Puritan Anxiety

“Pilgrim’s blues”: Puritan Anxiety in Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead

Josh SchneidermanCity University of New York Graduate Center

Robert Lowell ’s For the Union Dead evinces an anxiety over Puritanism that is bound to the sociological conditions of American Cold War culture. His collection envisions an America in which the old Calvinist binary of elect (the few chosen by God for salvation) and preterite (those left behind — everybody else) has imploded under Cold War threats of nuclear annihilation, thus reconfiguring the two driving concepts behind the Puritans’ “errand” into the New World: the apocalypse and salvation. Lowell suggests that the Puritan desire for salvation has developed into a secular pursuit of material wealth, and that this pursuit, in turn, has led to a technocratic nuclear tension. With grim irony, For the Union Dead claims that America’s capitalist pursuit of wealth and technology to enact its own election and salvation has actually resulted in national preterition. Few critics have considered Lowell ’s engagement with Puritanism and Calvinism, but my essay addresses this gap in scholarship and attempts to initiate a dialogue on Puritanism as an important trope in post-World War II American literature.

Keywords: Robert Lowell / For the Union Dead / Puritanism / Calvinism / Cold War

Robert Lowell gave off at times the unwilling haunted saintliness of a man who was repaying the moral debts of ten generations of ances-tors. So his guilt must have been a tyrant of a chemical in his blood always ready obliterate the best of his moods. . . . We may only be certain that the moral debt of the Puritan is no mean affair: agglutinations of incest, abominations upon God, kissing the sub cauda of the midnight cat — Lowell’s brain at its most painful must have been equal to an overdose of LSD on Halloween.

— Norman Mailer, The Armies of The NighT

Puritan Anxiety in Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead 59

The Academy of American Poets’ website on Robert Lowell tells us that his poetry “explored the dark side of America’s Puritan legacy,” and the editors of The Norton Anthology of American Literature are more coy when

they explain that Lowell’s early work “explored from within the nervous intensity which underlay Puritan revivalism” (2499). But the critical discourse on Lowell’s engagement with Puritanism and Calvinism consists of little more than these brief platitudes. Few critics have actually attempted to show how Puritanism works in Lowell’s poetry. Jerome Mazzaro, in his 1967 essay, did acknowledge Calvinism’s immediate presence in For the Union Dead, calling attention to “conditions which proclaim that modern man like the predetermined man of Calvinist theology is powerless and foredoomed” (58). Unfortunately, he fails to take into account exactly what “conditions” compelled Lowell to write this way. As its title suggests, Paul Mariani’s Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell limits itself to the biographi-cal implications of Lowell’s Puritan background, and Selim Sarwar’s more recent article, “Robert Lowell: Scripting the Mid-Century Eschatology,” uses Lowell’s ancestry and upbringing as a basis for analyzing the poet’s fascination with the apocalypse. As important as these investigations are, Lowell scholarship still lacks a full-scale exegesis of Puritan themes and theology in his poetry, due in part to the still-predominant critical tendency to read “confessional” poems as “a portrait of the artist as a mental patient,” a longstanding problem that Marjorie Perloff first recognized in 1973 (Poetic Art 164) and Michael Thurston reaffirmed in 2000 (81). Perhaps critics have also shied away from examining Puritan themes because in an oeuvre replete with allusions to America’s separatist roots, Puritanism seems an obvious topic. Nevertheless, to speak of “Puritanism” in Lowell’s poetry as any-thing other than content is to beg the question. In the pages that follow, I will map Puritanism as a function of his work.

Beginning with his first collection, Lord Weary’s Castle, Puritanism figures importantly throughout Lowell’s body of work. Nowhere is it more significant and developed, however, than in his collection For the Union Dead. Despite his repu-tation as a monumentalizing (and monumental) poet, Lowell’s project here very much resembles a post-structuralist approach as he identifies and implodes — Bau-drillard’s term for the collapse of one category into another — the Puritan theo-logical ideals at the root of American culture.1 The American Puritan system of belief operates on a principle of Calvinist predestination that divides humankind into two groups: the elect, those chosen by God for salvation; and the preterite, those passed over by God. Drawing on his personal Puritan ancestry, Lowell shows the pervasiveness of this binary not only in Cold War America of the 1960s but also in American cultural history at large. At the same time, Lowell implodes this binary in order to demonstrate how the elect have collapsed into the preterite as a result of the capitalist transformation that Max Weber describes in The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism. This collapsing of categories is not a good thing. Lowell himself called For the Union Dead “one whole book . . . about witheredness” (Collected Prose 287). “For the Union Dead,” his most public poem and the clearest manifestation of his Puritan anxiety, is about the witheredness of the Union, which

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yields no clear division between elect and preterite. Lowell identifies capitalism and its attendant technologies as the primary culprits. It is the innate Puritan desire for salvation — in twentieth-century terms, the use of technology to advance and save the state — that Lowell points to as the cause of America’s self-inflicted preterition. America’s Puritan roots, Lowell suggests, were hegemonic to begin with and have only grown significantly more so with this new trend.

To get a sense of Lowell’s family history, one need only flip through his Collected Poems, which includes such titles as “In Memory of Arthur Winslow,” “Mary Winslow,” “Mr. Edwards and the Spider,” “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” “Commander Lowell,” “Jonathan Edwards in Western Mas-sachusetts,” and “The Worst Sinner, Jonathan Edwards’ God.” As Elizabeth Bishop recognized, Lowell’s poetry conjures up a ghostly procession of names and figures associated with America’s founding. “I feel I could write in as much detail about my uncle Artie,” Bishop marveled in a letter to Lowell, “but what would be the significance? Nothing at all . . . Whereas all you have to do is put down the names! And the fact that it seems significant, illustrative, American. . . . In some ways you are the luckiest poet I know!” (qtd. in Hamilton 233). Whether he himself felt so lucky is another story. Lowell’s ancestry provided ample raw material for his poems and undoubtedly added to his literary appeal, but Lowell often seems to feel trampled beneath what he called “the mob of ruling-class Bostonians” (LS 66). The sheer amount of fetishized Puritan history that Lowell packs into his work makes it seem like a compulsive gesture, as if he had to write about it. Norman Mailer suggested as much during the March on the Pentagon, where he wrote that Lowell “gave off at times the unwilling haunted saintliness of a man who was repaying the moral debts of ten generations of ancestors” (83).

The first of these ancestors to reach America, Edward Winslow, stepped off the Mayflower in 1620. Winslow makes several cameo appearances in the urtext of New England consciousness, William Bradford’s narrative Of Plimmoth Planta-tion. After joining the Leyden Congregation at the age of twenty-two, Winslow, “a man of essentially adventurous and somewhat liberal outlook,” as Lowell’s English relative D. Kenelm Winslow describes him, found himself among “a worried, introverted community, strongly critical of the faults of others and none too sure of itself ” (26). Nevertheless, Winslow made the Mayflower’s voyage to the New World and was one of 52 (out of 102) pilgrims to survive into the summer of 1621 (Bradford 85). He spent his early years in Massachusetts engaged in Indian diplomacy and was elected Plymouth’s governor in 1633, 1636, and 1644 (Mariani 28). Edward’s brother, John Winslow, arrived on the Fortune in 1621 and soon after married Mary Chilton, who — as Lowell noted in an unfinished autobiographical sketch — was “credited with having been the first woman from the Mayflower to have stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock” (qtd. in Hamilton 3). Grandfather Arthur Winslow of Lord Weary’s Castle and Life Studies fame was directly descended from John and Mary Winslow. Lowell’s paternal genealogy comprises an equally rec-ognizable branch of the New England aristocracy, which made for an agreeable match between Robert Traill Spence Lowell III and Arthur Winslow’s daughter,


Charlotte. The Somerset Lowles established themselves in eastern Massachusetts in 1639 when Percival Lowle settled forty miles north of Boston at Newbury. Among his ancestors on that side, Robert Lowell could claim James Russell Lowell (whom he called “a poet pedestalled for oblivion”), Amy Lowell (“big and a scandal”), A. Lawrence Lowell (president of Harvard College), astronomer Percival Lowell, and Civil War hero Colonel Charles Russell Lowell (Mariani 28–29).

