Accountability and forgiveness: Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell

Both Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell understood public action to be a component of the poet's vocation. As both discover, however, the roles of citizen and poet cannot always be made to coincide. The clear perception of moral responsibility and the readiness for decisive action to which Pound and Lowell aspired in public life came unraveled as they attempted to define their sense of duty in their poetry. This dissertation explores two key points at which the divergence between the moral and political tasks of the poet and those of the citizen produces a particularly suggestive tension: accountability and forgiveness.;Both Pound and Lowell attempt and fail to fix the boundaries of accountability through their writing: Pound by trying to use poetry to intervene in political affairs, and Lowell by seeking to reestablish the foundations of individual judgment through the creation of a rigorously authentic language. In doing so, they engage the widespread ambivalence about the nature of individual responsibility that emerged in the years following World War II, as the need to develop mechanisms for understanding and responding to collective crimes has become increasingly urgent. Their examples not only show that accountability is a fragile concept, they also demonstrate the incoherencies generated when the writer is accountable for his acts of composition---as both Pound and Lowell were.;At the same time that I explore the instructive limitations of the concept of accountability, I also foreground the costs of presuming that the act of making literature commands forgiveness. Pound invokes beauty as a value that can rectify all disharmony; and Lowell, in order to narrate history without assuming objectivity, fashions a long poem in which multiple, contradictory voices are held together by a shared commitment to forgiveness. Their gestures toward forgiveness in the name of the universal value of poetry always involve a harmful abstraction away from the claims that a specific, beloved individual holds on them. Both finally experience the necessity of imagining writing as an interpersonal act---and as they do so, they glimpse a fuller definition of their responsibilities as individuals and as writers.