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?”
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?”