As this brief genealogical sketch suggests, the weight of family history cer-tainly contributes to the Calvinist fixations of For the Union Dead. But there are also larger sociological patterns that Lowell discerns. I use the word “anxiety” to describe the general feeling toward Puritanism manifested in Lowell’s work, because Puritanism—especially the American brand espoused by Winthrop and those like him—was itself full of anxiety. In perhaps the most cogent example of millennialism in intellectual history, American Puritans engaged in an eschato-logical discourse at every turn. The New England separatists felt that the Church of England had fallen into corruption, turning from Christ to Anti-Christ, and so they “tended to regard their ‘errand into the wilderness’ (of the New World) in terms of ‘the Gospel’s fleeting Westward’ ” (Engler, Fichte, and Scheiding 14). “Puritan emigration,” Bernard Capp asserts, “contained a defiant apocalyptic hope. In spreading the Gospel to new lands and establishing new bastions of truth, the settlers felt they were preparing the way for Christ’s coming” (107). This apocalyptic anxiety was the prime mover behind the separatist venture into the New World. Widespread millennial rumblings, which pervaded sixteenth-century Protestant movements, found their dramatic cathexis in the Puritans’ hasty departure from England and the Netherlands. Europe, spiritually bankrupt, was poised on the brink of apocalypse, but America was a promised land created by God especially for the Puritans: salvation embodied on a continental scale. Sacvan Bercovitch offers this succinct account of Puritan reasoning:

To all appearances, what they called America was just another plot of ground in a fallen world. The essence of colonial Puritan historiography lay in the conviction that it was not. Other countries, the argument went, had a double affiliation. In a primal, absolutist sense they belonged to God, but insofar as they were “dead to sin” — that is, temporally, legally, and providentially — they belonged to separate federal constituen-cies. The New World, like Canaan of old, belonged wholly to God. The remnant that fled Babylon in 1630 set sail for the new promised land, especially reserved by God for them. Why else did He so long conceal it, but to make its discovery the finale to His work of redemption? (Puritan Origins 100)

Bercovitch’s seminal studies of early American rhetoric reveal an apocalyptic preoc-cupation at every stage in America’s Puritan history.2 And while eschatology was, indeed, an overriding Calvinist concern, the Puritan theocracy often politicized this concern to assuage fears and quell dissidence, constantly reminding their “flock” that whatever setbacks they faced (starvation, pestilence, brutal warfare with the Native Americans) were part of God’s plan for their deliverance (Engler, Fichte, and Scheiding 14).


Underlying the Puritans’ millennial posture was a broader anxiety over sote-riological hierarchy. “A Modell of Christian Charity,” Winthrop’s theocratic vision penned aboard the Arbella, opens with an immediate pronouncement of social and spiritual stratification: “God Almightie in his most holy and wise providence hath soe disposed of the Condicion of mankinde, as in all times some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in sub-jection” (190). The doctrines of predestined election and limited atonement stood as central tenets of American Puritanism, which only magnified the ever-present apocalyptic dread. Stressing mankind’s fundamental depravity as a result of original sin, John Calvin dictated that man’s only hope for salvation lay in God’s mercy and grace. As a wholly sovereign power, Charles Berryman explains, the Puritan God predetermined election and damnation, rendering humankind impotent in affect-ing its own salvation (9). The doctrine of limited atonement, which maintained that Christ’s sacrifice did not atone for all mankind’s sins but only those of an elect few, was predestination’s logical outgrowth. As Berryman puts it, “Only the ‘chosen few’ would be saved. Only the ‘invisible saints’ would be accepted by God” (10). Even perfectly obedient Puritans might be denied salvation. American Puritanism, then, hinged upon a clear distinction between the elect (chosen) and preterite (passed over). In Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon, twentieth-century literature’s other great inheritor of Puritan anxiety, ruminates on this division at length.3 Tyrone Slothrop’s ancestor William (the fictional analogue to Pynchon’s ancestor William), the narrator informs us, wrote a religious tract in defense of the preterite:

It had to be published in England, and is among the first books to’ve been not only banned but also ceremonially burned in Boston. Nobody wanted to hear about all the Preterite, the many God passes over when he chooses a few for salvation. William argued holiness for these “second Sheep,” without whom there’d be no elect. You can bet the Elect in Boston were pissed off about that. (555)

As Berryman further explains, this belief system drastically exacerbated the uncer-tainty and tension already at hand: “The fear and anxiety created by not knowing whether you were destined for eternal bliss or damnation was more than individual Puritans could tolerate” (11).

For the Union Dead reenacts these Puritan anxieties in a Cold War register. American literature about the Cold War endlessly rehearses motifs like the arms race and nuclear holocaust, but Lowell is noteworthy insofar as he dramatizes the Cold War and the general 60s milieu in Puritan terms.4 He is, above all, interested in examining history’s back pages to find out how America ended up as it did. “History has to live with what was here,” Lowell writes in his poem “History,” “clutching and close to fumbling all we had” (Collected Poems 159). And For the Union Dead accordingly looks back to the nation’s origins and the civil war for sources of preterition.

It should be noted that Lowell’s engagement with Puritanism is not simply a matter of apocalyptic trepidation or genealogical narcissism. Its appearance in For the Union Dead is also attributable to the more general social context of the late


1950s and early 1960s — emergent oppositional cultures, the civil rights movement, and the clash of counterculture against conservatism. The New England separatists used the Old Testament to interpret their collective predicament (Europe equals Babylon; the New World equals Canaan), and in an identical intertextual maneuver, Lowell uses Early American history as a hermeneutical text to interpret his cen-tury’s postwar predicament. In view of this twofold social text, I use “preterite” not simply as a term to denote spiritual reprobation, but also as a concept to describe the way Lowell represents any marginalized group, any group left behind by domi-nant political structures, prevailing cultural attitudes, or the manifold anxieties of the Cold War. There is an obvious populist aspect to the revocation of the Puritan binary, which flickers across the visual landscape of “For the Union Dead”: “When I crouch to my television set, / the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons” (FTUD 72). Correspondingly, these poems not only observe the blurring of preterite and elect as a cultural phenomenon but also act it out on a textual level as a self-conscious implosion, breaching categorical distinctions at every move. This act is, however, always ambivalent and conflicted. While Lowell has little interest in stereotypically demonizing his ancestors as repressed moral hypocrites, he does identify his forefathers’ Calvinism as an oppressive ideology. Lowell relentlessly attacks the beliefs of his forbearers, tearing down their bifurcated religious vision while simultaneously bemoaning the nation’s preterition. For Lowell, the implosion of hierarchies and the loss of binary stabilities resulting in a loss of moral balance are symptomatic woes of the twentieth century, which nonetheless have their origin in an earlier period of American history.

