Whether looming over public squares or dotting old battlefields,
monuments certify a culture's present by securing its past and
pledging its future. They embody exemplary persons or events and
the shared ideals they stood for, prompting an obligation to keep
those ideals standing now and forever. But monuments also
exaggerate the staying power of civilizations and of art. In the
second half of the twentieth century, postmodern critics often
decried monuments not only for their pretensions and stiffness but
also for their supposed role in perpetuating oppressive cultural
conventions. Even so, many artists and thinkers of the same period
tried to reimagine monuments in ways that were humbler and more
provisional but still culturally confirming.
In "Castings," Guy Rotella examines the work of five important
poets who have engaged in that effort: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert
Lowell, James Merrill, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney.
Considering their wider careers as well as particular
poems--including Bishop's "The Monument," Lowell's "For the Union
Dead," Merrill's "Bronze," Walcott's "The Sea Is History," and
Heaney's "In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge"--Rotella argues that these
writers are less concerned with defending or condemning monuments
than with pursuing ancient and current debates about the political,
aesthetic, and broadly cultural issues that monuments condense.
Among these concerns are the competing claims of life and art,
persistence and change, meaning and meaninglessness, the self and
society, and the governing and the governed.
Original and provocative, Rotella's readings will make us ponder
how the human impulse to build to last, to reify our culturally
derived and ideologically driven faiths, might coexist with those
other creeds of our place and time: relativism, multiculuralism,
and diversity.
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