Thursday 11/18: Public Memorials – the Civil War and otherwise
Zoom link for tonight's 6pm class can be found here. If you are prompted for a passcode, it is 105838.
Zoom recording of this class can be found here.
Read/watch for class:
Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead” (1964)
Allen Tate, “Ode to the Confederate Dead” (1937)
Kriston Capps, “Kehinde Wiley’s Anti-Confederate Memorial,” The New Yorker, December 24, 2019.
Prepare/organize for class:
Consider: Is Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War a memorial? Why or why not?
Consider for Class: Both Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead and his mentor Allen Tate’s Ode for the Confederate Dead have definite settings. One is a memorial, the other a graveyard. One is in the snow of winter, the other in the leaf fall of autumn. One sprawls over an entire city’s downtown area, the other is more localized to the cemetery itself. In each case the poet is deliberately framing the way soldiers are memorialized to convey a message not only about the soldiers themselves, but about the war they fought, the history they inhabit, and most importantly the power that the artist has in framing perspective. How does the choice of setting exemplify differing perspectives between these two poems? How do the poet’s choices reveal their perspectives on the act of memorialization? Are the poets more in agreement or disagreement about how soldiers should be memorialized?