SOURCE: "War and Redemption in Land of Unlikeness," in Southern Humanities Review, Vol. XXVIII, No. 1, Winter, 1994, pp. 1-14.

In the following essay, Doreski explores Lowell's effort to reconcile his aesthetic attraction to warfare and moral objection to the Second World War in the poetry of Land of Unlikeness.

In 1943, Robert Lowell, disturbed by the Allied bombing of German cities and facing induction, sent a "declaration of conscience" to President Roosevelt and the local draft board. Lowell declared himself unalterably opposed not to war itself but to the conduct of this war, particularly to the bombing of civilian populations and to the intransigence of the Allied requirement of unconditional surrender, which he felt would lead (as Versailles had) to an untenable post-war situation:

The war has entered on an unforeseen phase: one that can by no possible extension of the meaning of the words be called defensive. By demanding...