“History” is a title fraught with pitfalls. There is, for starters, the ambiguity inherent in the word: there are nine entries listed in the OED, three of which are of primary importance here. “A relation of events” is the first; “A written account constituting a continuous methodical record, in temporal order, of important or public events” is the second; “the totality of past events in general and the course of events or human affairs” is the third. “History” is a document, the content of that document and a great abstract totality. Reflecting this dilemma is the ambiguity of all these poetic titles: is “story” a label, a self-identification, or rather the statement of a subject of meditation? I hope to show that for Robert Lowell's "History" it is both; and that his “History” appeals to all three senses of the OED, flouting them all. Lowell's 366 sonnets are arranged chronologically by subject and range from the creation of the world to the year of their own publication; although not inherently "methodical", they nevertheless attempt to offer a "continuous record" of the intellectual heritage and political history of Europe. They are not limited to the past, however, and as Lowell's timeline reaches his time, the poems not only turn inward, autobiographic and confessional, but also attempt to become themselves "a relationship of [public] events”. In other words, they strive to become primary sources, documents of a history in which their author was deeply involved. Finally, a meditation on "history" in the third sense, "the totality of past events", is formally anchored in the sequence, in the style of the individual poems and in their structure as a whole. I hope to treat seriously Lowell's attempt to "write history" in all these senses, and to consider his project in relation to the work of Michel de Certeau, Hayden White, and other theorists of narrative and history , but I also hope to honor the poems as poems, to account for the effect of genre and aesthetics on the historiographical operation. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Taking Lowell's historiography seriously does not mean viewing it as conventional, normative, or sanctioned. He writes outside of “Certeau’s aggregation which categorizes the writer’s I within the “we” of a collective work” (64). It evolves freely among texts with very diverse truth values: myth, literary texts, conventional history, confession. He considers fictional and aesthetic texts to be as authoritative as their nonfictional counterparts, if not more (“The real Charles, written by Titian, never lived” [“Charles V by Titian” 460]). More importantly, although history – as Hayden White and the OED tell us – is a narrative form, Lowell chose as his medium for historiography the most lyrical genre, the sonnet sequence. However, as we will see, Lowell's sonnets often oppose the lyrical mode, even the violent one. “The purpose of lyrics, as a genre,” writes Helen Vendler, “is to represent an inner life in such a way that it can be assumed by others... Social transactions as such cannot take place in the words as they do. in the story or drama” (xi). Bakhtin surely means something like this in his famous and controversial discussion of "poetry": "Poetic style is by convention suspended from any mutual interaction with aforeign speech, to any allusion to a foreign speech” (285). And yet the sonnets of "History" are filled with foreign speeches, translations, multiple voices and radical changes of diction, and they take as their subject not only "an inner life", but rather a life from which of the categories of “inner life” and “outer life” has disappeared; there is, for Lowell, no private sphere isolated from the public, and the interiority of these poems is streaked with consciousness and vulnerability to the events of history. They are, no offense to Vendler, full of social transactions. (Perhaps this is why Vendler is so resistant to "History", finding the sequence "repulsive".) Lowell's mercurial diction can be seen in the pair of sonnets about Hannibal, the first of which, "Roman disaster at Trebia", is among the most conventional - and also the most beautiful - sonnets in the collection: The dawn of a bad day whitens the heights. The camp wakes up. Below, the river roars and rolls, and light Numidian horsemen water their horses everywhere, the clear and sharp sounds of the trumpets Although warned by Scipio and the lying omens, the Trebia in flood, the rain pouring, the consul Sempronius, proud of his new glory, has. raised the battle ax, he marches his lictors A dark flamboyance reddens the dull sky, the Gallic villages smolder in the distance, the hysterical cry of an elephant... There, at the foot of. a bridge, with his back to the arch, Hannibal listens, pensive and glorious, to the dead footsteps of the advancing Roman legions. (439) This is a successful, if conventional, work of historical fiction. He does not attempt – as Lowell almost never does (he claims only once: “I want to write this without style or feeling” [“Abstraction” 566]) – to achieve objectivity; from the first line, and even from the title, our perspective is Roman, European. In a truly lyrical way, the poem takes a moment of action - the Roman legions advancing on the bridge - and imbues it with the drama of a battle already decided: thus the day is "sick", the sky "dull" with "a dark flamboyance", Hannibal "glorifying", the wanderer of the Romans "dead". The scene is permeated with fear as to its outcome, the defeat of Sempronius in Hannibal's ambush. The first approach of the poem is to provide details lost in conventional historiography: “The Gallic villages brood on the horizon, the hysterical cry of an elephant” and it seems to me that this is a word in the conventional sense. of the term, evolving not through the story but through the description, investing the details with the