Southern Relations: With Robert Lowell at Timrod’s Grave David Havird (bio) In April 1974 Robert Lowell read at the University of South Carolina. This wasn’t Lowell’s first visit to the state in April. In 1947, according to Paul Mariani, “At Easter . . . he was in Charleston, South Carolina, ‘admiring the old houses,’ and visiting Fort Sumter, ‘horrified by the flat, coastal desert that surrounds it.’” (Mariani, in Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell, quotes from the poet’s letter to his aunt Sarah Winslow.) It was, of course, the Rebel bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861 that started the Civil War, and it was the Union assault on Fort Wagner, on nearby Morris Island, in 1863, by a “bell-cheeked Negro infantry” led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (whose sister married a Lowell) that Lowell commemorates in “For the Union Dead.” If “St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief,” the bronze monument depicting Colonel Shaw and the African American 54th Massachusetts Infantry, links Boston Common to Charleston Harbor, perhaps (or so Mariani implies) the “parking spaces,” which “luxuriate like . . . sand-piles in the heart of Boston” brought to Lowell’s mind the sandy spit where Fort Wagner stood and “half the regiment,” after the unsuccessful assault, lay dead—to be interred in a mass grave, a “ditch,” by the victorious Confederates. According to the historian Thomas J. Brown, at least some of the Confederate casualties repose in Charleston’s Magnolia Cemetery, the decoration of whose graves, among other Confederate veterans’ graves, in 1866 occasioned an “Ode” by Henry Timrod, the unofficial poet laureate of the Confederacy. Lowell’s visit to South Carolina in 1974 culminated in a pilgrimage to Timrod’s grave [End Page 578] in a churchyard in downtown Columbia across the street from the Capitol. If you want to picture Lowell as he looked while on that pilgrimage, find in Ian Hamilton’s 1982 biography of the poet the 1974 photo of Lowell with his almost shoulder-length, scraggly gray hair—he’s wearing a dark suit and a knit tie with horizontal stripes. You can’t see on his feet the Clarks sand suede wallabees, which amused my mother, who mistakenly recognized them as Hush Puppies. In her judgment these would have gone all right with the red chamois-cloth shirt and baggy brown cords that Lowell had on at James Dickey’s house the previous morning, but not with a suit, much less a dark blue suit. Then, however, he’d kept on his bedroom slippers—playing Auden, Maxine Dickey archly observed. Anyway, there Lowell is on the ground, knee up, hands on the weedy-looking grass, posing in front of his cousin Harriet Winslow’s headstone in Washington, DC. Lowell’s three-day visit to Columbia was sponsored by the university’s student union, and I (as the student who invited him) played host. I didn’t know it when we made that culminating pilgrimage, but thanks to Brown—his Civil War Canon: Sites of Confederate Memory in South Carolina (2015)—I now know, 40 years later, that “Timrod’s grave was an important symbolic site in the struggle over the postwar direction of the white South.” I’ve also learned from Brown that Lowell “had theatrically fallen to his knees before the landmark,” the granite boulder marking Timrod’s grave. I think, Why not? No doubt, as Kay Redfield Jamison asserts (in Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire), “New England was critical to how Lowell came to be.” All the same, Lowell’s Southern relations were extensive—a matter of blood as well as friendship and marriage. As familial connections deeply rooted in North Carolina may have inspired his diversion to Fort Sumter, perhaps his relationship with the Southern poets who were his mentors piqued an interest in Timrod. Without a doubt, my Southern heritage had predisposed me to take an interest in “sites of Confederate memory.” For me as a son of [End Page 579] the South and a 21-year-old aspiring poet, the pilgrimage to Timrod’s grave with my favorite poet—with Robert Lowell, this self-conscious Bostonian (whose maternal grandmother hailed from the...
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Dec 6, 2018
Ane Turner Johnson 
Open Access