The development of the elect/preterite polarity that Lowell explores in For the Union Dead can actually be traced back to “Skunk Hour” at the end of Life Studies. Given the publishing history of “For the Union Dead,” the poem makes sense as a logical extension of “Skunk Hour.” Originally named “Colonel Shaw and the Mas-sachusetts 54th,” Lowell first delivered the poem at the Boston Fine Arts Festival in June 1960 under this title. “Colonel Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th” was sub-sequently tipped into the Vintage paperback edition of Life Studies and soon after appeared as “For the Union Dead” in The Atlantic Monthly’s November, 1960 issue. “For the Union Dead” assumed its final position as the capstone poem of 1964’s For the Union Dead (Collected Poems 1065). Critics generally regard the Vintage paper-back edition as an oddity — a temporary point of rest for “For the Union Dead” before it assumed its usual position. But the implications of this placement give rise to some interesting observations. First, “For the Union Dead” has, at one time or another, under one title or another, served as the final poem in both of Lowell’s most celebrated collections. Second, although “For the Union Dead” is positioned as the last poem of its eponymous work, it predates nearly all of the other poems in the book and sets the tone for the themes and tropes of the rest of For the Union Dead. Finally, and most importantly, the narrative thread of Puritanism marches out of “Skunk Hour” and into “Colonel Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th.” The effect of reading the poems as they appear in the Vintage paperback creates a highly suggestive narrative continuity, and I would argue that this placement isn’t incidental.


Topographically and thematically, “Skunk Hour” and “For the Union Dead” are similar projects. Both poems deal with the New England consciousness and offer indictments of the Puritan value system. The opening sequence of “Skunk Hour,” which consists of four tonally subdued stanzas, describes the arrival of autumn in the beach town of Castine, Maine, where Lowell spent the summer of 1957 (Life and Art 124). This scene ostensibly comments on a particularly dispirit-ing ritual of autumnal desertion specific to East Coast beach towns. Yet Lowell ascribes great meaning to the sudden desolation enacted when the summer ends and the tourists pull up stakes and take their commerce with them. Steven Gould Axelrod voices the critical consensus on what Lowell is doing here: “[Lowell] is describing more than scenery, he is describing the rotting of a whole social structure” (Life and Art 125). The figures left behind stand as conflicted or empty signifiers. “Nautilus Island’s hermit / heiress” is a post-Puritan elect who, like the elect of “For the Union Dead,” uses her wealth not as a tool of beneficence but as a weapon of desecration:

Thirsting forthe hierarchic privacyof Queen Victoria’s century,she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore,and lets them fall.

Elect and preterite immediately take on connotations of economic class in postwar Maine. These lines suggest “hierarchic” domination of the underclass preterite of Nautilus Island, and we can very well imagine these “eyesores” as the former homes of the working-class “lobstermen” of the next stanza. But the hermit heiress is herself on the brink of extinction. “She’s in her dotage,” and the fact that her “son’s a bishop” suggests a sterile lineage (not to mention a weird, lighthearted nod to Elizabeth Bishop).5 Castine’s “summer millionaire,” the capitalist successor to her aristocracy, also proves to be less than he seems. While Axelrod suggests that the millionaire has lost his money, “[he’s] past his prime — his yawl has been auctioned off ” (Life and Art 125), a better explanation may be that he is simply finished with Castine since it has been just another part of his false summer image along with his “L.L. Bean catalogue” facade. Either way, his disappearance signals another reduction of the town’s wealth. His “nine-knot yawl” is recycled by the village’s working-class lobstermen, which along with the heiress’s purchase of “eyesores,” enacts a collapsing of the elect and preterite categories in the merging of upper and lower class. The “lobstermen,” too, are a weird monstrosity that combines haut cuisine with manual labor. Linguistically, their name denies their humanity by bringing to mind a freakish amalgamation of lobster and man. The third figure of the opening sequence, Lowell’s “fairy decorator,” performs an antithetical opera-tion that amounts to the same thing: “And now our fairy / decorator brightens his shop for fall; / his fishnet’s filled with orange cork, / orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl.” By subsuming work implements into his shop to attract tourists and their money, the decorator has imploded preterite objects into the trappings of


election, but, as the speaker explains, “there is no money in his work / he’d rather marry.” The decorator’s willingness to suppress his homosexuality for the pros-pect of marginal pecuniary security further contributes to the opening sequence’s milieu of capitalism gone awry, a condition that even has a seemingly detrimental effect on the ecology: “The season’s ill — / . . . A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.” It should be noted that throughout these four stanzas Lowell consistently uses the all-inclusive “our,” a narrative technique that evokes not community solidarity but universal despondency (LS 83).

This unhappy leveling effect is a result of the phenomenon that Charles Berryman describes as “the substitution of mere worldly success for the original Puritan ideal of salvation” (21). In this way, Lowell’s representation of Castine’s residents reimagines the process delineated more than half a century earlier by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. According to Weber, the American emphasis on worldly success finds its origins in Puritan piety. The “melancholy inhumanity” inherent in Calvin’s doctrine of predestina-tion, the ever-present uncertainty as to whether one was among the saved, “had one result above all: a feeling of unimaginable inner loneliness of the solitary indi-vidual ” (59). As the Puritans moved away from strict Calvinist doctrine and into what Weber calls Ascetic Protestantism, they naturally had to revise and redirect this fatalist outlook in order to maintain their membership, which resulted in the “Protestant ethic.” Since God’s intentions could never be known, the only way to ameliorate soteriological anxiety was to actively search for signs of personal election and, in the process, maintain total obedience to God’s commandments and laws. Humankind’s innate turpitude obviously made utter conformity a near-impossible task. “Restless work in a vocational calling,” Weber explains, “was recommended as the best possible means to acquire the self-confidence that one belonged among the elect. Work, and work alone, banished religious doubt and gives certainty of one’s status among the saved” (66; emphasis Weber’s). From this statement, it’s not difficult to see the connection that Weber draws between Puritanism and capitalism. The “methodically organized work” advocated by Puri-tan ideology evolved into a pursuit of material wealth: “the acquisition of wealth, when it was the fruit of work in a vocational calling, as God’s blessing” (116). The spirit of capitalism, then, rests in material wealth as tangible proof of one’s salvation: “restless, continuous, and systematic work” aimed at the accumulation of “investment capital” becomes “the highest of all ascetic means for believers to testify to their elect status” (116–17). As Pynchon’s narrator phrases it at one point in Gravity’s Rainbow, investment capital became “money in the Puritan sense — an outward and visible O.K. on their intentions” (652). Capitalism transforms the conditioned impulse toward salvation into a secularized exaltation of wealth and its forms of outward cultural signification, forsaking any hope of election in the spiritual sense. Weber’s theory is a key framework for understanding Lowell’s treatment of Puritanism. The characters in this first section of “Skunk Hour” have all tried to display a “visible O.K. on their intentions,” only to end up collapsed into the very thing they are trying to avoid.


