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What Really Happened to Warren Winslow?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Stephen Fender
Stephen Fender
Affiliation:
University College, London
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Extract

Robert Lowell's The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket is dedicated to ‘Warren Winslow, Dead at Sea’. Academic treatments of the poem point out that Winslow, Lowell's cousin, was killed in action at sea in World War II, though as to the more specific details of his death there is little agreement among the scholarly commentators. Here are four versions, in the order of their appearance in print:

During World War II, the naval vessel on which Lowell's cousin, Warren Winslow, was serving disappeared and no Ishmael survived to explain her fate.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , August 1973 , pp. 187 - 190
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1973

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References

1 Staples, Hugh B., Robert Lowell, The First Twenty years (London, 1962), p. 45.Google Scholar

2 Mazzaro, Jerome, The Poetic Themes of Robert Lowell (Ann Arbor, 1965), p. 37.Google Scholar

3 Leibowitz, Herbert, ‘Robert Lowell: Ancestral Voices’, Salmagundi, 1 (1966–1967), 32n.Google Scholar

4 Dolan, Paul J., ‘Lowell's Quaker Graveyard: Poem and Tradition’, Renascence, (Summer, 1969), 173.Google Scholar

5 For information on Winslow's service career, I am indebted to Robert Weinland, of the Centre for Naval Analyses, Arlington, Va., and Lt. K. C. Walser, head of the Corres-pondence and Service Branch, Bureau of Personnel, USN.

6 ‘Destroyer Sinks in Bay’, New York Times, 4 January 1944, pp. 1–3Google Scholar; additional information from ‘History of Ships Named Turner’ and ‘History of USS Turner (DD 648)’, Ships' Histories Section, Division of Naval History (Op-29), Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Navy Department; see also Hocking, Charles, Dictionary of Disasters at sea … 1824–1962 (London, 1969), II, 720.Google Scholar

7 ‘Lost Ship Revealed as New Destroyer’, New York Times, 5 January 1944, pp. 1, 6.Google Scholar

8 Cape Cod (New Riverside Edition, New York, 1893), pp. 5–6.Google Scholar

9 The original Section VII, deleted from the final version of the poem as it appeared in Lord Weary's Castle but published under the heading ‘Passages from the Quaker Graveyard ’ in Partisan Review, 13 (1946), 76–8Google Scholar, makes the contemporary navy even more static and home based: And Now that the long smother snaps your spine

Across Poseidon's shins … and spins

Your green-eyed liquefaction to the sterns

Of the ships of the line

At drydock;…

10 The interview was printed under the heading ‘Et in America ego – The American Poet Robert Lowell Talks to the Novelist V. S. Naipaul about Art, Power, and the Dramatisation of the Self’, The Listener, 4 September 1969, pp. 302–4.Google Scholar

11 Cape Cod, p. II.Google Scholar