1928 poem "Ode to the Confederate Dead", by Lowell's former teacher and mentor Allen Tate. At the 1960 festival, Lowell said, "Writing is neither transport nor a technique. My own owes everything to a few of our poets who have tried to write directly about what mattered to them, and yet to keep faith with their calling's tricky, specialized, unpopular possibilities for good workmanship. When I finished Life Studies, I was left hanging on a question mark. I don't know whether it is a deathrope or a lifeline." The setting of "For the Union Dead" is the Boston Common, near the well-known Robert Gould Shaw Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. In the poem, Lowell's visit to the park, which is being excavated to provide an underground car park, conjures up a series of associations. First, watching the construction of the garage beneath the Common makes him think about his childhood and how Boston had changed; in particular, the South Boston Aquarium, that he'd visited as a child, had been demolished a few years before, in 1954. This leads him to think about the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial and the history associated with the memorial, specifically, the story of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry that he led during the Civil War. Finally, Lowell thinks of the then-controversial Civil Rights Movement and the images of the integration of black and white school-children that Lowell had recently seen on television. The final lines of the poem, which read, "The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,/ giant finned cars nose forward like fish;/ a savage servility/ slides by on grease" are particularly well known for their rather dark description of the large American cars that were popular at the time, evoking a corrupted consumer society without heroism. "The Public Garden" "The Public Garden" is a revised version of the poem "David and Bathsheba in the Public Garden" which was originally published in Lowell's third book The Mills of the Kavanaughs. In the version in For the Union Dead, Lowell completely removed from the poem any mention of the Biblical characters of David and Bathsheba who were central to the earlier version. During Lowell's 1963 public reading at the Guggenheim, prior to the publication of For the Union Dead, he explained that many of his readers expressed confusion over the presence of the Biblical characters being located in a modern park in