Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

208The Poetry of Robert Lowell“Concord, you loved the heartWithout a body.”(LU, 13)Lowell’s version of Madame Sosostris diagnoses current debacles asarising from Emersonian sentiment, a religion of the heart that repudiatedor repressed the body and therefore could not cope with the alltoo-bodilyworld when it had to. Implicit in his attack on Emerson’sotherworldly idealism, however, is Lowell’s attack on himself. Hisconscientious objection to the Second World War, for which he serveda jail sentence, is the sort of pacifist idealism or appeasement that abetsviolence by creating a vacuum where it can rage unchecked. His leapsfor the sublime, as much as Emerson’s, are implicated in the oppressiverealities they seek to transcend.Lowell airs this traditional criticism of Emerson only to retract itpartially at the end of his poem. Here Emerson appears as the Luciferof Concord again, the Promethean light bringer, more lion heartedthan angel-hearted, more fearsome revolutionary scaring off traditionalspirits than otherworldly Christian unable to repel the real world’s evil.In fact he resembles the young, apocalyptic Lowell himself, conductinga last judgment of dead townspeople with Jehovah-like ferocity:In the dry winds of noon,Ralph Waldo Emerson,Judging the peaceful deadOf Concord, takes the sunFrom every gravestone. SoonAngels will fear to treadOn that dead Lion’s bones,In their huge, unhewn hide.(LU, 14)Presumably the dead lion is Emerson, the angels Emerson’s admirerswho fear to tread on his grave out of sanctimonious respect. Or theycould be those squeamish traditionalists that Emerson, and Lowell,too, in his anarchistic moods, rebuked or offended.Lowell’s ambivalence toward Emerson jibed with his ambivalencetoward himself, America, and the sublime. During his last decadehe again condemned the American sublime for threatening to turn