Robert Lowell's career as a poet moderated or wavered between his natural inclination towards symbolic formalism and his courtship of confessional free verse…. He would not have smarted at being called the heir of the French Symbolists, or more exactly of the Parnassians…. The Parnassians are neglected in favour of the Symbolists, but their standards of formal beauty and objective, often descriptive, verse found for a while a remarkable inheritor in Lowell. Just as the Parnassians both developed and reacted against the extravagances of the great Romantics … [so] Lowell seemed to stand out for an impersonal rhetoric and conventional forms against the free verse utterances that the age had licensed.

My comparison is validated by the belief that when Lowell came to revise Notebook (1969) for History (1973), he gave it what he regarded as a "noble ordonnance", a chronological arrangement, in the gratifying awareness that [José María de] Heredia had set him an example in Les Trophées, a sequence of 118 (mostly historical) sonnets published in 1893 and favourably greeted by adherents of diverse schools…. For Lowell the epic which he quarried out of Notebook, consisting of serried blank-verse sonnets, looked for sanction to his Parnassian forebear…. Before trying his hand at historical vignettes, in fact, Lowell had written many fourteen-line poems in free verse, and only then in blank verse. After the spritely, ironic personalism of Life Studies and Near the Ocean, he must have found the period from 1967 to 1972, during which he seems to have written nothing but unrhymed sonnets, a time of happy reversion to his ideal of "formal, difficult" poetry.

The Dolphin (1973) seems to me to represent the happiest marriage possible between the studied, hermetic, evasive mode that he had indulged for too long in Notebook and History and a treatment of personal experience which cast back to his fashion of the Fifties. Exploring a symbol of succour, lovingness and constancy, The Dolphin makes available the best devices that may be recovered from the Symbolists, raising personal emotion to a level of suggestiveness and immutability. The basic themes of that volume are, I think, those of self-consciousness and self-presentation, Art and the nature of perception, existential consolation and love, the debate between free-will and pre-ordination, and the possibilities of transcendence, all treated with a dignity that approaches inscrutability. The personal is transfigured and given an air of the timeless; at worst, the manner can edge dangerously near that extreme of Mallarmé's, an almost incomprehensible privacy. (pp. 40-1)

Kicking the addiction to the fourteen-line unit, Day by Day … represents a wilful regression to the type of free-verse expression for which he first won most praise, but which—as he confesses here in "Logan Airport, Boston"—is "a way of writing I once thought heartless". The consummate success is no longer there. Although these last verses continue Lowell's serial autobiography, their sentiments seem just adequate, wry, and unchallenging. Gone are the fierce rhetoric and syntax, and the bitter assaults, of his earlier decades. He makes gestures that are serviceable and unstriving: not cries but murmurs, not rage but renunciation. The prevailing mood is elegiac, rehearsing old friendships and mismanaged love, and indeed the rue and melancholy of certain poems about lost relationships often have an intense poignancy. All too many poems, however, can lapse into a slackness of diction or paragraphing, occasional vapid observations, or a sentimentality which is only evaded by leery ironies…. Even allowing for a measure of jokiness in some poems, Lowell's sententiousness or ponderousness can take the edge off irony. (pp. 41-2)

In earlier volumes Lowell gave himself to locutions which are as clumsy as some in this collection, and has often shown a weakness for being heavy-handed with metaphor. (p. 42)

What is new to [Day by Day] is the incidence of unambiguously negative remarks about himself, registering obsolescence and incapacity—"I do not enjoy / polemic with my old students …" ("Death of a Critic"), "I cannot bring back youth with a snap of my belt, / I cannot touch you—" ("Logan Airport, Boston"), "I cannot sleep solo" ("Wellesley Free")…. He registers many occasions of soullessness, but few moments for spiritedness. His posture and tone in general seem passive: his reflexes are sufficient to rumination…. In his earlier poems, self-disparagement did give assurance of actual capability. He could expend a little shame in order to imply the resilience of his talent and stature: his brilliance could bear it. (pp. 43-4)

The finest poems [of Day by Day]—among them "This Golden Summer", "Milgate", "Ear of Corn", and "Burial"—illustrate Lowell's porcelain sensitivity and are so well made that extrapolation would not serve. Delicate to the seasons, his curious eye is startled by a detail of the natural scene and distils and ramifies a sense of time and place into a large image of life. (p. 45)

Lowell clearly regretted leaving behind the virtuosity of the grand formal manner: he described the conversational idiom of these poems to me in deprecating terms—as "fray" and "shamble". The poems have a premature age in them, but without a quality we could call ripe wisdom. They demonstrate contemplation and achieved art, though the evidence of fresh insight is disconcertingly weak. There remains the authentic feeling, however, true to a tiredness of soul. Time, in Henry James's words, had breathed upon his heart—but not in appeasement. Tender-hearted, enduring without demanding, Lowell's last works everywhere touch magic moments, whimsies, a sense of transience, and the pathos and incorrigibility of his own life. In the final, moving poem called "Epilogue", he states his faith in a poetry of the imagination, a vision which "trembles to caress the light" as against what he regards as the regrettable limitations of his own "threadbare art",

                    heightened from life,
                    yet paralyzed by fact.
                               (pp. 45-6)

John Haffenden, "The Last Parnassian: Robert Lowell," in Agenda, Summer, 1978, pp. 40-6.