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1 results

  • Chapter 9 - Melville

  • from Part III - Some Literary Models
  • Edited by Thomas Austenfeld, University of Fribourg, Grzegorz Kość, University of Warsaw
  • Book:
    Robert Lowell In Context
    Published online:
    28 March 2024
    Print publication:
    04 April 2024, pp 98-107

  • Summary

    Lowell’s intense creative engagement with Herman Melville was long-standing, evident from his first published poetry (notably and specifically in "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket") to his last works, particularly his trilogy of verse dramas The Old Glory. Tracking Melville in Lowell is relatively straightforward in terms of allusion, but there are deeper and more significant traits that the two writers shared. Both are Miltonic in terms of their literary and intellectual heritage, both reflect on the legacy of New England; on guilt, violence, power and the imagining of the United States. The Old Glory includes Lowell’s dramatic verse refiguring of Benito Cereno where the 1855 novella is aligned with key public and political themes of the 1960s: racial inequality and unrest; the cold war; American nuclear capability. These have a disturbing and discomforting resonance in our own times, and usefully remind us of Lowell as a public and political poet.