The Prophetic Voice of a War-traumatized Poet: Representation of Trauma in the Early Poetry of Robert Lowell

Abstract

This paper aims to show how Robert Lowell’s first volumes Land of Unlikeness and Lord Weary’s Castle can be examined from a trauma conceptual point of view. It attempts to explore Lowell’s representation of his traumatic experiences in his early poetry by drawing heavily on Freud’s and Cathy Caruth’s theorizations of trauma. More specifically, the paper attempts to illustrate how Lowell’s mode of representing his traumatic experience of World War II is based on witnessing and documenting the war events and how he endeavors to use this mode of representation as a strategy for transcending his war trauma. In his first two volumes, Lowell identifies with the war sufferers and becomes so much imbued with their trauma that he starts to experience a secondary trauma. However, he attempts to survive his trauma by using two alternative strategies which conform to specific psychoanalytic techniques of healing trauma. He achieves this through his spiritual resignation and alternatively through his description of the traumatic scenes of World War II in order to reassure himself that these war scenes are only a matter of the past. Keywords: War poetry; Robert Lowell; Land of Unlikeness; Lord Weary’s Castle; trauma; Freud; Cathy