ABSTRACT
Introducing “For the Union Dead” on the Boston Common in June 1960, Lowell is reported to have said, “We have emerged from the monumental age.”1 Combined with the poem’s preference for the horrible truth of the lives and deaths of the men of the massachusetts 54th over the idealized presentation of their wholeness in the St. Gaudens relief, lowell’s introduction encourages numerous readers to view “For the Union Dead” as a decidedly anti-monumental poem. Alan Williamson describes the poems “dislike of monumentals” and its “fear that abstract images will too effectively distance unpleasant realities.”2 Michael North finds in the poem a pattern common in Lowell’s poetry wherein “some ideal image is confronted with the realities of a sinful world,” that may indicate the “public” to be equivalent to “the false, the meretricious, the propagandistic.”3 Paul Breslin argues that the Mosler safe becomes the poem’s central monument, so Lowell can expose the blatantly ideological premises of all monuments.4
