In the 1960s, Robert Lowell took his career in an unexpected direction. Having won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired the devotion of literary critics and fellow practitioners in the previous two decades, he had established himself as the leading poet of his generation. But in the sixties, more than being warmly appreciated by a small elite audience, Lowell became a sensation: an American celebrity and a figure of political influence. In a few short years, he joined a select group of American poets who had bridged the great divide between academic and popular culture. This extraordinary stage in Lowell's career deserves wider critical attention than it has yet received, for it sheds significant light not only on his personal poetics but on the workings of America's literary and cultural history.

Scion of a dynastic American family, Lowell had always garnered more public attention than other modern poets, who, as we know, spent much of their time composing essays about the disappearance of their audiences. While the publication of Life Studies in 1959 guaranteed Lowell's critical reputation and reaffirmed his position as the preeminent poet of his generation, it also foreshadowed his dramatic rise to national prominence a mere five years later.

The story of Lowell's ascent begins in 1964, when President Lyndon Baines Johnson asked him to read at the White House Arts Festival. Citing his objections to LBJ's policies on Vietnam, Lowell declined. He also sent a copy of his letter of refusal to the New York Times, whose editors, knowing that a Lowell could always make news, decided to print it on the front page. Furious, Johnson responded, accusing Lowell of publicity seeking and grandstanding. When many of the nation's most important writers and artists lined up behind Lowell, the stage was set for a media battle between literati and the executive branch that took almost three months to play out and whose echoes could be heard now and again in the ideological war that raged for the better part of a decade.

Lowell's opposition to the Vietnam War constituted the first and perhaps most essential ingredient in the hash of political and social changes in which he served himself up to the public sphere. Politically he had always been a renegade—a conscientious objector to World War II and a persistent and harsh critic of American capitalism—yet the growing unpopularity of the Vietnam War, and the cultural revolution spawned in the wake of protests against it, found Lowell closer to mainstream American ideology and appetites than he would ever have thought possible. Abruptly, Lowell's iconoclasm was chic.

In 1965, Lowell wrote and directed The Old Glory, an off-Broadway production that targeted the hypocrisy of American government and institutions; it ran for three years and won an Obie award for best play. In the years between 1964 and 1967, four of Lowell's dramas were staged and two books of his poetry published. His 1964 volume For the Union Dead, issued just months before the LBJ letter, had been applauded by the critics. By 1967, he drew thousands of anti-war protestors to the steps of the Pentagon and narrowly avoided being arrested with Norman Mailer. In 1968, Lowell frequently dined with Jacqueline Kennedy, and he joined presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy on the campaign trail.

Lowell found that when he walked his dog on the streets of Manhattan, paparazzi trailed him. While it has been argued that he abjured this particular aspect of celebrity, he had to be pleased, nonetheless, to see the entire texts of "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" and "Memories of West Street and Lepke" reprinted in Life magazine, his portrait featured on the covers of Time and Newsweek, and articles touting his political views spreading to all corners of the world.

Despite Lowell's undeniable fame, curiously enough his career has never been appreciated, nor has his poetry been read, as a product of his lifelong ambition for popular, as well as critical, approbation. For it was not solely Lowell's political actions that brought him celebrity and influence; not every war resister, not even those who were poets, became stars. While certain external circumstances made Lowell popular—the turbulent political times, his maverick stance juxtaposed against his Brahmin background—Lowell's celebrity does not proceed simply from a serendipitous combination of biology and global events. Rather, Lowell is exceptional because he had skillfully mastered the formula for media attention.

A close friend of Lowell's. Blair Clark, explained the tremendous impact of the White House letter this way:

Lowell had a shrewdness in handling his public persona, and the "LBJ letter" was an example of his brilliant timing…. Cal, the public figure. He knew what he was doing. I'm sure there were people who were terribly envious of his ability to manipulate himself as a public figure. He did it without any pomposity—but he definitely believed he was a public figure.

