Robert Lowell (1917-1977), one of the great American poets of the twentieth century, published “For the Union Dead” in 1960 as the final poem in the paperback edition of Life Studies, under the title “Colonel Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th.” In the same year, he published it as “For the Union Dead in the Atlantic Monthly and then confirmed the rightness of this second title by placing the poem in 1964 at the end of the volume, For the Union Dead. In 1928, Lowell’s mentor, Allen Tate, had written “Ode to the Confederate Dead.”

Before his first public reading of the poem in 1960, Lowell made the following prepared statement: “My poem, The Union Dead, is about childhood memories, the evisceration of our modern cities, civil rights, nuclear warfare and more particularly, Colonel Robert Shaw and his Negro regiment, the Massachusetts 54th. I brought in early personal memories because I wanted to avoid the fixed, brazen tone of the set-piece and the official ode.”