Intertextuality:  Reading Lowell's Poem "For the Union Dead" in the context of his later poem "Epilogue"

In describing "For the Union Dead," Robert Lowell said  "I've never done this sort of thing before and I don't think I will again." (Public Broadcasting Service, Voices and Visions). Some fifteen years later, he wrote a poem called "Epilogue," which he published in his last collection of poetry, Day by Day .  It seems to comment directly upon the sort of thing he does in "For the Union Dead" and suggests that was not the last such poem he wrote.
 

Reading of "Epilogue" by Robert Lowell

Epilogue

Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with dim eyes and threadbare art
seems a snapshot
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name

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