Chapter 5 - War

Summary

Robert Lowell both resisted and embraced the mantle of public poet. One way of tracking this ambivalence in Lowell’s poetics is by following the developments in his war poems. Though Lowell, along with Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill, is credited with pivoting poetry from the mannered verse culture of the 1950s to the autobiographical experiments of the 1960s, more recent appraisals of Lowell find a complicated grappling with whiteness and with overlapping historical and personal selves. The events of Lowell’s biography provide one rich context for thinking about his poetry’s treatment of war. Yet war is not only the near-constant background for Lowell’s life and the theater for his political engagement. It is also a spur to Lowell’s incessant revision of his poetic methods and commitments to verse forms. Focusing on war helps to bring Lowell’s prosodic changes into relief.