Robert Lowell's Imitations and the Cold War: Containment, Leakage, Anarchy

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

The first book-length study focusing on Robert Lowells career-long preoccupation with the liberal mode of translational adaptation known as imitation.

Robert Lowell's Imitations and the Cold War argues that Lowells imitations are simultaneously symptomatic of and critically responsive to familiar nodes of Cold War ideology such as containment and contamination, secrecy and security, post-imperial U.S. expansion and Empire. It departs from studies focused solely on Imitations (1961), Lowells book-length collection of translational adaptations, by demonstrating how imitation shadows Lowells work from his earliest collections, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Wearys Castle (1946), through his celebrated mid-career collections, Life Studies (1959) and For the Union Dead (1964), and to later works such as Near the Ocean (1969) and his contributions of adaptations from the Russian of Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam collected in Olga Carlisles anthology, Poets on Street Corners (1967).

Simon Van Schalkwyk excavates the imitational substrate undergirding and informing Lowells compositional method and poetic imagination throughout the course of his career. In so doing, he shows how imitation enacts, at the level of form, Lowells restless investment in Cold War geopolitics and literary networks in ways that inform, develop, and complicate his more conventional canonization as an unquestionably 'American' poet preoccupied solely and simplistically with personal or autobiographical modes of poetic 'confession'.

As literary sites at which containments dualities, porosities, leakages, and contaminants are most clearly displayed, Lowells imitations simultaneously challenge and develop our understanding of confessions presumably strict preoccupation with the personal, regional and national frameworks through which Lowell has commonly been understood.

Author Bio

Simon Van Schalkwyk is Senior Lecturer of English Studies at University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and formerly Visiting Researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER). He is co-editor for Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies and academic editor for the Johannesburg Review of Books, and he has published a collection of poetry, Transcontinental Delay (2021).