Yet Lowell's prodigious talent for finding the spotlight should not be understood as a venal thirst for fame but rather as a result of his yearning to find common ground with the large American audience. Critics have mistakenly seen Lowell's gesturing to a popular audience as evidence of his poetic misprision instead of as a premeditated maneuver to widen his literary domain and to make contact with an audience that had become deeply alienated from most modern poetry. Lowell did manage his career shrewdly, but mere celebrity was not his aim: he wanted to be more than the poet literary critics acclaimed; he also wanted to be the poet the American people looked to for wisdom. While this conclusion has been occasionally and hurriedly noted in biographies of the poet, I believe that understanding Lowell means appreciating precisely how his conflicting ambitions directed his career decisions and affected the poetry he wrote.

For instance, many critics note that Lowell's career was a string of continual rebirths. A phoenix from the ashes, again and again Lowell reinvented his poetic persona with seeming ease: the student of obscure and inaccessible New Critical methods in Lord Weary's Castle transformed himself into the accessible, confessional poet of Life Studies, then turned himself into the political and public poet of History, then reinvented himself once more as the morose and withdrawn journalist of Day by Day. Critics have located the germs of these poetic evolutions in Lowell's tumultuous psychological profile, but they have failed to measure how his aspiration simultaneously to engage both an academic and a popular audience took its toll on him. Because the mass market and canonical poetry, especially in the post-Eliotic haze of high modernism, have always appeared implausible conspirators, literary scholars have been slow to recognize the degree to which marketplace pressures have driven American poetry. In Lowell's case, when the marketplace and the academy briefly reconciled, that oversight has resulted in a missed opportunity to examine the inner workings of literary history as well as precluded a thorough understanding of many of Lowell's greatest poems.

"For the Union Dead," published in 1964 in a volume of the same name and considered one of Lowell's most important poems, has attracted substantial critical attention. Commentators have fully explicated Lowell's resemblance to the ironclad hero of the poem, Robert Gould Shaw, who led the first black battalion of the Civil War into a conflict that sent more than half his fighting men to their deaths and ended in defeat. The romantic hero who accepts the challenge of political responsibility in a doomed cause is a recurring paradigm in Lowell's work. Throughout his career, Lowell was intrigued by individualists and idealists, even those on apparently misconceived missions. Thus, critics have long debated how "For the Union Dead" treats Shaw's particular task. Is Lowell celebrating Shaw's bravery? or is he criticizing his foolhardiness?

Stalled in progress, this debate has prevented literary criticism from opening other avenues of inquiry. I argue that "For the Union Dead," written just as Lowell is about to take centerstage in American culture, anticipates and showcases his conscious decision to abandon the neglected poet's pulpit and engage fully in American public, political, and economic life. Alan Williamson has noted that Shaw "represents a compromised, but still living, still responsible connection between ideology, or image and realities." While Williamson's articulation of Lowell's "compromise" is apt, by noticing neither that the "hero" of the poem is the statue and not the man nor that the statue is placed in a specific physical context, Williamson and other critics have failed to recognize a crucial facet of the poem: "For the Union Dead" presents more than a political crisis; it embodies an artistic one as well. And the compromise to which Williamson refers extends beyond the presentation of Shaw to encompass how Lowell will manage his own career.

In "For the Union Dead," technology and commercial opportunism threaten the artifact, "St. Gauden's shaky Civil War relief," which depicts Shaw on horseback among his black foot soldiers. Sited on the Boston Common, "the heart of Boston," and facing the "tingling State House," directly across Beacon Street, the nineteenth-century masterpiece has been rocked by excavations for a new parking garage. Thus, the poem treats the fate of the art work, left either to stand or perish when brought to the center of civic action. Shaw's metallic glance not only reflects his problematic idealism but it peers directly into all that is most hostile to American art.

"For the Union Dead" does not open with the image of Shaw, however. Neither the statue nor Shaw himself appears until stanza six. Lowell carefully sets the scene with the destruction of another romantic icon, the Boston Aquarium. More resigned to his fate than the speaker in "The Waste Land," who still prays for rain, the speaker in "For the Union Dead" expects no relief: He writes, "The Old South Boston Aquarium is waterless; the bronze weather vane has lost half its scales." The poet longs for "the dark downward vegetating kingdom of the fish and reptile," an image of artistic fertility; he instead finds a "new(ly) barbed and galvanized world" where "yellow dinosaur steamshovels … crop up tons of mush and grass / to gouge their underworld garage."

