The Problem of Theorizing Agency in Reading Robert Lowell’s Poems

The Problem of Theorizing Agency in Reading Robert Lowell’s Poems

This paper analyzes the limitations of the concept of agency in explaining the complex personhood that refuses normative modes of self-making and meaning-making in Robert Lowell’s Day by Day. Under the master rubric of agency, people are often rendered either as helpless individuals without agency or as active agents whose agency may not always appear as strength. This paper traces how the notion of agency was first forged amidst Western liberal individualism in the eighteenth century and how later critics made various attempts to revise the model of agency, including the relational approach to a theory of agency. In pointing out the inadequacy of applying the concept of agency to a reading of Day by Day, this paper gestures to an alternative theoretical statement proposed by Avery Gordon which emphasizes the complexity of people who have been bracketed off from the official history.