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Monumentalizing A Political Candidacy: Robert Lowell And Eugene Mccarthy’S History, Jeremy Freeman

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

History (1973) remains Robert Lowell’s most criticized collection of poetry. This was largely because of the critical consensus that Lowell, the most well-known confessional poet, had moved too far away from the elements of the genre in his later works. This reception, coupled with his public mental health episodes, highly publicized divorce from Elizabeth Hardwick in 1972, and personal politics, had a negative impact on the legacy of the author. In revisiting this work, I argue that Lowell’s History is just as confessional as his earlier collections but presents the confessional mode in a different way. In doing so, Lowell …