Robert Lowell’s Sense of History in History

Abstract

Kyoonwon YangLowell was such a confessional poet to speak about his own and familial experiences, while not so solipsistic as to hide himself from the world. His “impersonal personalism,” which “synthesizes the inclination to personalism and consciousness building of the nineteenth century with the elaborate masking techniques and objectifications of the twentieth,” reaches the climax when his personal memory is connected to that of humankind, that is, “social, political, and cultural historiography” (Hoffman 688). His journey into the past is to see the linkage of his personal past to that of all the related others in history. Thus, history turns into a place where, or a time when, the personal interacts with the historical. This essay aimed to show how subtle Lowell’s perception of, or reaction to, the past is. To do this, three poems from History were closely examined among others. The examination was not made to define what history is for Lowell but to reveal the way his sense of history works out. As shown in such poems as “History,” “The Nihilist as Hero” and “Reading Myself,” Lowell’s sense of history is too complicated to be pinned down in the linear way. History has both sides of darkness and brightness. Actually, the bright side is almost always overshadowed by the other. However, Lowell is no more a pure pessimist than he is an optimist. Lowell’s nihilistic quality goes abreast with his stoic, puritan endurance, and his existentialistic acceptance of the realities of life. This acceptance in turn qualifies somehow Lowell as a little hero.