The final four stanzas, which are perhaps the most commented-on of the Lowellian corpus, propel the conflation of elect and preterite to the poem’s fore-front. The “One dark night” of “Skunk Hour” (LS 84) penetrates “For the Union Dead,” its poetic double, modulating into “One morning last March” (FTUD 72). Both lines have a haunting, quotidian quality. Lowell has written at length on the subject of this “dark night”:

This is the dark night. I hoped my readers would remember John of the Cross’s poem. My night is not gracious, but secular, puritan, and agnostical. An Existential night. Somewhere in my mind was a passage from Sartre or Camus about reaching some final darkness where the one free act is suicide. (Collected Prose 226)

Far from St. John of the Cross’s dark night, which ultimately leads to a perfect union with God, this dark night features a wholly absent God. Lowell inverts the narrative of mystical election to create a Puritan wilderness in which none are saved; the union simply never happens. Of the three adjectives (“secular, puri-tan, and agnostical”) that Lowell uses to describe his night, “puritan” is the most troublesome. “Secular” and “agnostical” make perfect sense in light of the existen-tial aura that Lowell acknowledges. But why include the word “puritan”? We are speaking, of course, about “puritan” with a lowercase p, which can simply denote a rejection of sinful pleasures, but the word is heavily freighted coming from Lowell. One explanation is that the secularized Puritan struggle of the first half of the poem has been internalized by the speaker in the second half of the poem. The collapsed “our” of the poem’s first half telescopes into an “I” in the second half, culminating in the Satanic utterance “I myself am hell.” Carrying out the Puritan impulse to look for signs of election in everyday life (Puritan Origins 16), albeit in a perversely displaced manner, the “I” watches “love-cars” for signs of love (presumably a tonic to the existential condition) but finds only mechanized tombs that seem to mechani-cally copulate: “they lay together, hull to hull, / where the graveyard shelves on the town.” The speaker’s strange search is closely allied to the Puritan quest to make the invisible visible, an inclination that Pynchon calls the “Puritan reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible, also known as paranoia” (188). A psychologized iteration of Weber’s observation that relentless Puritan self-examination became displaced into the accumulation of capital, the peripatetic narrator attempts to accumulate evidence of election in the world around him in order to internalize it and find some comfort in his own election.6

Lowell does offer at least a modicum of hope in the skunks “that search / in the moonlight for a bite to eat,” and the skunks further explain Lowell’s use of the word “puritan.” Sandra M. Gilbert identifies them as representatives of hell, “fiery familiars who emerge from the shadows of the graveyard to march, as if punning on Milton and Dante, ‘on their soles up Main Street,’ flaunting their demonic triumph ‘under the chalk-dry and spar spire / of the Trinitarian Church,’ ” but of all the animals in the veritable bestiary of Life Studies, it is difficult to see the outcast, mal-odorous, mustelid skunk as a demonic conqueror or “the militant brutish new order, commanding the ruins of the former civilization” as Axelrod suggests (Life and Art


131). Rather, the skunks are the preterite, Lowell’s model of endurance in a secular wasteland where those saved and those left behind have become indistinguishable from one another. What we have here is not an affirmation of redemption, as one might suspect, but merely hope for survival. Outside the “Trinitarian Church,” outside the domestic sphere of “our back steps,” the mother skunk fights tooth and nail for existence, and unlike any other creature (or car) in “Skunk Hour,” she has managed to reproduce and provide for her offspring. Without hope for spiritual election, they carry on as purely willful subjects in the poem’s world of existential crisis. Accordingly, in a letter to John Berryman, Lowell called the skunks “horrible blind energy” and verified that his speaker does identify with them in a positive way, as a desirable alternative: “i.e. dropping down to a simpler form of life, and a hopeful wish for that simpler energy” (Letters 400). Their march is a march of defiance, a thumbnail sketch of how to endure modern existence. After the implo-sions and erasures of election, the evaporations of wealth and worldly pleasure, the preterite skunks stand at the end of the poem as a sort of displaced persons population, fierce survivors who “will not scare” in Lowell’s wrecked allegory of universal preterition (LS 84).

“I don’t think that anyone has to get themselves to go and watch lovers in a parking lot necking in order to write a poem,” Frank O’Hara griped, “and I don’t see why it’s admirable if they feel guilty about it. They should feel guilty.” O’Hara’s cutting analysis insightfully prods at the greater issues of “Skunk Hour” and offers some much needed relief from Lowell’s anomie:

Why are they snooping? What’s so wonderful about a Peeping Tom? And then if you liken them to skunks putting their noses into garbage pails, you’ve just done something perfectly revolting. No matter what the metrics are. And the metrics aren’t all that unusual. Every other person in any university in the United States could put that thing into metrics. (Lucie-Smith 13)

Lowell explained that the detail about watching lovers wasn’t from personal experi-ence, “but from an anecdote about Walt Whitman in his old age” (Collected Prose 228). The hidden presence of Whitman — the “bard of democracy” — is significant, especially when taken with the simultaneous allusion to Paradise Lost. David Leh-man attributes O’Hara’s distaste to “the grandiose egoism of a speaker who likens the welfare of the body politic to the state of his psyche and quotes Milton’s Satan, ‘Myself am Hell,’ without saving irony” (348). However, in light of the Calvinist drama that unfolds in the first four stanzas, there is something ironic about Low-ell’s identification with Satan. Lowell transposes Milton’s great Puritan struggle between heaven and hell onto Whitman’s democratic vision: “the prostitute and the President” living in perfect accord, creating a democracy of preterition where the “hermit heiress” suffers equally alongside the “lobstermen.” Theological categories collapse, and moral balance is lost. O’Hara is right; the result is revolting. That’s the point.

Perhaps Marjorie Perloff is correct when she contends that “Skunk Hour” falters when Lowell attempts to “make his own malaise representative of the larger


condition of an America in decline” (“Return” 81). But one aspect of the poem that has gone strangely unnoticed is the way in which the skunks’ march presages real preterite marches, the civil rights, women’s rights, and Vietnam War protests that would erupt only a few years later. “Skunk Hour” is most important to twenty-first century readers not necessarily as a confessional testament to “America in decline” but as a mapping of the fault line between the “tranquilized fifties” and the volatile 60s, where formalism ruptures into confessionalism and the obstinate skunks transmute into Mailer’s Armies of the Night. Lowell himself, elect by most measures, took part in several protests against the Vietnam War. Underlying his support of the anti-war movement, however, is the deeply conflicted suspicion that distinctions between right and New Left, conservative and liberal, and war apologist and anti-war protestor are insignificant in the depolarized twentieth century. While “Skunk Hour” explores America’s Puritan legacy in allegorical terms, Lowell would move towards more concrete expressions of this catastrophe in For the Union Dead.

