Book: Collected Poems
Author: Robert Lowell
Price: Faber, £40
At Robert Lowell's funeral in Boston in 1977, there were 600 mourners; obituaries called him the best poet of his generation. Twenty-six years later, Lowell's Collected Poems has finally been published, and the principal question for reviewers is the dip in Lowell's poetic "stock": the best-known American poet of his day has, in just decades, faded from view, curricula, canons, anthologies.
Vagaries of reputation are nothing new; we know that making the front page of the New York Times, or being called "the greatest poet writing in English," as Lowell did and was, will not guarantee shelf-life after death. Critical agitation over Lowell's slight demotion-and it is slight, as the reception of this nearly 1,200-page tome demonstrates-seems also a lament for a lost age when poets made front pages at all. Lowell was the whole package: a figure of genuine literary eminence who was charismatic and relevant, serious and wild. He towered over Paris Review parties, Harvard classrooms and Washington protest marches, his movie-star good looks offset by geeky thick-rimmed glasses. He was a New England aristocrat who could trace his lineage back to the Mayflower on both sides; his conscientious objection during the second world war, and, two decades later, his refusal to read his work at a White House arts festival, were national events. When he campaigned with Eugene McCarthy, presidential candidate, it was neither a scorned affectation nor a publicity stunt.
What poet could manage the same scope today? Reading Lowell now, perhaps, we want his poems to be great because we want poetic fame to be possible. His life fits perfectly with the romantic notion that genius is proven by personal pain: biographies of Lowell (the standard one is by Ian Hamilton) are looping records of wrecks and near-wrecks. In and out of mental institutions for months at a stretch, on and off various psychotic drugs, he married three times and had numerous affairs. When he died of heart failure in a New York taxi, he was returning once more to his long-suffering second wife while holding a portrait of his third.
None of this should affect our judgement of the poems. It is irresponsible to confuse criticism of literature with criticism of its writer. Irresponsible-but, in Lowell's case, oddly just. For his poetry-misleadingly dubbed "confessional"-brought life and work into a challenging new conflation. Beginning with Life Studies (1959), in which he wrote candidly, in freed meters, about his family, marriage and mental illness; and continuing with Notebooks 1967-68 (1969), a diary-like series of loosely blank-verse "sonnets" chronicling public and private details of his daily life; the trend culminated in The Dolphin (1973), a book written during and about the breakup of his second marriage. Here Lowell reprinted-and sometimes, alarmingly, changed-excerpts from private letters written by others, without asking permission.
He debated whether to publish these, and sought the counsel of friends. Elizabeth Bishop, famously, was against: "Art just isn't worth that much," she wrote to him. But for Lowell, it was: from the summer when, still at high school, he nearly starved himself in his quest for pure culture, or when as a college student he pitched a tent on Allen Tate's lawn to be close to his master. It is, I think, this determination that all passion can be literary passion and that only literary passion matters, that makes critics anxious for Lowell's reputation, and that prompts some-then and now-to make grand but somehow hedged claims for him. Such obvious ambition combined with such obvious talent ought to make a great American poet.
One of the refreshing pleasures of the Collected Poems is to see the signs of greatness in Lowell's early books, Lord Weary's Castle (1946) and The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951). These are more formal and impersonal than Lowell's famous confessional mode: here he wrote mostly iambic pentameter couplets, often (in Kavanaughs) with an adopted persona. But the poems seem anything but classicist. Rhythms barrel forward, full of thick alliterative muscle. One of Lowell's favourite tools is the one-beat enjambment, which jerks the reader up and back on the rhyme-word with all the inevitable surprise of an ocean swell, as in the final two lines of this section from "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket":
Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather,
Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers
Where the morning stars sing out together
And thunder shakes the white surf and dismembers
The red flag hammered in the mast-head. Hide,
Our steel, Jonas Messias, in Thy side.
From these early lines to his last completed poem, "Summer Tides," Lowell is never far from the sea. Always a Melvillean sea: fated, alluring, threatening, fundamentally divine. Lowell is a very American poet, and a very religious one, but he skirted, warily, the usual American poetic-religious stance, modelled by Whitman, of self-anointed prophet. Indeed, in a talk on his early influences, Lowell remembered denigrating Whitman in favour of a "poetry of experience"; he would be martyr, not sage. Hence, perhaps, his conversion from Protestantism to fervent Catholicism (later to lapse); hence the Melvillean violence of his poetic syntax. Not for him the gentle turns and flow of Whitman's lines. "A man must sweat with his meters," Lowell wrote to Ezra Pound in 1954, "if he is ever going to be a fabbro [craftsman], and not just a prophet."
