ABSTRACT

It is difficult to come third in this series, and particularly difficult to follow someone who has theorized the position of third-in-a-series as both that of maximum insight, and that in which the observer is most likely to blunder, mistaking her particular outlook for an objective viewpoint. Imagine my relief, then, at discovering that what we had in front of us was not the forbidding ratio “One Poem, Three Readers,” but at least three and possibly four poems (depending on how you count them). The poem we have been examining, “For the Union Dead,” was titled “Colonel Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th” in its first incarnation—an occasional poem delivered to thunderous applause at the Boston Fine Arts Festival in June 1960. The poem was then tipped into the paperback edition of Life Studies as the last poem in that series, and published on its own under its current title in The Atlantic Magazine, before it took its more familiar place as the final poem in the eponymous volume For the Union Dead. 1