{Yenser’s extended survey of "Lost in Translation" focuses on numerous passages and discusses them in detail. In this, he is centered on Merrill’s description of the page in the jigsaw puzzle.] … Mademoiselle perhaps thinks the boy is the veiled woman’s son, and if so she might be swayed by her own maternal feelings or by her keen awareness of her employers’ domestic plight.

"Lost in Translation" calls into play three autobiographical situations. In the most recent one, which the poem outlines last, the setting is Athens, where Merrill had his second home, on Athinaion Efivon Street at the foot of Mount Lykabettos, from 1959 until the late 1970s, and the subject is his rereading of Valery's magnificent lyric, "Palme," and his subsequent search through the city's libraries for Rilke's translation of that poem into German. Merrill half-recalls having seen the translation years earlier, but when he cannot turn up a copy, he wonders whether he hasn't imagined it.

Symbolism turns on an ambiguity between literal and metaphoric, or if ambiguity is too strong a word, on an extension and elaboration of metaphor to the point where it threatens to gain priority over the objects it modifies. … Merrill does not often push to the boundaries of metaphor … but often enough a simple construct of likeness exfoliates into a richly imagined (or described) scene of its own, moving far from its metaphorical function. …

[Shetley cites the lines that begin "Soon, of these May mornings" and end "into a crazing texture."]

Unlike E.P. Thompson, I would like to fasten Thomas McGrath’s "Against the False Magicians" down into a local context. Thompson suggests we read the poem in the context of "Communist cultural circles to illuminate an internal hullabaloo in which McGrath was rejecting both of the barren alternatives, ‘socialist romanticism’ or ‘socialist realism,’ which were being debated." Never a strict party-liner, McGrath’s resistance to the sometimes overly orthodox aesthetic prescriptions of the left no doubt influences, as Thompson argues, both "Magicians" and his poetics.

What makes Thomas McGrath’s "Crash Report" so immediately intriguing is the decidedly anti-populist—for this famously populist poet—last stanza. McGrath challenges his readers to "examine a case on record," to make sense of the apparent contradiction between calling two grossly unequal deaths—one "real" (going "down over Paramashiru"), the other "phony" (the result of "joy-riding"—equally heroic.

In his analysis of Thomas McGrath’s “Crash Report,” John Marsh calls the poem a “decidedly anti-populist” and “decidedly cynical account of World War II.” Puzzlingly contradicting his track record of populist and socialist politics, McGrath, Marsh suggests, criticizes the “unthinking patriotism” of the masses even when the war effort itself might be morally justified for fighting fascism and stopping the Holocaust.

Some of Lowell's poems avoid the rigged rhetoric of "Skunk Hour" by relatively modest ambition, as in "Father's Bedroom"; others make the frustration of the quest for correspondence between self and other part of their theme. And there is at least one justly celebrated poem that takes a third and simpler way: "For the Union Dead."

Now who would be certain the shades of those Union dead were not ready to come on Lowell and Mailer as they strode through the grass up the long flat breast of hill at the base of the Washington Monument and looked down the length of the reflecting pool to Lincoln Memorial perhaps one-half mile away, "then to step off like green Union Army recruits for the first Bull Run, sped by photographers . . ." was what Lowell was to write about events a bit later that day, but although they said hardly a word now, Lowell and Mailer were thinking of the Civil War: it was hard not to.

The poet wryly mocks his activist self, the bespectacled, aging, nervous man of letters playing Union Recruit in his first engagement, not yet sure that Bull Run will be a defeat but vaguely hopeful that defeats may feel more glorious than victories anyway. Washington appears as a post-card version of itself, everything bigger and whiter than life; and the theatrical setting and melodramatized "sci-fi" enemy mock the poet's excitement at doing something "important" and exhilaratingly remote from his usual sense of himself.

An account of the confrontation at the Pentagon between the antiwar protesters and the military the day after [Lowell's reading at an antiwar rally], "The March" . . . describes Lowell's own ambivalence as a participant. The marchers listened to "the remorseless amplified harangues for peace" at the Lincoln Memorial, and then later at the Pentagon, at the end of their march, "heard, alas, more speeches." The political significance of the event lay less in the specific words anyone spoke through a microphone than in the very fact and size of the demonstration.