Abstract

Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead evinces an anxiety over Puritanism that is bound to the sociological conditions of American Cold War culture. His collection envisions an America in which the old Calvinist binary of elect (the few chosen by God for salvation) and preterite (those left behind—everybody else) has imploded under Cold War threats of nuclear annihilation, thus reconfiguring the two driving concepts behind the Puritans' "errand" into the New World: the apocalypse and salvation. Lowell suggests that the Puritan desire for salvation has developed into a secular pursuit of material wealth, and that this pursuit, in turn, has led to a technocratic nuclear tension. With grim irony, For the Union Dead claims that America's capitalist pursuit of wealth and technology to enact its own election and salvation has actually resulted in national preterition. Few critics have considered Lowell's engagement with Puritanism and Calvinism, but my essay addresses this gap in scholarship and attempts to initiate a dialogue on Puritanism as an important trope in post-World War II American literature.

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