These opening images suggest a vision of hell, inhabited by the unearthly monsters of technological advance. But Lowell warns that the statue faces more than one local excavation; it gazes out upon the larger contemporary horizon—the barbed wire fence and dinosaur steam shovels and the commercial photographs of television and advertising. The juxtaposition of the statue with commercial art suggests a previously unrecognized theme in the poem. The art that seems more expressive of and appropriate to sixties culture is "a commercial photograph / (that) shows Hiroshima boiling / over a Mosler safe." As Lowell presents it, the statue appears out of its element, for it shows signs of physical as well as thematic antiquity. Indeed, that it is "shaky" and needs "prop(ping) by a plank split against the garage" symbolizes the poet's uncertainty about its ability to survive amidst the increasingly threatening aspects of commercial culture.

After evoking an artistic field from which the subject has disappeared and only the artifact remains in its compromised form, the poet announces Shaw's death, stating peculiarly that "he is out of bounds now." At Shaw's death, his "father wanted no monument / except the ditch / where his son's body was thrown." In these lines, Lowell both repudiates the power of art adequately to measure contemporary reality and sounds the note of alarm for which his poem is destined. If the ditch is the fitting grave for Shaw, it is because it symbolizes the necessary and paradoxical nobility of abasing oneself in order to lead the nation. Just as Shaw's burial in a ditch serves a more important function than a ceremonious entombment might have, Lowell believes that his own descent into the pit of American commercialism has now become the most important contribution he can offer to the people, for only then can he lead them out of their morass. Lowell's insistence that "The ditch is nearer" ominously precedes his account of the barbarity of modern civilization. Critics have from the start acknowledged that "the ditch" is, in the words of one, a "many-layered symbol, that brings together nuclear annihilation, the absolute zero of outer space, the blank terror in the faces of the Negro schoolchildren, and the hollowness of ideals out of touch with real circumstances." They have not noted, however, that Lowell's identification with his character, Shaw, extends to his venturing into that ditch.

Just as he has described the position of Shaw's statue, so Lowell now places himself eye to eye with the political realities of his time, indicating his readiness to participate in the world of commercial transaction. Even while identifying with Shaw's compromised idealism and the statue's compromised ability to speak to a new age, Lowell nonetheless prepares to carry himself and his artistic creations into the center of civic action. In fact, in "For the Union Dead" Lowell is proclaiming that only a compromised artistic vision can endure among the brutally realistic symbols of a highly technological and commercialized culture. Taking his lesson from the compromised statue of Shaw, which still maintains its tenacious hold on Boston Common, Lowell decides to do what he must to turn his art public.

Lowell's interaction with the marketplace of the sixties culminated with the publication of Near the Ocean. The volume, hurried to the stores by both a determined Lowell and an opportunistic publisher eager to cash in on the heyday of the poet's prestige, stands as a telling marker of Lowell's aspirations. Of the many clues in his career that he sought to influence the larger culture and earn the plaudits of a wide audience, none is more revealing than the collection of poems that appeared in January 1967. Strongly critical of American ideology and policy, the poems in Near the Ocean expose the corruption of America's leaders and preach an end to imperialist violence.

The message cannot be missed: the poems do not hide their meanings in dense metaphors or obscure references; they mask neither their political nor their commercial intentions. A conventionally popular form, rhyming couplets maximize the oral potential of the poems and thus their public quality; we can be read before crowds, they announce, or chanted and remembered. In "The Fourth of July," Lowell writes "dinner waits / in the cold oven, icy plates—/ repeating and repeating, one / Joan Baez on the gramophone." The reference to Joan Baez reveals the immediacy of Lowell's intentions and also identifies the poet with youth culture, a youth culture that might adapt his verse to song.