force of an ellidized and condensed discursivity It is not, in Vendler's terms, "the narrative continuity specific to. the epic", but rather of the "insight specific to the lyric" (3). The diction of the poem is lofty and dark; it achieves a tone of dread and elegy appropriate to its subject. The story to which the poem alludes is not a triumphal one, but it is, in a sense, heroic: the doomed soldiers march blindly toward death, the savior Scipio waits in the wings. It is a poem which claims a non-ironic identification with the story it dramatizes and which reflects the true feelings of the audience. Its companion, "Hannibal 2. The Life", is very different: throw Hannibal on the scale, how many kilos does the first captain weigh? It was he who found the plains of Africa too small and the elephants of Ethiopia a unique species. He climbed the Pyrenees, the snow, the Alps - nature blocked his way, he dug mountains... Italy now belongs to him. “I think nothing is done until Rome breaks and my standards fly over the Forum.” What a figure for a painter; look, he's one-eyed. Glory? Heis defeated like the others, serves a little tyrant by farting drunken meals and dies by poisoning himself... Go, Fool, cross the Alps, the Tiber - be a purple stain for the schoolchildren and their theme of declamation. (439) As a performance, this shares very little with Hannibal's first sonnet. The long and elegant syntax of the previous poem is broken down into short, sardonic sentences tinged with irony. High diction is reduced to a tragic carnivalesque: “a little tyrant farting drunken meals”. The poem is much less lyrical, without any details from the first sonnet; instead of lyrically conveying the richness of a single moment, Lowell here takes a telescopic view of Hannibal's life, expressing his accomplishments in discursive, almost prose lines. Most significant, however, is the vision of history presented in the last five lines. The “glorification” of Hannibal is revealed here in all its vanity, but this vanity does not seem particular to his story, but rather constitutive of the great monotony of history: “He is defeated like the others”. Indeed, the idea of ​​“glory” or “fame” is deflated; the great heroes of history are only schoolboy enthusiasms; the whole effort at historical knowledge is somehow childish, pathetic: “Go, fool, cross the Alps, the Tiber - be a purple stain for schoolchildren and their theme of declamation. Hannibal's real defeat lies less in his biographical enslavement than in his easy academic digestion; the passion and heroism of the story are made ridiculous, "a purple stain for schoolchildren." criticized by an equally sincere cynicism about the futility of human achievements; there is something bitter in the mature atheism of this former Catholic convert. And Lowell's meditations on history revolve around a great melancholy, an awareness of the imperfections of memory: looking at the ruins of Rome, Lowell writes, "more things have been lost to chance and time than 'Hannibal or Caesar could not consume it' ("Rome in the Sixteenth Century" 448). The forgetting of forgetting is, for Lowell, more voracious than even the greatest and most destructive human ambition. This awareness of the ease with which even the greatest achievements pass into oblivion gives Lowell's own attempts to record and bear witness to a particular urgency. A disproportionate amount of space is given to the present: Lowell reaches the twentieth century halfway through the volume. Many of these sonnets are explicitly autobiographical, but even at their most confessional, Lowell is deeply concerned with the public movements of history. Lowell was more "public" than any modern poet, and he lived a life of political engagement: as a conscientious objector during World War II, and then as a protester against the Vietnam War, he made headlines. It is, as Helen Vendler acknowledged, a given of his life: born into a prominent, if financially declining, Boston Brahmin family, a place in public history was part of Lowell's heritage. Through the confessional poems, Lowell demonstrates an awareness of his place in this public history, as well as his visibility and influence as a public figure. One of the most haunting poems in “History” meditates on the strange process by which it itself became “historical.” Here is "Image in La vie littéraire, un album": A magazine photo, before I was me, or my books - a listener... A cheekbone gives me gumballs; too much live hair. My wife surprised by this flaming eye, an egg boiled in the tension of this hand, my untied shoelaces write my name in the dust... I lean against the tree and sharpen the bromidesto serve our great master builder, the New Critic, who loved writing better than ourselves... At that time, if I pressed my ear to the ground, I heard the growl of the bass of Hiroshima . In the Scrapbook, we only find the old classics: one foot in the grave, two fingers in life. Who would rather be his listed correspondents than the Keats boy spitting blood to have time to breathe. (524)To understand the force of autobiography in "History", it may be useful to consider Hayden White's striking reflection on the non-narrativity of the Annals of St. Gall: Now, the capacity to envisage a set of events as belonging to History The same order of meaning requires a metaphysical principle allowing difference to be translated into similarity. In other words, there must be a “subject” common to all the referents of the different sentences which record the events as having occurred. If such a subject exists, it is the “Lord” whose “years” are treated as manifestations of his power to bring about the events that occur there. The subject of the story therefore does not exist in time and therefore cannot function as the subject of a story. Does it follow that for there to be a narrative there must be an equivalent of the