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"Cambridge Interiors:  Nation and Irony in Lowell's Harvard Commemoration Ode"
Martin Griffin, Ph.D., Department of English, UCLA
November 7, 2002

The critical consensus on the so-called "Fireside" or "Schoolroom" poets of the mid-nineteenth century is that they were, for the most part, technicians of conventional popular verse who never challenged their limitations. In this reading of the "Harvard Commemoration Ode," however, James Russell Lowell's long meditation on the meanings and losses of the Civil War, I take a second look at the question of irredeemable superficiality.

Lowell's poem, first unveiled at a commemorative ceremony at Harvard College on July 21, 1865, is troubled by elements that undermine any assumption that it's a text of pure public rhetoric. Lowell's attempt to understand the political nature of death and sacrifice, and the Ode's heroic-pessimistic view of human possibility in a desacralized world, suggest a more ambiguous vision than the standard invocation of Union moral superiority that is the usual interpretation of the poem.

The poem has, I argue, "interiors" as well as surfaces. At its best, the Commemoration Ode is an ironic elegy that attempts a complex task of celebrating victory in war while refusing to avoid the implications of individual and community bereavement and loss.