"Waking Early Sunday Morning," the first poem in the volume, became "the political poem of the sixties," according to critic Richard Howard. When read aloud, it included a stanza that regularly received howls of delight from Lowell's audiences and represented one of his most Ginsberg-like moments:

     O to break loose. All life's grandeur
     is something with a girl in summer …
     elated as the President
     girdled by his establishment
     this Sunday morning, free to chaff
     his own thoughts with his bear-cuffed staff,
     swimming nude, unbuttoned, sick
     of his ghost-written rhetoric!

The poem ends with a generalized plea against all war, but listeners could not help but hear the relevance to their own decade's aggression and imperialism:

     Pity the planet, all joy gone
     from this sweet volcanic cone;
     peace to our children when they fall
     in small war on the heels of small
     war—until the end of time
     to police the earth, a ghost
     orbiting forever lost
     in our monotonous sublime.

Other poems in the volume also take swipes at the American military. In Lowell's imitation of Juvenal's "The Vanity of Human Wishes," the poet rewrites the classic to make it more topical and pertinent to his own decade:

     barbarian commanders march; for these they pledge their lives
     and freedom—such their thirst for fame, and such
     their scorn of virtue.
     For who wants a life
     a virtue without praise? Whole nations die
     to serve the glory of a few; all lust for honors …

Even more remarkable than the overt politics of the poems it contained was the physical appearance of the volume itself. Near the Ocean looked like, as a handful of reviewers dared mention, "a coffee table book." At 10 inches by 8 inches, it was larger than a standard-sized collection of poetry; Sidney Nolan had illustrated the poems with impressionistic pen-and-ink drawings; the lines were double spaced and the pages held at most sixteen lines—a markedly unserious and unliterary format. While the poems of Near the Ocean may or may not stand with his best work, in the context of Lowell's career, the appearance of a coffee table book is a significant piece of literary history. This volume evidences just how much Lowell labored to influence the wider culture; and more important, perhaps, the critical reception of the volume reveals the fate of the literary artist who struggles to satisfy a commercial market. Lowell's biographer cautiously suggests that Lowell may have decided to issue a new collection of poetry at this stage of his career because "he felt himself to be at something of a dead end, or that the public or occasional aspects of poems like 'Waking Early Sunday Morning' made him see the book as his timely contribution to the intensifying antiwar campaign." But in making his case so tentatively, Hamilton, like many Lowell scholars, underemphasizes the poet's commercial aspirations. Indeed, most critics have failed to recognize that Near the Ocean was Lowell's deliberate and premeditated attempt to ensconce his literary productions among the paraphernalia of the American household and to inscribe his message into American hearts and minds. Instead, the book has been viewed as an anomaly, virtually wished out of existence by supportive critics. To others, it has simply confirmed that Lowell's career was finished.

With the exception of Richard Howard, who, writing in Poetry, called the book "devastating" and "Waking Early Sunday Morning" a masterpiece, reviewers for high culture publications panned Near the Ocean. Helen Vendler, writing in the Massachusetts Review, called it sensationalistic, shrill, and full of doggerel. Charles Philbrick, in the Saturday Review, dubbed it "the disappointment of the season." David Kalstone generously noted in the Partisan Review that "the slick coffee-table design of the volume entirely misrepresents the poems, which, at their best, challenge things that are shiny and bright."

The reviewer for the New Yorker, Louise Bogan, condemned Near the Ocean for its "coldness and theatricality, its will towards pure shock and its horrifying illustrations that disqualify it as a coffee table object," although ultimately Bogan admits the book "is in that class." Explaining that a reviewer had "good reason to be annoyed with Robert Lowell's new book," Hayden Carruth, commenting in the Hudson Review, elaborated on its many commercial aspects:

It is a pretentious volume; printed on expensive paper, bound in heavy cloth and stamped in three colors, decorated with twenty-one drawings, designed lavishly and wastefully in out-size format, jacketed in varnished sixty-pound stock—in short, a very self-conscious-looking collector's item…. The price has been announced progressively at $4.95, $5.50 and $6.00.

