Robert Lowell's Imitations and the Cold War

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

Robert Lowell's Imitations and the Cold War argues that Lowellâs 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), Lowellâs book-length collection of translational adaptations, by demonstrating how imitation shadows Lowellâs work from his earliest collections, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Wearyâs 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 Carlisleâs anthology, Poets on Street Corners (1967).

Simon Van Schalkwyk excavates the imitational substrate undergirding and informing Lowellâs compositional method and poetic imagination throughout the course of his career. In so doing, he shows how imitation enacts, at the level of form, Lowellâs 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 containmentâs dualities, porosities, leakages, and contaminants are most clearly displayed, Lowellâs imitations simultaneously challenge and develop our understanding of confessionâs presumably strict preoccupation with the personal, regional and national frameworks through which Lowell has commonly been understood.