Robert Lowell both resisted and embraced the mantle of public poet. One way of tracking this ambivalence in Lowell’s poetics is by following the developments in his war poems. Though Lowell, along with Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill, is credited with pivoting poetry from the mannered verse culture of the 1950s to the autobiographical experiments of the 1960s, more recent appraisals of Lowell find a complicated grappling with whiteness and with overlapping historical and personal selves. The events of Lowell’s biography provide one rich context for thinking about his poetry’s treatment of war. Yet war is not only the near-constant background for Lowell’s life and the theater for his political engagement. It is also a spur to Lowell’s incessant revision of his poetic methods and commitments to verse forms. Focusing on war helps to bring Lowell’s prosodic changes into relief.

Due in part to Claudia Rankine’s invocation of Robert Lowell’s poetry in Citizen: An American Lyric (2015), readers have begun to stress the poet’s status as the representative “of a (mostly white, mostly male) post-Romantic lyric tradition,” as Kamran Javadizadeh puts it. Rankine’s presentation of Lowell as a racial artist invites criticism not only to acknowledge racist dimensions of his poetics, but also to consider Lowell’s unusual interest in exploring the emotional contours of his own concept of whiteness. This chapter explores how forms of entitlement, anxiety, and desirous identification with non-white others coexist alongside Lowell’s attempts to reckon with the white supremacist undercurrents that shaped his family history, his social formation, and his earliest articulations of self. This complex coexistence generates a striking pattern in Lowell’s literary configurations of whiteness in terms of suspended states of liminal awareness: confusion, shadowy recollection, and the vague annunciations of dreams.