SOURCE: "'One Gallant Rush': The Writing of Robert Lowell's 'For the Union Dead,'" in New England Quarterly, Vol. LXVII, No. 1, March, 1994, pp. 30-45.

In the following essay, Doreski traces the creative evolution of "For the Union Dead" and offers alternative interpretations. According to Doreski, the poem "centers not in its public language of history and heroism, as some critics would have it, but in its tropes of memory and psychological alienation."

In 1969 Robert Lowell drafted a statement on his poem "For the Union Dead" to be included in an anthology edited by Whit Burnett and entitled This is My Best. Each poet was to select the most outstanding poem from his or her own work and then explain that choice. Though Lowell hedged on declaring "For the Union Dead" his best poem, in choosing it for the collection he confirmed what many of his readers had felt...