TL;DRAbstract
The apocalyptic literary legacy of King Philip's War extends farther forward than currently recognized, to writers as different as Robert Lowell and Bharati Mukherjee. “The Park Street Cemetery,” the lead poem of Lowell's first book of poetry, immerses the reader in the “dusty leaves” and near forgotten spiritual/political pretensions of Boston's long-buried dead, culminating in the avenging depersonalizing question “What are Sam Adams or Cotton Mather?” When Lowell expanded this “graveyard” poem for inclusion in Lord Weary's Castle, he retitled it “At the Indian Killer's Grave,” thereby suggesting that the prevailing motivation of the Puritans had been, not salvation but domination, not king-killing but Indian-killing. The poem's narrator, clearly Lowell himself, discovers upon a visit to King's Chapel Burial Ground that the cracked gravestones of Boston's sanctified progenitors cannot hide a half-covered well in a ruined garden. Through the well, the narrator catches glimpses of the
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The apocalyptic literary legacy of King Philip's War extends farther forward than currently recognized, to writers as different as Robert Lowell and Bharati Mukherjee. “The Park Street Cemetery,” the lead poem of Lowell's first book of poetry, immerses the reader in the “dusty leaves” and near forgotten spiritual/political pretensions of Boston's long-buried dead, culminating in the avenging depersonalizing question “What are Sam Adams or Cotton Mather?” When Lowell expanded this “graveyard” poem for inclusion in Lord Weary's Castle, he retitled it “At the Indian Killer's Grave,” thereby suggesting that the prevailing motivation of the Puritans had been, not salvation but domination, not king-killing but Indian-killing. The poem's narrator, clearly Lowell himself, discovers upon a visit to King's Chapel Burial Ground that the cracked gravestones of Boston's sanctified progenitors cannot hide a half-covered well in a ruined garden. Through the well, the narrator catches glimpses of the
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