Despite the American literary establishment's dismay, Near the Ocean was widely and enthusiastically reviewed in both the British and American mass media. The London Times complained that "niggling critics were treating the book too harshly and that it was an important complement to [Lowell's] work"; Donald Davie, in the Manchester Guardian Weekly, said several poems were "elating and invigorating." In the American media, the book accumulated more plaudits: Life titled its review "The Poet as Folk Hero"; the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune Book Week responded positively; and in the Chicago Tribune of Books, William Stafford claimed, that Lowell's new book had immediate relevance to the national mood.

Only Life magazine grasped the obvious: in Near the Ocean, Lowell's project had changed—he wanted to be a folk hero. No longer seeking to please the academician exclusively, Lowell tried his hand at poetry that advanced a political cause. Yet the critical reception of Near the Ocean proved that the large majority of reviewers for high culture publications could not tolerate Lowell's shift in intentions. Theatricality, doggerel; pretentious, sensationalistic: detractors used such descriptions to suggest that Lowell was no longer writing poetry worthy of serious attention. American critics, who had no criteria for the evaluation of, and no interest in, popular poetry, could only condemn a collection so blatantly commercial and aggressively political.

While the cultural revolution of the sixties opened a space for the critical recognition of certain popular art forms, it was not of the sort to accommodate Near the Ocean. Poetry designed exclusively for success in the political and commercial market not only suffered the slings and arrows of elite culture; it could not survive in a de-politicized mass culture. A modest fad in the sixties, Lowell's poetry soon succumbed to the fate of most timely products. By 1970, the anti-war movement had lost its steam with the election of Richard Nixon and the slow withdrawal of American troops. Lowell's politics and his poetry had outlived their usefulness. Near the Ocean was out of print by the early seventies, and in the 1990s critics dismiss the collection as containing his least important poetry.

Yet the volume is central to an understanding both of Lowell's ambitions and conflicts and of the relationship between poetry and American culture. Near the Ocean marks the apex of a personal career perched on the brink of marketplace success, and, however fleetingly, it also represents a rare phenomenon in recent literary history: an academically credentialed, canonical poet exerting wide cultural influence and political leadership. On its own terms, Near the Ocean succeeded. It demonstrated that poetry could be relevant; it brought Lowell and his politics before the public; and it provided, with "Waking Early Sunday Morning," a poetic cry to ignite and rally war resisters.

Despite these notable accomplishments, Lowell would never think of himself as a success. He had gained cultural prominence and political stature, but he had sacrificed too much. In a sonnet for Robert F. Kennedy, composed in 1968, Lowell had written, "For them like a prince, you daily left your tower / to walk through dirt in your best clothes. Untouched." In 1964, Lowell had considered himself to be like Shaw, an aristocrat bending down to carry the people towards glory. But by 1968, Lowell's clothes, supposedly unlike those of Shaw and the equally heroic aristocrat RFK, were dirty; Lowell had tumbled farther into the ditch than he had believed possible. Literary critics had turned their backs on him; RFK had been assassinated; the anti-war movement had spawned its own regrettable violence; and he had been dragged into one distasteful partisan controversy after the next in which his motives and his methods were impugned. Indeed, "his commitment to see the whole thing through" waned as the anti-war movement wound down and as he became a target for "New Left" bashers. Diana Trilling and Lowell had argued in the politically conservative pages of Commentary. Their acrimonious volley extended for several months and encompassed more than just their disagreement about the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War. Trilling had attacked Lowell for his "grandstanding" and "opportunism" during the student strikes at Columbia, and Lowell was deeply troubled by her reproach, the violence that erupted at Columbia during the demonstrations, and the critical indifference to his work.

But just as the critics forsook Lowell after Near the Ocean, he forsook them, and the general reading audience as well. A poet who until this point catered to critical trends and anticipated, public appetites, Lowell used his last three volumes to chasten himself for fashioning his career to win public approval. Thus, after accomplishing what he always thought he wanted—securing a podium to preach his convictions and a popular audience to appreciate his poetry—Lowell retreated to a manor house in England. Like a wounded warrior at the end of a ravaging and futile battle, he repudiated the national crusade. And his bitterness towards the critics he believed had misunderstood him and the American public he thought had abandoned him haunt the final poems of his career.