"History" is a title fraught with dilemmas. First there is the ambiguity inherent in the word: there are nine entries listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, three of which are of primary importance here. “A relation of events” is the first; “A written narrative that constitutes a continuous methodical record, in order of time, of important or public events” is the second; “the aggregate 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 grand, abstract totality. Reflecting this dilemma is the ambiguity of all these poetic titles: is "story" a label, a self-identification, or rather the affirmation of a subject of meditation? I hope to demonstrate that for Robert Lowell's "History" it is both; and that his "Story" partakes of all three senses of the Oxford English Dictionary, ignoring them all. Lowell's 366 sonnets are organized chronologically by topic and range from the creation of the world to the year of their publication; while not inherently "methodical", they nevertheless attempt to offer a "continuous record" of Europe's intellectual heritage and political history. However, they are not limited to the past, and when Lowell's chronology reaches its time, the poems do not simply turn inward, the autobiographical, and the confessional, but also attempt to become themselves "a report of [public] events ]". In other words, they aspire 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 aggregate of past events," is formally incorporated into the sequence, style of individual poems, and their structure as a whole. I hope to treat Lowell's attempt to "write history" seriously 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 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 Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Taking Lowell's historiography seriously does not mean interpreting it as conventional, normative, or sanctioned. He writes from outside de Certeau's "aggregation that categorizes the writer's self within the 'we' of a collective work" (64). He moves freely between texts with very different truth values: myth, literary texts, conventional history, confession. He regards fictional and aesthetic texts as equally authoritative as their non-fictional counterparts, if not more so (“The real Charles, made by Titian, never lived” [“Titian's Charles V” 460]). Even more significantly, although story - as both Hayden White and the Oxford English Dictionary tell us - is a narrative form, Lowell chooses as his medium for historiography the most lyrical of genres, the sonnet sequence. As we will see, however, Lowell's sonnets often counteract, or even violate, the lyric mode. “The purpose of the lyric, as a genre,” writes Helen Vendler, “is to represent an inner life so that it can be taken up by others…[S]ocial transactions as such cannot take place in the lyric as they do in the narrative or drama" (xi). Surely Bakhtin means something like this in his famous, and notoriously contested, discussion of "poetry": "Poetic style is by convention suspended from any mutual interaction with foreign speech, from any allusion to foreign speech" (285). Yet the sonnets of "History"they are full of extraneous discourses, translations, multiple voices and radical changes of diction, and have as their subject not simply "an internal life", but rather a life from which categories of "internal" and "external" originate they disappeared; there is not, for Lowell, a private sphere isolated from the public one, and the interiority in these poems is streaked by awareness and vulnerability to the events of history. They are, pace Vendler, full of social transactions. (It is perhaps for this reason that Vendler is so resistant to "History," finding the sequence "repellent.") Lowell's mercurial diction can be seen in the pair of sonnets on Hannibal, the first of which, "Roman Disaster at the Trebia ," is one of the most conventional - and also most beautiful - sonnets of the collection: The dawn of a sick day whitens the hills. The camp wakes up. Below the river rumbles and flows, and the light Numidian horsemen water their horses; everywhere, sharp and clear blasts from the trumpeters. Although warned by Scipio and the lying wishes, by the Trebia in flood, by the pouring rain, the consul Sempronius, proud of his new glory, raised his ax for battle, and makes his lictors march. A dark splendor reddens the opaque sky, Gallic villages burn on the horizon. In the distance, the hysterical cry of an elephant... Over there, under a bridge, with his back leaning against the arch, Hannibal listens, thoughtful, exultant, to the dead step of the advancing Roman legions. (439)This is a successful, if conventional, work of historical fiction. He makes no attempt—as Lowell almost never makes (only once does he state “I want to write this without style or feeling” [“Abstraction” 566])—to achieve objectivity; from the first verse, even from the title, ours is a Roman, European perspective. In pure lyrical style, the poem captures 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 "dark" with "a gloomy lavishness”, Hannibal “glorious”, the wanderer of the Romans “dead”. The scene is filled with terror for its outcome, the defeat of Sempronius in Hannibal's ambush. The main procedure of the poem is to provide details lost in historiography conventional: "Gallic villages burn on the horizon. Far away, the hysterical cry of an elephant"; and it seems to me to be a lyric in the conventional sense of the term, which moves not through narration but through description, investing the details with the force of elliptical and condensed discursiveness. It does not attempt, in terms of Vendler, "the narrative continuity proper to the epic", but rather "the gaze proper to the lyric" (3). narrative