Customer Reviews

Life Studies: and, For the Union Dead

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For a long time, one of my favorite poems has been Robert Lowell's "Skunk Hour", but I have never read the book which was the context around it. Lowell is one of those writers who are often pushed down your throat as being "The Most Important Poet Ever!" by college professors and I have to admit that this attitude lead me to resist reading further.

I want to say that this was a mistake, because of how much I enjoyed this book, but I'm not sure how well I could have appreciated these poetry books had I been younger. They are not simple about anything they touch-- not histories (public or private), not love, not death, not depression. They are complicated words that are painted in detailed layers, so the richness gets deeper the longer you look. The setting is so subtle that when Lowell does say something overt, it comes as a distinct shock.

I didn't want to stop reading the book when it was over, and went back and started reading the poems again-- it was that compelling.

I read this poem again on Martin Luther King Day, a fitting day for this poem, a tribute to the Union dead of the Civil War and a particular remembrance of the black soldiers who wore the uniform of the Union-- particularly of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment (made famous to non-Civil War students by the movie Glory several years ago).

The 54th Massachusetts was the first black regiment to march from the North to fight the Confederacy. These men were quite brave knowing that in battle they would likely get little or no quarter, and if captured they would most assuredly be sent south back to slavery. These men had much to prove, what with years of racism from North and South to be broken and defeated by their bravery and sacrifices-- not to mention the Confederate army that they would later face on the battlefield. They would win ever-lasting fame for their courage during their doomed assault on Fort Wagner at Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, July, 1863. The attack would be a night assault on this heavily guarded fort. The fighting would be intense and the 54th would not be successful. Their white colonel, Robert Gould Shaw would be killed, and almost half the regiment would be lost. The first Medal of Honor for a black man would be earned there.

They marched down Beacon Street, with the Massachusetts State House on one side and Boston Common on the other - off to war, off to death and glory on a twin mission; to fight for the Union and show the world that they were equal in ability to whites. Directly across the street from the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Street there now stands the brilliant monument by Augustus St. Gaudens, forever commemorating the 54th, the first black regiment and their white commander Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.

This monument on Beacon Hill is one of the finest monuments of any kind in the United States. As a tribute to Shaw and the 54th it is unparalleled in the physical world; but in the emotional world, the world of poetry, Robert Lowell comes quite close. Lowell brilliantly describes the monument to the 54th and works it into the life of Boston that foremost of abolition cities of the North. Standing before the 54th monument on Beacon Hill, as the crowds walk swiftly by and the traffic speeds along past the State House, one can almost hear the men breath as they are forever frozen in bronze on their march south to battle. There are few monuments in bronze as lifelike as this one: it is an incredible tribute to the 54th and their commander and adorns the city of Boston as fittingly as the obelisk at Bunker Hill or the colonial historical sites of Adams, Revere, Hancock, and several miles to the west, Lexington and Concord.

Lowell's "For the Union Dead" is a successful poem on so many levels and succeeds completely where Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead" so totally fails. It unifies time and place, and brings context and permanence where everything seems to be shifting and changing. As a tribute to the 54th and the Union dead of the Civil War its elements run as deep as the waters off the coast of Boston seen from the top of Beacon Hill so long ago when the skyscrapers didn't block the view.

Having started his education at Harvard, Lowell transfered to Kenyon College to study under John Crowe Ransom another of Vanderbilt's Fugitives, like Allen Tate and Donald Davidson. It is an astounding thing that the two greatest Civil War poems of modern times ("Lee in the Mountains" and "For the Union Dead") and the worst ("Ode to the Confederate Dead") should be written by poets with Nashville connections. Lowell went on to graduate school to study under Robert Penn Warren, another Vanderbilt "Fugitive".

St. Gaudens placed a Latin inscription on the monument, the motto of the Society of the Cincinnati (a society of Revolutionary War officers started by George Washington and Henry Knox): "Relinquit Omnia Servare Rem Publicam". The translation is: "He left behind everything to save the Republic". Lowell opened his poem with this Latin phrase but changed the singular "he" to "they" in the Latin so that his poem would refer to all the men of the 54th not just its white commander, Robert Gould Shaw, to read: "Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam".

"For the Union Dead" was published in 1964 during the height of the Civil Rights movement. Active in Civil Rights efforts, it is perfectly understandable that Lowell should have written this poem of unity and appreciation with concern, too, that the past should be remembered and its lessons learned. The battlefield of Fort Wagner had been by then reclaimed by the sea at Charleston Harbor and the monument to the 54th had fallen into disrepair. In fact, it was during this time that the St. Gaudens monument had been removed and stored in a crate to prevent damage from "shaking" from the construction of the underground Boston Commons parking garage. So, the battleground is gone, and Shaw's monunument is gone (but only temporarily), and history fades while "progress" continues speedily obliterating the memory of those that have come before.