Lowell transformed, but did not abandon, his early formal mastery; his "confessions" remained those of a thorough fabbro. The regular but restless couplets of "Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid," in Kavanaughs, as good a poem as he wrote, become the modest, whimsical, near-couplets of "Waking in the Blue" and "Home After Three Months Away," some of the best of Life Studies. In these latter poems, we have Lowell's characteristically maritime imagery, his biblical reach, his brave enjambments and rhymes-but domesticated, subtler and quietly witty.
One can trace in Lowell's work-as in many late 20th-century poetic careers-a general growth from the influence of Eliot to that of Yeats. His early academicism was Eliotic; Lowell's Yeatsian realisation was that making peace with history means making peace with oneself, and vice versa. His most public-minded poems-"For the Union Dead," "Waking Early Sunday Morning" and "Fourth of July in Maine"-are as deeply, transcendently, personal as "Easter 1916" or "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz." "For the Union Dead" is the most famous-justly famous; but the other two seem more moving and masterful now. In "Fourth of July in Maine," addressed to Lowell's cousin, Harriet Winslow, the poet blends small and grand fears to achieve something on the order of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter," but for the Vietnam era:
Blue-ribboned, blue-jeaned, named for you,
our daughter cartwheels on the blue-
may your proportion strengthen her
to live through the millennial year
Two Thousand, and like you possess
friends, independence, and a house,
herself God's plenty, mistress of
your tireless sedentary love.
There are plenty who find in the final "notebook" collections a more exalted culmination to Lowell's career, and who find individual poems among them to be as good as anything he wrote earlier. These are the sorts of debates that will-and should-be reanimated with this volume. Lowell's standing and influence will not be decided by analysis of shifts in literary taste, or knowledge of his life, or general laments for a different time. If his reputation is not what it once was, this book is the start of what it must begin to be: a considered reading of the poems he left.
At Robert Lowell's funeral in Boston in 1977, there were 600 mourners; obituaries called him the best poet of his generation. Twenty-six years later, Lowell's Collected Poems has finally been published, and the principal question for reviewers is the dip in Lowell's poetic "stock": the best-known American poet of his day has, in just decades, faded from view, curricula, canons, anthologies.
Vagaries of reputation are nothing new; we know that making the front page of the New York Times, or being called "the greatest poet writing in English," as Lowell did and was, will not guarantee shelf-life after death. Critical agitation over Lowell's slight demotion-and it is slight, as the reception of this nearly 1,200-page tome demonstrates-seems also a lament for a lost age when poets made front pages at all. Lowell was the whole package: a figure of genuine literary eminence who was charismatic and relevant, serious and wild. He towered over Paris Review parties, Harvard classrooms and Washington protest marches, his movie-star good looks offset by geeky thick-rimmed glasses. He was a New England aristocrat who could trace his lineage back to the Mayflower on both sides; his conscientious objection during the second world war, and, two decades later, his refusal to read his work at a White House arts festival, were national events. When he campaigned with Eugene McCarthy, presidential candidate, it was neither a scorned affectation nor a publicity stunt.
What poet could manage the same scope today? Reading Lowell now, perhaps, we want his poems to be great because we want poetic fame to be possible. His life fits perfectly with the romantic notion that genius is proven by personal pain: biographies of Lowell (the standard one is by Ian Hamilton) are looping records of wrecks and near-wrecks. In and out of mental institutions for months at a stretch, on and off various psychotic drugs, he married three times and had numerous affairs. When he died of heart failure in a New York taxi, he was returning once more to his long-suffering second wife while holding a portrait of his third.
None of this should affect our judgement of the poems. It is irresponsible to confuse criticism of literature with criticism of its writer. Irresponsible-but, in Lowell's case, oddly just. For his poetry-misleadingly dubbed "confessional"-brought life and work into a challenging new conflation. Beginning with Life Studies (1959), in which he wrote candidly, in freed meters, about his family, marriage and mental illness; and continuing with Notebooks 1967-68 (1969), a diary-like series of loosely blank-verse "sonnets" chronicling public and private details of his daily life; the trend culminated in The Dolphin (1973), a book written during and about the breakup of his second marriage. Here Lowell reprinted-and sometimes, alarmingly, changed-excerpts from private letters written by others, without asking permission.
