- Home
- Castings
Castings
Monuments and Monumentality in Poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney
by Guy Rotella
In Castings, Guy Rotella examines the work of five important poets who have engaged in that effort: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney. Considering their wider careers as well as particular poems--including Bishop's "The Monument," Lowell's "For the Union Dead," Merrill's "Bronze," Walcott's "The Sea Is History," and Heaney's "In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge"--Rotella argues that these writers are less concerned with defending or condemning monuments than with pursuing ancient and current debates about the political, aesthetic, and broadly cultural issues that monuments condense. Among these concerns are the competing claims of life and art, persistence and change, meaning and meaninglessness, the self and society, and the governing and the governed.
Original and provocative, Rotella's readings will make us ponder how the human impulse to build to last, to reify our culturally derived and ideologically driven faiths, might coexist with those other creeds of our place and time: relativism, multiculuralism, and diversity.
Guy Rotella is professor of English at Northeastern University. He is the author of Reading and Writing Nature: The Poetry of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop and editor of the anthology Critical Essays on James Merrill.
Brilliantly argued, and written with an elegance that comes close to the poetic in its sensitive, subtly playful responsiveness to the language of the texts he treats, Guy Rotella's new book deserves a wide audience. His subject is poems about monuments--and the poem as monument--in the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney. But he's also interested in the complex concept and fate of the monument (and of monumentalism in general) in the postmodern era, and what he gives us is a view of postmodern history--a view of it, that is, from inside the poems he discusses--and of the ways in which they respond to and are themselves affected by that history, as well as by our culture's skewed and tangled efforts to memorialize.
--Robert Kern
. . . the book presents a broad, sophisticated, and engaging account of postmodern aesthetics and politics; it also includes comprehensive and sensitive close readings of specific poems, readings that point outward to the larger cultural issues with which the book is concerned. Highly recommended.
--Choice
Rotella's fluid mastery of literary history and theory allows him to dispense with jargon, and his skillful mix of biography, history, and close reading provides an entirely convincing analysis of each poet's attitude toward the idea of the monumental in the practice of his or her art.
--Brett Millier
Also of Interest