alluded to by the poem is not triumphant, but is, in a sense, heroic: the doomed soldiers march blindly to their deaths, the savior Scipio awaits in the wings. It is a poem that claims a non-ironic identification with history which dramatizes and shows the right feelings of the audience. Very different is its companion, "Hannibal 2. The Life": throw Hannibal on the scales, how many kilos does the First Captain reach? Ethiopian elephants are a unique species. He climbed the Pyrenees, the snow, the Alps, nature blocked his path, derailed the mountains... Now Italy is his. "I think nothing will be done until Rome collapses and my banners fly in the Forum." What a painter; look, it's only one eye. The glory? He is defeated like the others, he serves some little tyrant who farts while eating drunk, and dies taking poison... Go, madman, cross the Alps, the Tiber: be a purple stain for the schoolchildren, and their theme of declamation .(439)As a performance, this has little in common with Hannibal's first sonnet. The long and elegant syntax of the previous poem is broken down into short and sardonic sentences imbued with irony. The lofty diction is lowered to a carnivalesque tragic: "some little tyrant who farts drunkards' meals." The poem is much less lyrical, without the detail of the first sonnet; instead of lyrically conveying the richness of a single moment, Lowell here takes a telescopic view of Hannibal's life, conveying his successes in discursive, almost prosaic verse. Most telling, however, is the vision of history shown in the last five lines. Hannibal's "glorying" is revealed here in all its vanity, but that vanity does not seem peculiar 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 nothing more than schoolboy enthusiasms; the whole endeavor of historical knowledge is somehow childish, pathetic: "Go, Crazy, cross the Alps, the Tiber - be a purple stain for schoolchildren, and their theme for declamation." Hannibal's real defeat is not so much his biographical slavery as his easy academic digestion; the passion and heroism of the story are made ridiculous, "a purple stain for schoolchildren". Much of the charm of Lowell's "History" lies in the disjunction between these paired sonnets: a genuine enthusiasm for history, heroism, honor, fame is questioned and criticized by an equally sincere cynicism about futility of human achievements; there is something bitter in the mature atheism of the former Catholic convert. And Lowell's meditations on history hover around a great melancholy, an awareness of the imperfections of memory: seeing the ruins of Rome, Lowell writes, "they say more was lost to chance and time than Hannibal or Caesar could consume." (“Rome in the Sixteenth Century” 448). The oblivion of oblivion is more voracious, for Lowell, than even the greatest and most destructive human ambition. This awareness of the ease with which achievements, even the greatest, pass into oblivion gives Lowell's attempts to document and bear witness a special 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 in his most confessional version Lowell is deeply interested in the public movements of history. Lowell was more "public" than any modern poet, and lived a life of political involvement: as a conscientious objector in World War II, and again as an anti-Vietnam War protester, he was front-page news. This is, as Helen Vendler acknowledged, a woman in his life: Born into a prominent Boston Brahmin family, though in financial decline, a place in public history was part of Lowell's legacy. Throughout the confessional poems Lowell demonstrates awareness of his place in public history and of his visibility and influence as a public figure. One of the most disturbing poems in "History" meditates on the mysterious process by which he himself became "historical." Here is "An image in literary life, an album": a photo from a magazine, before I was me, or my books: a listener... A cheekbone makes the gum pop out of my cheek; too many live hairs. My wife caught in that eye flames, an egg would boil in the tension of that hand, my untied shoelaces write my name in the dust... I lean against the tree, and sharpen the bromides to serve our great overseer, the New Critic, who loved writing more than ourselves... In those days, if I put my ear to the ground, I heard theHiroshima bass growl. In the Scrapbook there are only the old classics: one foot in the grave, two toes in their life. Who would rather be his indexed correspondents than the boy Keats who spits blood to have time to breathe. (524) To understand the power of autobiography in «History», it may be useful to consider Hayden White's surprising meditation on the non-narrativity of the Annals of St. Gallen: Now, the ability to imagine a set of events as belonging to the same order of meaning requires some metaphysical principle by which to translate difference into similarity. In other words, it requires a "subject" common to all the referents of the various sentences that record the events as having happened. If such a subject exists, it is the "Lord" whose "years" are treated as manifestations of His power to cause the events that occur in them. The subject of the story, therefore, does not exist in time and could therefore not function as the object of a narrative. Does it follow that for there to be a narrative, there must be some equivalent of the Lord, some sacral being endowed 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 "exist[s] in time" is the notion of a unified subjectivity - developing and growing, to be sure , but possessing a basic identity that transcends any temporal change. For the most conventional of Lowell's confessional sonnets, the assumption of a unified self seems largely serene, and his