Beschreibung:

THE WORKING PAPERS FOR HIS IMPORTANT POEM 'FALL 1961', comprising the autograph draft in pencil with additions and revisions in ink and six successive typescript versions mostly with autograph revisions preserving unused readings, 7 pages, quarto, the final two typescripts with typed name and address '15 W 67 NYC', numbered in pencil 1-7, unbound, 1961 [First typescript, beginning] Tick tock back and forth, back and forth the orange and blue swin[g]ing Oriole's nest back and forth, back and forth the swinging of the orange and blue ambassadorial face of the moon My point of rest A father's no shield for his child my child stands behind me I can't stand behind her [Final printed version, extracts] Back and forth, back and forth goes the tock, tock, tock of the orange, bland, ambassadorial face of the moon on the grandfather clock... A father's no shield for his child. We are a lot of wild spiders crying together, but without tears... Back and forth! Back and forth, back and forth -- my one point of rest is the orange and black oriole's swinging nest! 'FALL 1961' IS LOWELL'S MAJOR COLD WAR POEM OF THE KENNEDY YEARS. THE PRESENT PAPERS REVEAL THE COMPOSITIONAL PROCESS FROM ITS CONCEPTION TO THE FINAL VERSION, with numerous reconsidered and unrecorded readings and re-castings - the fine use of 'ambassadorial', for instance, does not appear in the draft - and they retain passages that did not reach the final version. Published in his acclaimed collection, For the Union Dead, 1965, the poem crystallized the sense of nuclear fear and paranoia in the West during the Cold War, 'the defining horror of the age.' Lowell was a noted pacifist poet who consistently opposed militarism in war, served in prison as a conscientious objector, denounced the Vietnam War, was a major critic in writing of government policy, attended anti-war rallies and deplored nuclear weapons. The context of the poem is the year 1961 when 'the Cold War grew warmer by degree:' the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by the U.S.; the erecting of the Berlin War; Soviet and U.S. tanks confronting one another at the Friedrichstrasse crossing point; the Soviet Union ending its three-year moratorium on nuclear testing; the U.S. resuming underground testing; and the 'Sky II Shield' simulating a U.S. reaction to a Soviet attack. This led to the nuclear face-down crisis known as the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year, the closest the world has come to a nuclear war. Lowell himself wrote, at about the same time that he was composing 'Fall 1961', in the Partisan Review: 'No nation should possess, or retaliate with its bombs. I believe we should rather die than drop our own bombs. Every man belongs to his nation and to the world. He can only, as things are, belong to the world by belonging to his own nation. Yet the sovereign nations, despite their feverish last minute existence, are really obsolete. They imperil the lives that they are credited to protect.' Four years later he added: 'We are in danger of imperceptibly becoming an explosive and suddenly chauvinistic nation, and may even be drifting our way to the last nuclear ruin.' In a letter to Elizabeth Bishop of 3 October [1961] Lowell noted: '...there's just a queer, half-apocalyptic, nuclear feeling in the air, as tho nations had died and were now anachronistic, yet in their anarchic death-throes would live on for ages troubling us, threatening the likelihood of life continuing. I guess this is my personal, eccentric impression, but things are very queer, as if one's clothes were full of holes!' In reply, Elizabeth Bishop commented on 'Fall 1961': 'Your poem is haunting me - I find I have it almost memorized - We had a clock that had a ship that rocked back and forth, and another one that showed something moving in the window of a house on a green hill - I always thought it was shaking out the sheets in the bedroom. "Radiant with terror" - but best of all, I think, are the old sayings used in the ghastly new context.' Micha