“Beyond My Outrage or My Admiration”: Robert Pinsky’s An Explanation of America

  • Piotr K. Gwiazda
Chapter
Part of the Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics book series (MPCC)

Abstract

In 1964, Robert Lowell wrote a poem about the American empire at its peak. Titled “July in Washington,” the poem describes the US capital as the center of the world, a “wheel” whose spokes “touch the sore spots of the earth.” The United States has replaced the old colonial European powers, even while it competes with the Soviet Union for influence among undeveloped or politically unstable countries. But this global hegemon is not free of inner corruption. The equestrian statues that adorn the centers of traffic circles in Washington “ride like South American/liberators,” politicians arrive in the capital “bright as dimes” but “die disheveled and soft.” Throughout the poem, Lowell seems skeptical if not scornful of America’s expansionist impulse: “we wish the river had another shore/some farther range of delectable mountains.” 1 Indeed, this moment in US history already marks the beginning of its decline. The poem’s imagery suggests, in the words of one commentator, that “the new era will be one in which American civilization will sink back into the wilderness from which it sprang.” 2 In “July in Washington,” Lowell seems simultaneously entranced and repelled by the American empire; it is difficult to tell how he feels about it because throughout the poem he remains characteristically ambivalent.

Keywords

National Identity Fellow Citizen Knowledge Forum Traffic Circle American Empire 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

  1. 1.
    Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003 ), 366.Google Scholar
  2. 2.
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© Piotr K. Gwiazda 2014

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