"The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year-
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . ."

Lowell's brilliant poem is his way of retaining the past and ensuring that important historical memory is not lost forever. The men of the 54th Massachusetts, black and white, were leaders in bringing an end to slavery and establishing equality under the law for blacks in America. The story of their bravery and sacrifice is important to understanding American history and the Civil War. These men demonstrated with their actions and their blood that they were equals and merited equal positions in American society. As Americans North and South we ought to continue to embrace their memory and appreciate the many challenges that they overcame and the lessons that they taught us with their sacrifices at Fort Wagner and elsewhere.

We can look back to the 54th Massachusetts as a standard bearer in the struggle for Civil Rights in America. In the 1980s, my husband was privileged to be part of an effort to restore the St. Gaudens monument to its original beauty and power. Lowell's poem is a tribute to this beautiful work of art, and the men of the 54th Massachusetts who so inspired it. It is our duty a to remember our past, appreciate and commemorate our war dead, and learn those lessons that they underscored for later generations with their lives.

"Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe."

This is one of the finest poems of the 20th century and stands with "Lee in the Mountains" as one of the two great modern poems of the Civil War.

In LIFE STUDIES, published in 1959, Lowell described his experiences growing up in a prominent Boston family, using a style so intimate and revealing that it became known as "confessional poetry." Four years later came FOR THE UNION DEAD, in which he used the same style to address social themes as well as personal ones. Together, these two books constitute a watershed in modern American poetry. In a host of poems, including "Beyond the Alps," "Skunk Hour," and "For the Union Dead," Lowell created a style that was colloquial and contemporary, but echoed the grandeur of a poetic tradition running back to Shakespeare. Of all the American poets to emerge since the war, few have had the wide-ranging influence of Lowell and a young student of his named Sylvia Plath. This is a book that every literate American should know.

Most of us probably first read Robert Lowell in high school, and I remember being both repulsed and fascinated by Life Studies when I was a teenager. I am no longer repulsed, but simply fascinated by Lowell's writing. Life Studies' haunting biographies of Lowell's relatives frame the poet's autobiographical memoir of growing up with "no girls or undesirables in [his] set"; his attention to detail constantly mesmerizes the reader as we tour a New England catalogue of memorabilia, illness, and affect. Lowell's resolutely melancholy, nostalgic, and idiosycratic tone reminds the reader that poetry may speak most generally when it is most particular in its subject. I've spent twenty years thinking about these poems, and the thoughts are never stale, even if the lives they chronicle are preternaturally decayed.

Lowell is of the vanguard of American twentieth century poets, a man who created many brilliant works other than the two joined in this volume. In such poems in Life Studies as Beyond the Alps and A Mad Negro Soldier Confined in Munich, as well as his portraits of various friends and family, we discover a man capable of both acid humor and outright sadness. However, in Life Studies, these excellent poems are overshadowed by the towering biographical essay 91 Revere Street. In this touching memoir, Lowell describes distant, illustrious relatives, Amy Lowell being a famous but ostracized example, friendships wrecked in childhood, disquietude over a girlfriend who soils herself in class (in his embarrassment, Lowell sits in it), his formative years on the periphery of polite, conservative Bostonian society, and his fathers coarse, difficult superiors and buddies that cropped up in the father's job with the Navy. Though his poems here are outstanding, an uncomfortable question arises when one considers this essay: Would Lowell have been better off to employ his time as a prose stylist, not a poet?

For the Union Dead validates Lowell's decision to declare poetry his mode of expression. Poems such as the dolorous My Last Evening with Uncle Devereaux Winslow and Terminal Days at Beverly Farm expose a man groping for hope after the deaths of close relatives; Waking in the Blue and Myopia: A night explore, respectively, Lowell's mental illness and attendant three month hospitalization, and a night of insomnia that becomes a maelstrom of tortured reflections and half-hewn thoughts; The Drinker explores alcoholism as a product of foiled love, with a question as to whether pathology or sheer carelessness and love of idleness is the underlying shibboleth. Water, the poem that stoked my love for Lowell, uses a maritime theme to express sorrow over a lost love. Beyond the Alps, from Life Studies, is reprised here with an elided stanza reinserted at the behest of coeval John Berryman.

Lowell is one of those poets so gifted, so erudite, so steeped in classical literature, it's hard to grasp that, as he explains it, he was "less rather than more bookish than most children." Much of the isolation evinced in Lowell's poetry, as well as the restlessness of his life, both as youth and adult, are radiantly eviscerated in these two collections.