In order to understand these expressions, it is useful to look at some other poems in the collection For the Union Dead that come close to delineating the elect-preterite binary and the causes of its demise, specifically “Fall 1961,” “July in Washington,” and “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts.” Remembering that “For the Union Dead” predates any other poem in the collection, it is also useful to look at its epigraph in relation to these other poems. For quite some time, this epigraph, “Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam,” was taken to mean “They relinquish everything to serve the state.” In fact, because Lowell himself provided no footnotes, most anthology editors still use this translation in their notes. But as William Nelles explains, the Latin word servare does not mean “to serve” but “to save,” and as a classicist, Lowell would have been well aware of the difference (640). Thus, the epigraph reads, “They relinquish everything to save the state.” Lowell made several remarks that support Nelles’s finding. In a 1964 interview with Stanley Kunitz he explained, “My theme might be summed up in this paradox: we Americans might save the world or blow it up: perhaps we should do neither.” He expanded on this idea in an interview with A. Alvarez:

We were founded on a Declaration, on the Constitution, on Principles, and we’ve always had the ideal of “saving the world.” And that comes close to perhaps destroy-ing the world. Suddenly it is as though this really terrible nightmare has come true, that we are suddenly in a position where we might destroy the world, and that is very closely allied to saving it. We might blow up Cuba to save ourselves and then the whole world would blow up. Yet it would come in the guise of an idealistic stroke. (qtd. in Nelles 640)

Lowell’s blurring of the distinction between “saving” and “destroying” reveals a post-structuralist inclination in For the Union Dead ’s project. More importantly, this statement summons up the Puritan drive towards salvation as the cause of America’s debased national condition. Sacvan Bercovitch, in his introduction to The American Puritan Imagination, explains that the pietists who founded America


saw themselves as members of a “new Israel” on an “errand” to found a “city on a hill,” and that these terms carried highly specialized meanings:

“Errand” implied the believer’s journey to God and the communal calling to the New World; “new Israel” signified the elect, the theocracy as it was prefigured in the Old Testament, and the blessed remnant which, according to prophecy, would usher in the millennium; “city” meant a social order and the bonds of a true visible church; the concept of “hill” opened into a series of scriptural landmarks demarcating the march of redemptive history: Ararat, Sinai, Golgotha [a place that figures importantly in “Skunk Hour”], and the Holy Mount of New Jerusalem. (9)

For the Union Dead demonstrates how this “errand” to found a “new Israel” has miscarried to create its antithesis: a Union of preterition. The United States’ par-ticipation in the nuclear arms race of the 1950s and 1960s was allegedly a defensive measure to save America, but it ultimately resulted in a policy of “mutually assured destruction.” This impulse, Lowell argues, inheres in our American sensibility, and it presents itself as a double bind. As John Winthrop knew, to be a city upon a hill is to be above all other cities, but it is also to be perilously in the international eye, to have all shortcomings and weakness open to scrutiny. In anxiously trying to posi-tion ourselves as a city upon a hill, Lowell argues, we tend towards self-destruction, thus distorting the line between redemption and reprobation.

This idea of “saving the world” as a primary American anxiety manifests itself explicitly in “Fall 1961,” a poem replete with the anxious Cold War rhetoric of imminent annihilation.7 Set in the months following the U-2 incident, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the beginning of the Space Race (alluded to by several references to the moon), widespread obsession over a “missile gap” during the 1960 presidential election, and a rapidly escalating nuclear arms race, “Fall 1961” depicts a nation of despondence: “We are like a lot of wild / spiders crying together, / but without tears.” By using spiders as his creature of choice, Lowell references his own “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” and “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts,” but this metaphor is also important in and of itself. Spiders are solitary creatures. The image is one of Americans as an indistinguishable mass of preterits — as Sarwar puts it, “a confused swarm of crawling insects too terrified to emote” — joined only by the perceived threat of nuclear destruction (126). “Crying together, but without tears,” suggests histrionics, and this is historically accurate since America was not actually under direct threat of nuclear attack before or during the time of the poem. Nevertheless, Lowell blames this psychologically “chafing” condition on technol-ogy, which in this case are nuclear weapons meant to provide salvation from a hostile international environment: “All autumn, the chafe and jar / of nuclear war; / we have talked our extinction to death.” “Fall 1961” produces its own unsettling nuclear countdown effect by repeating the phrase “back and forth” and making allusions to clocks and ticking (FTUD 11).

The poem’s closing lines, “My one point of rest / is the orange and black / oriole’s swinging nest,” have been read, oddly, as the poet’s recourse to nature as a source of comfort. Patrick Cosgrave, one of the first critics to write a book-length


analysis of Lowell’s poetry, sees “the rhythms and routines of nature” as an offer of consolation (172), and Axelrod similarly argues that the natural rhythm of the oriole’s nest “belongs to the eternal cycle of life, and summons up comforting thoughts of renewal” (Life and Art 150). But to accept this positive interpretation of one of Lowell’s bleakest poems is to ignore two issues: first, the general tone of the poems that surround “Fall 1961” in For the Union Dead; and second, Lowell’s treatment of nature in the poem itself. It would be wrong to suggest that For the Union Dead is an unredeemingly negative collection, but the natural world is an all too easy answer here, especially in light of the way that it is treated in poems such as “Middle Age,” “The Mouth of the Hudson” and “Florence.” In these poems, and more importantly in “Fall 1961,” nature is corrupted by pollution and unnatural occurrences, and as Perloff notes, Lowell reads his sense of personal futility into the minutiae of the insect and animal world (Poetic Art 12). The spiders have already been mentioned, and the speaker also flatly declares, “I swim like a minnow / behind my studio window.” All of these allusions to nature suggest that natural hierarchies have been destroyed by the threat of nuclear war, a development further expressed by the phrase, “A father’s no shield / for his child” (FTUD 12). The nest functions in much the same way. Organic structures tend toward obsolescence in the atomic age. No longer a shelter for the oriole, this brittle, hopelessly ineffectual nest is now an ironic “point of rest,” suggestive of the speaker’s unsheltered existence in a state where the distinction between salvation (here presented as defensive nation-building) and destruction is tenuous.

“July in Washington,” one of several poems that Lowell wrote after a tour of South America with the Congress of Cultural Freedom, comes closest to explicitly delineating the elect/preterite polarity (Life and Art 151). Here, Lowell identifies the elected politicians of Washington as the Puritan elect: “The elect, the elected . . . they come here bright as dimes, / and die disheveled and soft. / We cannot name their names, or number their dates — / circle on circle, like rings on a tree” (FTUD 58). The ellipsis at the beginning of this passage signals a meditative association between the “elect” and the “elected.” Lowell immediately undercuts this asso-ciation, however, by identifying the “elected” as gaudy yet essentially insignificant “dimes” who remain subject to the same entropic decay as society at large. These “elected” are not elect at all, but so ineffectual and unremarkable that they are easily forgotten by the American cultural consciousness and quickly become preterite. As a unit of currency, “dimes” also suggests the same detrimental capitalism as the Mosler safe of “For the Union Dead” and again points to Weber’s material-ist reconfiguration of American Protestantism. The poem continues with similar Puritan rhetoric by evoking that most recognizable of Puritan tracts, Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress: “but we wish the river had another shore, / some farther range of delectable mountains” (FTUD 59). Bunyan’s “delectable mountains” of The Pilgrim’s Progress are, of course, the “Promised Land” that the elect could look forward to as a reward for the tribulations of earthly existence. Lowell aligns this belief with 60s utopianism in order to show the idealistic hopelessness of both notions.