Lord, a sacred one with the authority and power of the Lord, existing in time? If so, what could be such an equivalent? (16) A partial answer to White's final question is interestingly suggested in the autobiography: a "metaphysical principle" that "exists in time" is the notion of a unified subjectivity - developing and growing, of course , but possessing a fundamental identity that transcends all temporal change. For the most conventional of Lowell's confessional sonnets, the assumption of a unified self seems largely serene, and his tales of love, family, and illness parade under this banner. But Lowell was also acutely aware of the fragility of the self: subject to debilitating manic depression, he was forced to realize how fractured "identity" is and how quickly one can alienate oneself. at work in the sonnet “Image”: “before I was me, or my books”. In fact, the photo was taken after Lowell's first major achievement: he had just won the Pulitzer Prize for "Lord Weary's Castle" (on the newspaper's front page is a photo of his first wife, the novelist Jean Stafford). The octave is strangely disjointed, its three ellipses suggesting an insoluble fragmentation. His attention shifts unpredictably, and at least one currency, “sharpening bromides,” escapes comprehension. The poet's image is just as strange: “A cheekbone gives me gumballs; / too much live hair. » It's strangely grotesque: even Lowell's face is badly arranged. The photograph presents an alienated and (especially for the older poet viewing it) image. His name, too, was somehow lost, reduced to the illegible shoelace marks in the dust. However, the deepest alienation, the poem suggests, arises from the very practice that one might consider to constitute identity, writing: “before I was me, or my books.” “My books” constitute a self distinct from “I”, but no less “true”; and they certainly constitute the identity which has a hope of survival, of becoming “a classic”. “The old people” who are the subject of the penultimate sentence of the poem represent aesthetic accomplishment, success: they become texts, “one foot in the grave, two fingers in their life”. This last word is of course a pun on the magazine the speaker is looking at; but it is not italicized and represents the texts that their lives have already become. Another guyof accomplishment - and perhaps, for Lowell, a preferable fulfillment, which he has already been denied - is represented by the "Keats boy", who spits his life for his art. Saved from the oblivion of a forgotten history, Keats represents a genius who shines all the more for his brevity; This is the name given to the book whose index is full of more obscure and older “correspondents”. I have not yet explained the first two lines of the sonnet's sesnet, which constitute the greatest oddity of the poem. These are the only lines, with the exception of the first, that occupy the past, and they move the poem from its concern with autobiography and aesthetic development to a world historical event: "at that time, if I put my ear against the earth, I heard the bass growl of Hiroshima. I read these lines as full of regret, recognizing a political commitment and passion that was lost (Lowell increasingly distanced himself from active politics following the apparent irrelevance of the Vietnam protests ). However, they are of much greater importance as representations of a movement at the heart of Lowell's sequence of sonnets and are constitutive of his theory of history. Everywhere in these poems, however private and everyday, acts - often atrocities - with world-historical consequences force themselves upon the conscience of the speaker. As the most striking example of a ubiquitous technique, in “Streamers: 1970,” Christmas streamers in London become the “streaming wedding veils” of prostitutes married for a day by Nazi officers: “After the weddings, we packed brides on planes; as they gained altitude, the girls were pushed out” (528) Although the sonnets of History are organized chronologically, they almost uniformly resist chronology; If historical consciousness is one of the constitutive characteristics of the mind exhibited in History, anachronism is the other. Sometimes this anachronism goes unmentioned, as when Lowell quotes a letter from his mother in “Clytemnestra I” (431); more often it is shockingly overt, as in "Attila/Hitler": Hitler's fingertips were apprehensive: "Who knows how long I will live?" Let's go to war. We are the barbarians, the world is near the end. Attila mounted on raw meat and greenery galloped to the massacre in his unique costume of a field mouse... (448) The juxtaposition is neither justified nor explained, and it is wrong to read it typologically. Hitler is not an achievement of Attila; rather, they both occupy a "festering smoke of garbage, old boxes, dead vermin, ashes, eggshells, youth": the final image of the poem's story. It is a vision of history which excludes all historicism of which “progress” is an unreserved part. History is a totality for Lowell, but a synchronic and not “evolutionary” history (the expression is that of White); his meditations slip between centuries without the direction of a narrative of progress, as in the octave of "Thanksgiving 1660 or 1990": When life shortens and daylight saving dies, God's couples walked in arms to the harvest house and town distilleries of Plymouth... three days they rest in peace with God and the beast.... I rejoice in Thanksgiving, from noon until evening: the young are mobile, friends of the dead leaves, bell-bottoms, bare feet, the wild hair of Christendom - the words are what stand in the way of what they say. (557) It is this fluidity that makes Lowell’s choice of genre necessary. His conception and intellectual experience of history beats the narrative, demanding the freer experience of time allowed by words. In their essential notes to, 1987.