narratives of love, family, and illness parade under its banner. But Lowell was also acutely aware of the fragility of the self: prone to debilitating manic depression, he was forced to realize how fractured "identity" is and how quickly one can become alienated from oneself. Something like this alienation is at work in the "Image" sonnet: "before I was I, or my books." In fact, the photo was taken after Lowell's first great success: he had just received the Pulitzer Prize for "Lord Weary's Castle" (on the facing page of the diary is a photograph of his first wife, the writer Jean Stafford). The octave is strangely disjointed, its three ellipses suggesting an unresolvable fragmentation. His attention shifts unpredictably, and at least one coinage, “sharp bromides,” eludes comprehension. Equally strange is the image of the poet: "One cheekbone makes my cheek stick out; / too many live hairs." This is strangely grotesque: Lowell's face is also badly arranged. The photograph presents an alienating and (especially to the older poet looking on) alienating image. Even his name has been lost in a certain sense, reduced to the illegible marks of shoelaces in the dust. However, the deepest alienation, the poem suggests, arises from the very practice that one might think constitutes identity, writing: "before me it was me, or my books." "My books" constitute a self separate from the "I", but no less "true" for this; and they certainly constitute the identity that has a hope of surviving, of becoming "a classic". The "old" subjects of the poem's penultimate sentence represent aesthetic fulfillment, success: they are becoming lyrics, "one foot in the grave, two toes in their Life." This last word is, of course, a pun on the magazine the speaker looks at; but significantly it is not italicized and represents those texts that their lives have already become. Another kind of outcome - and perhaps, for Lowell, a preferable outcome, already denied - is represented by the "boy Keats", who sacrifices his life for his art. Saved from the oblivion of historyforgotten, Keats represents the genius who shines even more for his brevity; his is the name given to the book whose index is full of "weaker and longer-lived correspondents". I have yet to account for the first two lines of the sonnet's sestet, which are the poem's greatest oddity. They are the only lines, except the first, that occupy the past, and they move the poem from its concern with autobiography and aesthetic development to a world-historical event: "in those days, if I pressed my ear to the earth, I heard the Hiroshima bass growl." I read these lines as full of regret, recognizing a political commitment and passion that has been lost (Lowell has increasingly distanced himself from active politics in the wake of the apparent irrelevance of the Vietnam protests). However, they have a much more significant meaning as representations of a movement at the heart of Lowell's sonnet sequence and are constitutive of his theory of history. Everywhere in these poems, however private and quotidian their subjects, acts—often atrocities—of world-historical consequence force themselves upon the speaker's awareness. As just the most striking example of a pervasive technique, in "Streamers: 1970," Christmas streamers in London become the "floating wedding veils" of prostitutes married for a day by Nazi officers: "After the weddings they loaded the wives on planes; gained altitude, girls were pushed outdoors" (528) .Although the sonnets of History are organized chronologically, they almost uniformly resist chronology; if historical awareness is one constitutive characteristic of the mind exposed in History, anachronism is the other. Sometimes this anachronism is silent, as when Lowell quotes a letter from his mother in "Clytemnestra I" (431); more often, it is shockingly overt, as in "Attila/Hitler": Hitler had his fingertips apprehensive: "Who knows how long I will live? Let's make war. We are the barbarians, the world is near the end." Attila riding raw meat and vegetables galloped to the slaughter in his unique mouse costume... (448)The comparison is neither justified nor explained, and we are wrong to read it typologically. Hitler is not the realization of Attila; rather, they both occupy a "putrescent smoke of waste, old cans, dead vermin, ash, eggshells, youth": the concluding image of the poem's story. It is a vision of history that precludes any historicism of which "progress" is uncritically part. History is a totality for Lowell, but synchronic, not "evolving" (the phrase is White's); his meditations slide between the centuries without the direction of a narrative of progress, as in the octave of "Thanksgiving 1660 or 1990": When life shortens and daylight saving time dies, God's couples marched in arms toward the house of the harvest and the town distilleries of Plymouth... three days lie at peace with God and the animals... I enjoy from Thanksgiving noon until night: the young are mobile, friends of the thrown leaves, bell-bottoms of 'elephant, barefoot, wild hair of Christendom - words are what get in the way of what they said. (557)It is this fluidity that makes Lowell's choice of genre necessary. Its conception and intellectual experience of history defeats narrative, requiring the freer experience of time permitted by lyric. In their indispensable notes to Lowell's collection, Frank Bidart and David Gewanter suggest a precedent for understanding Lowell's story in that original American literary theorist, Emerson: "Man is explainable by nothing less than all his history... All public facts must be individualized, all private facts must be generalized. Then immediately History becomes fluid and true, and Biography profound and sublime.", 1987.