Translation and the Transatlantic Frontier: Robert Lowell's Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (1946).

Robert Lowell's earliest volumes,Land of Unlikeness(1944) andLord Weary's Castle(1946), anticipate William Appleman Williams’ (1973) argument that America exploited the myth of the frontier in order to execute and authorize policies of transatlantic expansion in the post-war and Cold War years. InLand of Unlikeness, Lowell's conscious alignment with a form of Southernist politic, curiously inflected by Max Weber's remarks on the kinship between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, reinforces his scathing critique of the industrial, commercial, and martial excesses of the American North.Lord Weary's Castle, by contrast, is less explicitly censorious of America's expansionist impulses. Lowell's liberal translation of a variety of cultural and poetic resources derived from a wide range of European inter-texts, however, serves to display the complex interests and potential consequences of an American imperium deeply invested in laying claim to the political, cultural, and poetic resources of a trans-Atlantic frontier. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]