowell’s poetry in Citizen: An American Lyric (2015), readers have begun to stress the poet’s status as the representative “of a (mostly white, mostly male) post-Romantic lyric tradition,” as Kamran Javadizadeh puts it. Rankine’s presentation of Lowell as a racial artist invites criticism not only to acknowledge racist dimensions of his poetics, but also to consider Lowell’s unusual interest in exploring the emotional contours of his own concept of whiteness. This chapter explores how forms of entitlement, anxiety, and desirous identification with non-white others coexist alongside Lowell’s attempts to reckon with the white supremacist undercurrents that shaped his family history, his social formation, and his earliest articulations of self. This complex coexistence generates a striking pattern in Lowell’s literary configurations of whiteness in terms of suspended states of liminal awareness: confusion, shadowy recollection, and the vague annunciations of dreams.