Robert Lowell is one of America's great poets and this collection demonstrates why his work remains powerful. His style of writing leaves nothing hidden even while often failing to answer the biggest questions.

Life Studies and For the Union Dead are two of Robert Lowell's most accomplished books and are also very representative of his style during what might be called his "middle period." This period involved a shift away from the use of regular meter and regular rhyme as well as a shift away from the New Critical elements in his earlier poems (which were often more impersonal and more carefully crafted).

In my humble opinion, the combined publication of these two volumes also represents Lowell's most successful attempts at combining his earlier, New Critical influences (poet/critics like Allen Tate and T. S. Eliot) with more liberal literary influences (like poets William Carlos Williams and Elizabeth Bishop).

Although many of the pieces in these volumes are successful, it's true that some aren't. For instance, the ponderous "91 Revere Street" is an extraordinarily tedious (and far too long) account of various scenes from Lowell's childhood in Boston.

However, this book contain more hits than misses, and some of these hits are truly masterful--for instance, "Skunk Hour," "For the Union Dead," "To Speak of Woe that is In Marriage," and "The Public Garden."

Still, despite all the hits that this volume contains, it won't give you a full picture of Lowell's abilities as America's pre-eminent, poetic chameleon who wrote in a wide variety of styles over the course of his long career.

So if this is the only Lowell book that you have read or are going to read, you won't get a sense of everything Lowell was capable of with a pen. And if that's what you're looking for, I would suggest the Selected or Collected Poems.

Robert Lowell's poetry is praised for its technical brilliance, metrical complexity, and verbal ambiguity. In an earlier review of Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle (awarded Pulitzer Prize of Poetry in 1947) I compared reading his poetry to studying mathematics, too advanced mathematics.

Furthermore, I am often uncomfortable with Lowell's disaffection, mistrust, and anger (one critic calls it apocalyptic rage) evident both in his criticism of contemporary society, and in his confessional topics such as marital difficulties, drinking problems, and mental illness. And yet I keep coming back to Lowell's work to savor his remarkable command of language.

Life Studies, a blend of prose and poetry, is more explicitly personal than his earlier work. The prose section, titled 91 Revere Street, is quite exceptional, not simply for its dispassionate candor, but for its literary excellence. Lowell is almost brutal in his depiction of himself as a boy, offering no excuses for his insensitivity toward others. He is no less severe with his parents. Lowell's portraits of his grandparents, aunts, and uncles were equally candid, but more sympathetic.

Lowell reserves his later difficulties, including struggles with mental illness, for his poetry. Waking in the Blue, a haunting picture of fellow patients in a mental hospital, is immediately followed by an unsettling description of Lowell's return to his family, Home After Three Months Away. Soft Wood, dedicated to Harriet Winslow, who "was more to me than my mother", is deeply moving. Other family poems - like Dunbarton, Grandparents, and Sailing Home from Rapallo - have a poignant beauty. I also liked Beyond the Alps, the first poem in Life Studies, which reappears with an additional stanza as one of the last poems in For the Union Dead.

For the Union Dead has a broader span, addressing social issues and historical subjects, as well as confessional topics, and is thus more similar to Lord Weary's Castle. Hawthorne, Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts, Water, The Old Flame, and the title poem, For the Union Dead offer a good sampling of this work.

The quality of a writer for us , it seems to me, is often defined by how much of ourselves we are willing to put into knowing their work. I read the poems in this collection, but am not tempted to reread them. They make sense and tell of Lowell's childhood, his relation to his father, his meditation on the way he first met his first wife and the way they have grown distant through the years, his sense of his grandfather's grandness as he takes him with him on a local tour, his friendships with other writers. I can read the poems and feel their meaning and sense quite clearly. This to my mind raises them above much poetic language which in many modern poetry writers does not have a context or a sense. Lowell does often tell a small story in his poem.
But there is for me , anyway, a certain absence of music , a certain lack of those kind of memorable lines I find in my beloved poets.
Reading other reviews of Lowell's poetry I see others see more in his work, feel it deeper than I do. They are the truer readers.

Robert Lowell is a giant in American poetry. He is pretty much unanimously considered one of the best of his generation. This book combines two of his volumes of poetry. One of those volumes is his masterpiece Life Studies--the reason why he is a giant in American poetry. This is his seminal work. No matter how you look at it, this is an important book of poetry. And an excellent book of poetry. Most of the poems are good and there are several phenomenal poems within. Life Studies alone belongs on any serious poetry connoisseur's shelf. Also in this book is arguably Lowell's second best collection (only Lord Weary's Castle might be better) For the Union Dead, which contains another masterpiece, "For the Union Dead" (and a favorite of mine "Hawthorne"). This is a book that poetry lovers of all kinds should have.