He debated whether to publish these, and sought the counsel of friends. Elizabeth Bishop, famously, was against: "Art just isn't worth that much," she wrote to him. But for Lowell, it was: from the summer when, still at high school, he nearly starved himself in his quest for pure culture, or when as a college student he pitched a tent on Allen Tate's lawn to be close to his master. It is, I think, this determination that all passion can be literary passion and that only literary passion matters, that makes critics anxious for Lowell's reputation, and that prompts some-then and now-to make grand but somehow hedged claims for him. Such obvious ambition combined with such obvious talent ought to make a great American poet.
One of the refreshing pleasures of the Collected Poems is to see the signs of greatness in Lowell's early books, Lord Weary's Castle (1946) and The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951). These are more formal and impersonal than Lowell's famous confessional mode: here he wrote mostly iambic pentameter couplets, often (in Kavanaughs) with an adopted persona. But the poems seem anything but classicist. Rhythms barrel forward, full of thick alliterative muscle. One of Lowell's favourite tools is the one-beat enjambment, which jerks the reader up and back on the rhyme-word with all the inevitable surprise of an ocean swell, as in the final two lines of this section from "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket":
Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather,
Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers
Where the morning stars sing out together
And thunder shakes the white surf and dismembers
The red flag hammered in the mast-head. Hide,
Our steel, Jonas Messias, in Thy side.
From these early lines to his last completed poem, "Summer Tides," Lowell is never far from the sea. Always a Melvillean sea: fated, alluring, threatening, fundamentally divine. Lowell is a very American poet, and a very religious one, but he skirted, warily, the usual American poetic-religious stance, modelled by Whitman, of self-anointed prophet. Indeed, in a talk on his early influences, Lowell remembered denigrating Whitman in favour of a "poetry of experience"; he would be martyr, not sage. Hence, perhaps, his conversion from Protestantism to fervent Catholicism (later to lapse); hence the Melvillean violence of his poetic syntax. Not for him the gentle turns and flow of Whitman's lines. "A man must sweat with his meters," Lowell wrote to Ezra Pound in 1954, "if he is ever going to be a fabbro [craftsman], and not just a prophet."
Lowell transformed, but did not abandon, his early formal mastery; his "confessions" remained those of a thorough fabbro. The regular but restless couplets of "Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid," in Kavanaughs, as good a poem as he wrote, become the modest, whimsical, near-couplets of "Waking in the Blue" and "Home After Three Months Away," some of the best of Life Studies. In these latter poems, we have Lowell's characteristically maritime imagery, his biblical reach, his brave enjambments and rhymes-but domesticated, subtler and quietly witty.
One can trace in Lowell's work-as in many late 20th-century poetic careers-a general growth from the influence of Eliot to that of Yeats. His early academicism was Eliotic; Lowell's Yeatsian realisation was that making peace with history means making peace with oneself, and vice versa. His most public-minded poems-"For the Union Dead," "Waking Early Sunday Morning" and "Fourth of July in Maine"-are as deeply, transcendently, personal as "Easter 1916" or "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz." "For the Union Dead" is the most famous-justly famous; but the other two seem more moving and masterful now. In "Fourth of July in Maine," addressed to Lowell's cousin, Harriet Winslow, the poet blends small and grand fears to achieve something on the order of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter," but for the Vietnam era:
Blue-ribboned, blue-jeaned, named for you,
our daughter cartwheels on the blue-
may your proportion strengthen her
to live through the millennial year
Two Thousand, and like you possess
friends, independence, and a house,
herself God's plenty, mistress of
your tireless sedentary love.
There are plenty who find in the final "notebook" collections a more exalted culmination to Lowell's career, and who find individual poems among them to be as good as anything he wrote earlier. These are the sorts of debates that will-and should-be reanimated with this volume. Lowell's standing and influence will not be decided by analysis of shifts in literary taste, or knowledge of his life, or general laments for a different time. If his reputation is not what it once was, this book is the start of what it must begin to be: a considered reading of the poems he left.
