Beyond the Alps

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'Beyond the Alps' is a poem by Robert Lowell that was first collected in Life Studies and then appeared in a revised form in For the Union Dead.

Contents 1 Composition 2 Second version 3 Cultural references 4 Footnotes

[edit] Composition

Lowell finished the first published version of the poem in a productive spurt of writing in the second half of 1957. On 30 September he wrote to William Carlos Williams^[1]:

“

I've been writing poems like a house a fire, i.e. for me that means five in six weeks, fifty versions of each. I've been experimenting with mixing loose and free meters with strict in order to get the accuracy, naturalness, and multiplicity of prose, yet, I also want the state and surge of the old verse, the carpentry of definite meter that tells me when to stop rambling.

”

[edit] Second version

The main difference from the earlier collected version is the insertion of the new stanza commencing 'I thought of Ovid'. Other small differences include: 'Life changed to landscape' becomes 'Man changed to landscape, the insertion of an exclamation point after Papa , the insertion of a hyphen in the word 'miscarriage' and an ellipsis at the end of that line.

[edit] Cultural references

Lowell refers to

• Pope Pius XII and his defining the dogma of Mary's bodily assumption (declared November 1950).
• A Swiss attempt to climb Mount Everest (attempts actually made in May 1952 & the autumn of 1952 by Raymond Lambert)
• Benito Mussolini, 'The Duce'
• the golden bough Aeneas used to ensure safe passage through the underworld
• Ovid
• Minerva who was born from the head of Zeus

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[edit] Footnotes