A close friend writes: "Here is something I ran across in the new Collected Poems of Robert Lowell (sorry, I know poetry isn't your thing). It's in a note to The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, a famous poem in his first collection. In an interview from 1963, Lowell said, 'If I have an image for [America], it would be taken from Melville's Moby Dick: the fanatical idealist who brings the world down in ruin through some sort of simplicity of mind.' Now who does that remind you of?"
Katrina vanden Heuvel
A close friend writes: “Here is something I ran across in the new Collected Poems of Robert Lowell (sorry, I know poetry isn’t your thing). It’s in a note to The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, a famous poem in his first collection. In an interview from 1963, Lowell said, ‘If I have an image for [America], it would be taken from Melville’s Moby Dick: the fanatical idealist who brings the world down in ruin through some sort of simplicity of mind.’ Now who does that remind you of?”
Katrina vanden HeuvelTwitterKatrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of The Nation, America’s leading source of progressive politics and culture. She served as editor of the magazine from 1995 to 2019.