While “July in Washington” evokes the most recognizable of Puritan tracts, “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts” summons forth one of the most recognizable figures of American Puritanism. But Edwards is not portrayed as the brimstone-spewing sermonizer of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God who promises a painful judgment for those not granted God’s grace. Rather, much like the “hermit heiress” of “Skunk Hour,” Edwards is in his dotage — an outdated relic who pins scraps of paper to himself and leads his “last flock, a dozen / Houssatonic Indian chil-dren.” Like the African-Americans of “For the Union Dead,” the Native Americans of “Jonathan Edwards” are American history’s other vast preterite demographic, and Edwards’ association with them only serves to reinforce his preterition. “[F]aded, / Old, exiled and afraid,” Edwards has been collapsed into the same people his culture sedulously oppressed, yet he continues to obliterate their belief system from within (FTUD 43). The decline of Edwards, an exemplary member of the elect — history’s greatest huckster of election, one might say — synecdochally represents the decline of the Elect Nation. Puritan rhetoric commonly refers to the elect as “sheep,” but the houses that signify them stand “out in the cold / like sheep outside the fold.” Using John Winthrop’s writing as an example, Bercovitch explains that the Elect Nation of New England was to be a “ ‘means to save out of this generall callamitie,’ as the ark had saved Noah from the flood, and as New Jerusalem would harbor the elect plucked out of the final conflagration” (Puritan Origins 102). Lowell’s New England, where “Faith is trying to do without / faith,” attests to the failure of this venture:

We know how the world will end,but where is paradise, each day fartherfrom the Pilgrim’s blues for Englandand the Promised Land. (FTUD 40)

As the poem’s speaker, Lowell stands in postwar Western Massachusetts at the edge of apocalypse, what Pynchon calls “the end of history” in Gravity’s Rainbow (56). What we have here is a startling example of Lowell’s tendency to conflate historical time, the sort of viscous temporal movement that marks “For the Union Dead.” Lowell’s Massachusetts is superimposed upon Edwards’ Massachusetts with a knowing glance at the reader — we know how Edwards’ millennial prophecies will play out: in nuclear apocalypse. And even though Lowell chronicles the failure of Puritanism, such an analysis, as Dwight Eddins recognizes, always entails an indictment of Puritan hegemony, a divergence from “paradise,” in this case the Pilgrims’ radical departure from the Gospels’ humane message in their exploitation of the Native Americans (“a dozen / Houssatonic Indian Children”) under the guise of their “Errand.” Eddins explains, “Subsequent American history merely changed the targets and the rationale of exploitation; wars fought in the seventeenth century under the banner of religious zeal are fought in the twentieth century under the banner of the capitalistic system” (42).

These poems seem like a warm-up when compared with “For the Union Dead,” a poem that fully realizes the transition that Eddins outlines. While it


should be clear that the other poems in For the Union Dead are distillations of Lowell’s project, “For the Union Dead” stands as the poet’s most intense scrutiny of Puritanism, a scathing jeremiad that problematizes the elect-preterite relation-ship. Even the title ironically deconstructs itself. At the most literal level, “For the Union Dead” suggests a commemorative ode for the fallen Northern soldiers of the Civil War, but the title can also mean “For the State Dead” or “For America Dead.” The epigraph, “Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam” or “They relinquish everything to save the republic,” operates in much the same way. A deliberate appropriation of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s inscription on the Shaw memorial (“He relinquishes everything to save the republic”), which is actually the motto of Shaw’s Society of the Cincinnati (Nelles 639), Lowell has ostensibly altered it to include the African-American soldiers of the Massachusetts 54th. Yet when taken with the title’s alternate reading, the epigraph’s darker purpose usurps its initial appearances. The inclusive “they,” as in all American citizens, provides a narrative framework in which the poem can be read as an elegy for a postwar America of what Pynchon calls “second Sheep.”8 In a series of interconnected vignettes, all dealing with a relinquishment of some sort, Lowell implodes the Puritan concept of elect and preterite by closely examining Saint-Gaudens’s monument to Colo-nel Robert Gould Shaw and the various objects of technology that have caused America’s preterition.

Colonel Shaw is both figuratively and literally foregrounded by a statement about America’s Puritan inheritance when Lowell describes the excavation taking place directly across the street from Saint-Gaudens’s Shaw Memorial: “A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders / braces the tingling Statehouse” (FTUD 70). The image is a powerful one of Puritan ideals undergirding Boston’s government and, by extension, the American government as a whole. A member of Lowell’s rich Puritan ancestry and commander of the first black regiment in the Civil War, Shaw is himself identified as a quasi-Puritan member of the elect. Decidedly elect in both his ties to the Lowell legacy and his military status, Shaw “Has an angry wrenlike vigilance, / a greyhound’s gentle tautness; / he seems to wince at pleasure, / and suffocate for privacy.” While Shaw is both intrinsically and visually defined as a Puritan elect, his “niggers,” the black soldiers of the Mas-sachusetts 54th, are undoubtedly preterite. America’s long-standing treatment of African Americans as “second Sheep,” especially during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, needs no recapitulation, and Lowell evokes the attitude of dispens-ability that was historically directed towards the black soldiers: “Two months after marching through Boston, / half the regiment was dead.”

Yet Lowell keenly problematizes what seems like a clear-cut division between Shaw and his black soldiers. Shaw rides high above his soldiers on Saint-Gaud-ens’s immortalizing monument, but, as Lowell points out, “Shaw’s father wanted no monument / except the ditch, / where his son’s body was thrown / and lost with his ‘niggers.’ ” In his abjection, Shaw is indistinguishable from his preterite soldiers. Moreover, Saint-Gaudens’s monument, which Lowell’s vision renders


indistinguishable from the “real” Shaw, “sticks like a fishbone / in the city’s throat,” a reminder not of the heroic wartime deeds of the Massachusetts 54th, but of the systematic disenfranchisement of an entire race and the unfulfilled promises of the post-Civil War era. The case of Robert Shaw stands as a crucial aporia that Lowell uses to implode the distinction between elect and preterite (FTUD 71).

Inherent in Lowell’s implosion is a critique of the ideology of war, specifically Robert Shaw’s Civil War and Robert Lowell’s virtually unnamable “last war.” It is inaccurate to say, as some have, that Lowell negatively portrays Robert Shaw and his soldiers. Instead, he inveighs against one particular perception of Shaw’s memo-rial. That is, that the Shaw memorial was, as Axelrod tells us, “intended in part as a compliment by the Boston cultural elite to itself,” not a difficult claim to make in light of the fact that the memorial was inscribed with the name of every one of the slain white officers but not a single black soldier (Life and Art 166). Thus Saint-Gaudens’s 1897 memorial is less a memorial than a site of public forgetting. This is the case with many popular conceptions of the Massachusetts 54th, including Peter Burchard’s One Gallant Rush, a biography published around the same time as For the Union Dead. One Gallant Rush pays little attention to the black soldiers, instead devoting its pages to reinforcing the idea of Shaw as an elect hero.9 “For the Union Dead” exposes the way in which the memorial itself as well as written depictions like Burchard’s have subjected the Massachusetts 54th to a preterition of forgetfulness.

Consequently, a large part of the scenes in “For the Union Dead” deal with this forgetfulness. While I have already discussed the implications of the physical abjection of Saint-Gaudens’s relief, two other scenes illustrate this critique. In the first scene, returning to the present from an analepsis that provides a visual and moral portrait of Shaw, Lowell describes “A thousand small town New England greens” where “the old white churches hold their air / of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags / quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.” It seems curious to describe New England churches as rebellious, especially in light of the “rebel” label attached to the Confederate states during the Civil War. The next line clarifies: the “frayed flags” rebel against the waning memory of the Union dead. And the next four lines provide us with a highly palpable image of yet another set of immortalizations — “The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier” — physically disappearing as they erode away. While the ideology behind the Civil War was, at least theoretically, one of anti-slavery, Lowell suggests that almost one hundred years later, little has changed. The second scene, which refers to the civil rights movement of the 1960’s and the desegregation of schools, expresses this sentiment: “When I crouch to my television set, / the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.” This scene questions whether the death and preterition of the Massachusetts 54th has accomplished anything at all. Elsewhere, Lowell more explicitly classified African Americans as social preterites and expressed dismay over American historical amnesia. “In my poem ‘[For] the Union Dead,’ ” Lowell wrote to The Village Voice in response to allegations of racism in his play Benito


Cereno, “I lament the loss of the old abolitionist spirit; the terrible injustice, in the past and in the present, of the American treatment of the Negro is of the greatest urgency to me as a man and as a writer” (CL 454). Not that the “loss of the old abolitionist spirit” is the sole focus of “For the Union Dead”; Lowell points to it as one of many social ills caused by the American Calvinist temperament. But it is important inasmuch as it forms a nexus, a kind of hinge point, where the 1860s come into contrast with the late 1950s.

