Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell by Joan Romano Shifflett

Author:Joan Romano Shifflett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2020-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

6

The 1960s

“The Times They Are A-Changin’”

THE SWINGING SIXTIES

An escalation from the nation’s turmoil of the 1950s, the 1960s marked a period of great change and shifting consciousness for America and for the world. The Cold War raged on, heightened by the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban missile crisis, and the highly controversial war in Vietnam. As millions of children from the post–World War II baby boom entered young adulthood, the decade became characterized by revolutionary thought and opposition to conservatism. The civil rights movement, supported by President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and President Lyndon B. Johnson, made great strides for African Americans and women via the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and contentious debate and protest, particularly on college campuses, became commonplace for a generation that craved change. A far cry from what Lowell described in “Memories of West Street and Lepke” as the “tranquilized Fifties,” many Americans identified this decade as the “Swinging Sixties,” a time that continued to inspire artists—Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell among them—in all genres to respond to the incendiary world events. Thrust into the limelight due to notable success in American letters, Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell served as public spokesmen in the 1960s, and national concerns took shape in their poetry, fiction, and nonfiction alike.

By this point, as Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell were well-established authors writing the “New American Poetry” that defined the second half of the century, the 1960s brought prolific literary achievements for each author. Warren published several excellent books of poetry, including You, Emperors, and Others: Poems, 1957–1960 (1960); Selected Poems: New and Old, 1923–1966 (1966); Incarnations: Poems, 1966–1968 (1968); and one of his masterpieces, Audubon: A Vision (1969), in addition to two influential nonfiction works, The Legacy of the Civil War (1961) and Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965), and several other fiction and nonfiction works. After nine years without publishing any new books of poetry, Jarrell penned his best, The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960) and The Lost World (1965), and also published his noteworthy book of essays A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962), along with some translations, before his untimely death in 1965. After Lowell’s watershed Life Studies in 1959, he followed with several books of translated poems (1961 and 1969) as well as his first and only play, The Old Glory (1965), and two books of poetry, For the Union Dead (1964) and Near the Ocean (1967). Though each of these works is deserving of a comprehensive analysis, for the purposes of this narrative, this chapter will focus on the ways in which these authors’ work and lives continued to intersect in this decade.

One thing that brought Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell together since their days at Vanderbilt was a shared devotion to the impact of history, past and present, on American society. In light of their increasing political activity in the 1960s and beyond, it is enriching to consider the political endeavors of these writers, especially seeing how these roles shaped the content and aesthetics of their poetry.

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