page_title: For the Union Dead
section_title: "For the Union Dead" (poem)
hierarchical_section_title: For the Union Dead / "For the Union Dead" (poem)
caption_attribution_description: English: Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, Boston Common, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Sculpture created 1884-1887 by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), with memorial architecture by Stanford White. I took this photograph.
context_page_description: For the Union Dead is a book of poems by Robert Lowell that was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1964. It was Lowell's sixth book.
  Notable poems from the collection include "Beyond the Alps'", "Water," "The Old Flame," "The Public Garden" and the title poem, which is one of Lowell's best-known poems.
context_section_description: Lowell originally wrote the poem "For the Union Dead" for the Boston Arts Festival in 1960 where he first read it in public. The title refers to the 1928 poem "Ode to the Confederate Dead", by Lowell's former teacher and mentor Allen Tate. At the 1960 festival, Lowell said, "Writing is neither transport nor a technique. My own owes everything to a few of our poets who have tried to write directly about what mattered to them, and yet to keep faith with their calling's tricky, specialized, unpopular possibilities for good workmanship. When I finished Life Studies, I was left hanging on a question mark. I don't know whether it is a deathrope or a lifeline."
  The setting of "For the Union Dead" is the Boston Common, near the well-known Robert Gould Shaw Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. In the poem, Lowell's visit to the park, which is being excavated to provide an underground car park, conjures up a series of associations. First, watching the construction of the garage beneath the Common makes him think about his childhood and how Boston had changed; in particular, the South Boston Aquarium, that he'd visited as a child, had been demolished a few years before, in 1954. This leads him to think about the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial and the history associated with the memorial, specifically, the story of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry that he led during the Civil War. Finally, Lowell thinks of the then-controversial Civil Rights Movement and the images of the integration of black and white school-children that Lowell had recently seen on television.
  The final lines of the poem, which read, "The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,/ giant finned cars nose forward like fish;/ a savage servility/ slides by on grease" are particularly well known for their rather dark description of the large American cars that were popular at the time, evoking a corrupted consumer society without heroism.
caption: Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment in Boston that figures prominently in Lowell's poem "For the Union Dead"
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