The American Civil War is a topic which many poets have addressed in verse. What separates Lowells For The Union Dead from the scores of other Civil War poems is not only the complex interweaving of period and contemporary events in order to make

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based on your reading of the critical anthology, argue the case for your selection of poems which you view as having value

The American Civil War is a topic which many poets have addressed in verse. What separates Lowell’s ‘For The Union Dead’ from the scores of other Civil War poems is not only the complex interweaving of period and contemporary events in order to make a social commentary on change, which give the poem a strong modern-day resonance, but also the precise and polysemic lexis Lowell employs in order to link different timeframes.

In 1964, four years after he first read ‘For The Union Dead’ in public, Lowell stated in a letter: “In my poem For The Union Dead, I lament the loss of the old Abolitionist spirit; the terrible injustice, in the past and present, of the American treatment of the Negro is the greatest urgency to me as a man and a writer.”. By describing the “loss” of such a spirit, Lowell also reveals what has replaced it in modern Boston; a vulgar fixation with consumerism. His juxtaposition of the unselfish and heroic sacrifice of Colonel Shaw and his all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry against the moral decline of modern Boston, of a rose-tinted past against a dystopian present, is a continual theme in the poem. He describes the bronze monument celebrating their valour as “(sticking) like a fishbone in the city’s throat”, going on to state that the Colonel “is out of bounds now”; in both instances, Lowell alludes to the fact that the laudable values which the Colonel and his men stood for are ignored by modern society, that human nature has degenerated into crude materialism. This degeneration is shown further by Lowell’s disdainful description of the building of a garage beneath the Boston Common, which is owned by the people of Boston rather than the city itself. The construction of the garage in the 60s was subject to vehement and ultimately unsuccessful protest, as it was seen as an infringement of the people’s rights. The theme of immoral consumerism recurs in this disdainful description: “Parking spaces luxuriate like civic sandpiles in the heart of Boston.” Lowell sees his city reduced to a plaything for childlike developers who have no thought for culture or heritage. Yet another example of this brazen consumerism is the reference to the Mosler Safe, which is advertised and glorified as a result of WWII. This is juxtaposed against the memorial, carelessly “propped by a plank splint”. This theme is not only applicable to Boston, but universally applicable; indeed, with the ever increasing emphasis on material wealth in modern life, the poem may have even greater relevance today. Through the universal applicability of its themes, then, Lowell’s poem demonstrates the “qualities of durability” which allows literary works to be widely deemed as “valuable”.

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In addition to this large-scale historical juxtaposition, there is a personal juxtaposition between the child Lowell and the adult Lowell, adding another layer of complexity to the poem as the factual and emotional interact with each other. The Aquarium is vital here, not only exhibiting the impermanence of the world we live in as modernisation propels human ‘advancement’, but showing how even within Lowell’s lifetime, the world has changed beyond recognition; the fish of his childhood are gone, and all that is left is the “bronze weathervane cod” which has “lost half its scales”; they have been replaced by “yellow ...

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