Whereas the ideology behind the Civil War has been forgotten, the ideology behind World War II is nothing less than horrific: “on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph / shows Hiroshima boiling / over a Mosler Safe, the ‘Rock of Ages’ / that survived the blast. Space is nearer.” This famous mention of the Mosler Safe Company’s use of a melted but otherwise intact safe that survived the atom bomb at Hiroshima as advertising material is at once a statement about the commercial-ization of war and the moral bankruptcy of America. The ostensibly noble inten-tions of World War II, Lowell argues, have been debased into a twofold capitalist simulation: an advertisement and an ever-present specter of nuclear annihilation.10 The atomic bombing of Hiroshima is a prime example of Lowell’s “saving the world” paradox. The melted safe, an insensitive icon of national strength, doubles as a harrowing reminder of what the nuclear age truly inaugurated. As Thurston notes, the internal assonance of “Boylston” and “boiling” suggests that “Boylston Street is every bit as threatened by the bomb as Hiroshima.”

Herein lies the cause of America’s sorrows. In anxious pursuit of the innate Puritan impulse to prove itself as the Elect Nation, America has actually inflicted preterition upon itself. Call it salvational suicide: the thirst for technology to advance, protect, and provide salvation actually separates us from our humanity. It is useful to think of the process as a circular configuration. The Puritan anxiety over salvation becomes, under the banner of capitalism, the Weberian drive for wealth. This drive, in turn, spurs the state’s accumulation of nuclear weaponry both to save itself and display outward signs of national election. It takes Weberian wealth to acquire nuclear technology, and it is important to remember that the Cold War was billed as a competition between Communism and capitalist democracy — the Soviet welfare state versus America’s old-fashioned hard work and know-how. But this secularized Puritanism inimically doubles back on itself to implode the original binary, making all preterite under the sign of nuclear holocaust. Lowell summed up these concerns in one of the last essays he wrote before his death:

We live in the sunset of Capitalism. We have thundered nobly against its record all our years, yet we cling to its vestiges, not just out of greed and nostalgia, but for our intelligible survival. Is this what makes our art so contradictory, muddled and troubled? We are being proven in a sort of secular purgatory; there is no earthly paradise on the horizon. (“After Enjoying” 289)

The Mosler Safe anecdote illustrates this cycle through a series of brutal analogies. Lowell calls the safe “the ‘Rock of Ages’ / that survived the blast.” This refers, of course, to a Puritan hymn of the same name in which Christ/God is the “Rock


of Ages” (FTUD 72). In post-World War II America, Lowell suggests, God has been replaced by commercialism and technology. “For the Union Dead” contains numerous instances of living things becoming mechanized, and vice-versa (like the copulating cars of “Skunk Hour”), signifying a kind of unnatural evolution. Lowell’s meditation on the Shaw memorial is triggered by a technological image:

One morning last March,I pressed against the new barbed and galvanizedfence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,yellow dinosaur steamshovels were gruntingas they cropped up tons of mush and grassto gouge their underworld garage.

The “yellow dinosaur steamshovels” are significant not only because they exemplify an unnaturally mechanized organism but also because dinosaurs are extinct, thus lending a crucial motif of obsolescence to this particular scene of relinquish-ment (Lowell evokes dinosaurs to a similar effect in “Middle Age”). In addition, these objects of technology are responsible for what Lowell clearly portrays as a desecration: the gouging of “their underworld garage,” which denotes a violation of the organic and, quite literally, an undermining of the State. Perhaps the most important organic-turned-mechanical objects, and certainly the most prevalent, are the “cowed, compliant fish” of the South Boston Aquarium. They appear in various forms (“Their monument sticks like a fishbone / in the city’s throat”), none more malevolent than in the final stanza. Very early in the poem, Lowell laments, “I often sigh still / for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom / of the fish and reptile” (FTUD 70). But over fifty lines later, the fish have evolved into mechanical sharks: “Everywhere, / giant finned cars nose forward like fish; / a savage servility / slides by on grease.” Moreover, the fish have gone from cowed compliance to savage servility in a line that resonantly returns to the epigraph by echoing the word “Servare.” Knowing what we know about this troublesome word makes this connection even more ironic, for the active “saving” of the epigraph has been linguistically contorted into an imprisoned “servility,” which speaks to the ultimate consequences of the Puritan salvational impulse. The poem’s hapless organisms have given themselves over to modernity and mechanization only to end up trapped in a state of terminal preterition.

“For the Union Dead,” a poem about public issues written for a public event, seems to be far from the confessional poetry associated with Robert Lowell. Yet Lowell’s direct and far-reaching ties to the American Puritan legacy make an implosion of the elect/preterite binary an implosion of himself, “a poet who still dwells in the shadow of his New England family” (Poetic Art 163). As Jed Rasula holds, Lowell was “compelled in part to destroy the terms of valuation that had can-onized him in the first place” and, on a larger scale, compelled to destroy the Puritan values undergirding his personal history and America’s history (247). For the Union Dead, which, Moloch-like, devours and demolishes every father figure available to Lowell from his Puritan forerunners to Allen Tate, is the prime example of this


phenomenon. But it is merely one book in a matrix of subversive texts that col-lectively signal a reemergence of Early-American themes in post-World War II American literature: Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow; Arthur Miller’s allegorical slash at McCarthyism, The Crucible; John Berryman’s evocation of Anne Bradstreet in “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet”; and John Barth’s satire on colonial economics and culture, The Sot-Weed Factor, to name four other texts that participate in the long tradition of the American jeremiad.11 The American jeremiad, Bercovitch explains, was a political sermon, “a state of the covenant address” emphasizing societal declension and pointing out the perverse wrongdoings of its intended audi-ence: “False dealing with God, betrayal of covenant promises, the degeneracy of the young, the lure of profits and pleasures, the prospects of God’s just, swift and total revenge” (American Jeremiad 4). Perry Miller sees the jeremiad as a Puritan lament for the failure of their errand into the wilderness, “a literature of self-condemnation” (15). Bercovitch, on the other hand, argues that the jeremiad coalesced lament with celebration, constantly reaffirming the Puritans’ errand (American Jeremiad 11). He traces the jeremiad tradition into the nineteenth century, pointing to Melville, Emerson, and Henry Adams as a few of its late practitioners. We should regard For the Union Dead and its mid-century counterparts as new jeremiads for the twen-tieth century, which turn the genre back upon itself to show how the “city upon a hill” has declined into withered, secular capitalism. And like Bercovitch’s take on the jeremiad, texts like “Skunk Hour” offer a survival map for the preterite soul in a world where election has been exposed as a myth. In the twenty-first century, as America stands as the world’s only superpower (though perhaps not for long), it is now time for a reassessment of Puritanism’s influence on the American literature.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Susan Rosenbaum and Jed Rasula for their insightful feedback, generosity and encouragement at every stage of this essay’s development.

