Chapter 2 - The American South

Summary

How could Robert Lowell, a blue-blooded New England Brahmin, make the counterintuitive claim “I’m Southern” (as he did in a letter)? The chapter focuses on Lowell’s early apprenticeship to the Southern Agrarians and particularly Allen Tate, the author of a tense, neo-Metaphysical poetry that powerfully influenced Lowell. The traditionalist-modernist precepts of the Agrarians both gave Lowell a way of understanding his Puritan inheritance as an abstract Platonism and allowed him to counter it through the Catholic worldview of Tate. The chapter explains how the Civil War was central to Lowell’s verse, but how his interpretation of the conflict was partly skewed toward Southern readings of it. This especially emerges in “For the Union Dead,” Lowell’s answer to Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” Later, the literary South became less important to Lowell when he moved toward the more disconnected, personalistic style found in Life Studies.