Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • Chapter 22 - Whiteness

  • from Part VI - Reputation and New Contexts
  • 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 238-248

  • 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.