Notes

I use “implosion” as an analytical term because it precisely describes Lowell’s thematic and textual 1. stance towards Puritanism. According to Baudrillard, industrialized Western societies first undergo a process of “explosion”: “demography, or uncontrollable surplus production, a process of uncontrollable expansion, or quite simply when colonization violently initiated them into the expansive and centrifu-gal norm of Western systems” (73). When explosion reaches a point of critical mass, it is followed by catastrophic implosion, the collapse of previously defined boundaries. Most recognizably, Baudrillard chronicles the media’s implosion into the social. “Thus the media do not bring about socialization,” he argues, “but just the opposite: the implosion of the social in the masses” (102). Best and Kellner further extrapolate: “The social thus disappears and with it distinctions implode between classes, political ideologies, cultural forms, and between media semiurgy and the real itself . . . Baudrillard is not only describing a series of implosions (that is, between politics and entertainment, capital and labour, or high and low cultures) but is claiming that the society in its entirety is implosive” (121).


See 2. The Puritan Origins of the American Self and American Jeremiad. Winthrop’s essay “Conclusions for the Plantation” is a representative example: “All the other Churches of Europe are brought to desolation . . . and it cannot be but a like judgement is coming upon us . . . the Lord hath admonished, threatened, corrected, and astonished us, yet we grow worse and worse, so as . . . he must needs give way to his fury at last: he hath smitten all the other Churches before our eyes . . . ; we saw this, . . . but have provoked him more than all the other nations round about us: therefore he is turning the cup towards us also . . . I am verily persuaded, God will bring some heavy Affliction upon this land and that speedily” (qtd. in Puritan Origins 102; ellipses Bercovitch’s).

“Elect” and “preterite” are ubiquitous terms in 3. Gravity’s Rainbow. While “reprobate” is far more common designation in Calvinist tracts, I use “preterite” to suggest a cross-genre, cross-literary-culture bond between Lowell and Pynchon. Both trace their roots to America’s first families (Lowell, the Mayflower; Pynchon, the Arbella), and both evince a Puritan anxiety that is bound to the sociological conditions of 1960s American culture.

Though as Edward Brunner shows, in the case of much poetry written during the Cold War, we 4. might better classify the atomic bomb as an absent presence. See Cold War Poetry.

Alternatively, if her son is an Episcopal bishop, it suggests even deeper ties to the New England 5. aristocracy’s power structure. Born into the Episcopal Church, Lowell converted to Catholicism for six years during the 1940s.

Lowell identified his speaker as a Romantic “I,” which is not at all different from the “I” of American 6. Puritan writings. As Lowell told John Berryman, the “ ‘sob in each blood-cell’ is meant to have a haggard, romantic profilish exaggerated quality — true, but in the rhetoric of destitution, here the more matter of fact descriptive style gives out, won’t do, and there’s only the stagey for the despair” (Letters 407). We should recall Bercovitch’s thesis that the Puritan self was, in fact, predicated on a proto-Romantic “I-ness,” and that the Puritan identity was locked in a constant struggle between self-repression (austere “humility”) and “personal assertion.” To attempt to deny the self is to paradoxically reassert the self ad infinitum in “a consuming involvement with ‘me’ and ‘mine’ that resists disintegration” (Puritan Origins 18). Refrains of self-abnegation, self-abhorring, and self-denial only habitually bolster the primacy of the “I” by continually recognizing that there is a self, just as Lowell’s “I” paradoxically constitutes itself through a flagellating introjection of the surrounding wreckage and stubbornly asserts itself through the very end of the poem.

In “Robert Lowell and the Cold War,” one of the most balanced and sensitive articles to tackle 7. Lowell’s political alignments, Axelrod shows how “Fall 1961” and other poems pastiche the public dis-course of the Cold War. The line, “our end drifts nearer,” for example, “is generated by and contributes to an obsessive public discourse about the dangers of nuclear ‘drift,’ as in Time’s typical formulation: ‘Across the U.S., like a malevolent mist, drifted the fallout from the Russian nuclear test shots’ ” (“Cold War” 351–352).

I mean “elegy” in Jahan Ramazani’s sense of the modern elegy, which turns to “ ‘melancholic’ 8. mourning.” “Unlike their literary forbearers,” Ramazani explains, modern elegists “attack the dead and themselves, their own work and tradition; and they refuse such orthodox consolations as the rebirth of the dead in nature, in God, or in poetry itself ” (4). Ramazani specifically points to Lowell as a poet who “attacks the dead as unworthy, taunting and teasing parents, grandparents, and their overly esteemed ancestors. He conflates the satiric invective and the oedipal drama of the elegy, heightening both of them and turning them into the foundation of his elegiac art” (227).

In his introduction to 9. One Gallant Rush, the book upon which Edward Zwick’s film Glory (1989) was based, Burchard offers a well-intentioned but idealizingly dislocated reenactment of the same scene that Saint-Gaudens chose for the Shaw Memorial: “Shaw’s skin was pale above the faces of his men. His white officers were some of the best battle-tempered youths of the day, and marching beside them were the finest of Negroes — men who had drilled through the winter and who marched proudly, holding their rifles in their strong brown hands” (1). Ironically, Burchard uses a passage from “For the Union Dead” as one of his epigraphs, but this is exactly the type of hierarchical depiction that Lowell abhors.


This passage reveals a starkly dichotomous division between Shaw and the African-American soldiers. His “pale” face rides high above their “strong brown hands,” and Burchard seems to unintentionally dehumanize the soldiers as “the finest of Negroes,” not the finest of soldiers but the finest of blacks, which are two very different classifications. It implies that only the best blacks could aspire to careers as military grunts, careers that ended, not incidentally, in an unmitigated suicide mission.

And like the first half of “Skunk Hour,” the Mosler Safe simultaneously encapsulates Baudrillard’s 10. concepts of explosion and implosion: explosion as a signifier of the rampant proliferation of wealth and implosion as the resultant categorical breakdown, particularly the collapse of the real into the unreal.

This is to say nothing of the renewed interest in early America carried out in academia by Perry 11. Miller, Samuel Eliot Morison, and Kenneth Murdock, scholars who initiated the serious study of American literature in the 1930s and carried on with increasing intensity throughout the 1940s and 50s. Their direct academic descendents, particularly Bercovitch and Edmund Morgan, extended their project into the 60s and 70s. Few have inquired as to what prompted this reexamination and critique of first principles. Critical studies of Puritanism’s influence on American literature almost never move beyond the nineteenth century, tracing its genealogy no further than Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville. The sole exception is Barnstone, Manson, and Singley’s essay collection entitled The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era, which focuses on writers “influenced by Cal-vinism’s transformation from theological doctrine to secular ideology.” In the twentieth century, the editors explain, “Calvinism appears as a psychological construct, a cultural institution or artifact, a habit of mind, or a sociopolitical structure” (xiii).

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Barnstone, Aliki, Michael Tomasek Manson, and Carol J. Singley. “Introduction.” The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era. Ed. Aliki Barnstone, Michael Tomasek Manson, and Carol J. Singley. Hanover: UP of New England, 1997. xiii–xxx.

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Puritan Anxiety

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