SOURCE: "Aspects of Robert Lowell," in Commonweal, December 9, 1977, pp. 783-8.

I. His Career

The speaker of Robert Lowell's "In the American Grain" (History) announces at the close of the poem

     (') I am not William Carlos Williams. He
     knew the germ on every flower, and saw
     the snake is a petty, rather pathetic creature.'

Whether or not the speaker is Lowell—the poem is a direct quote, perhaps a letter to him—the sentiment is rarely his. Snakes, dragons, other biblical and/or allusive figures haunt Lowell's pages. In the early poems of Land of Unlikeness and Lord Weary's Castle he writes this most emblematic. "No ideas but in things," Williams proclaimed. Lowell's first works, for which he has lionized by much of the critical establishment, might well be saying, "Nothing but within my ideas of things":

                                    … I fear
      That only Armageddon will suffice
    To turn the hero skating on thin ice
      When Whore and Beast and Dragon rise for air
      From allegoric waters.
 
    ("To Peter Taylor on the Feast of the Epiphany," Lord Weary)

The self-assurance of Lowell's poems in Lord Weary impressed. The difficulties they posed to be puzzled through impressed. Only a few objections have been recorded. Hayden Carruth dismissed the motifs in Lord Weary as lifeless tokens and many of the poems as "set pieces in a high style," a young poet's homage to his older masters; though among the purely "sententious" specimens Carruth discovered poems that include, under their "high gloss of artifice," urgent and moving autobiographical elements ("A Meaning of Robert Lowell," Robert Lowell: A Portrait of the Artist in His Time, 1970). And the artifice of Lowell's third volume, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, caused Williams to temper a favorable review:

In his new book Robert Lowell gives us six first-rate poems of which we may well be proud. As usual he has taken the rhyme-track for his effects. We shall now have rhyme again for a while, rhymes completely missing the incentive. The rhymes are necessary to Mr. Lowell. He must, to his mind, appear to surmount them. ("In a Mood of tragedy….": ibid.)

Did Williams's objection to rhyme echo a bit his lament that T. S. Eliot had set back irreparably the course of poetry in an American idiom?

Just as critics have stressed Eliot's religion, which never was more than a convenience to his poetry, many have made much of Lowell's temporarily-adopted (and adapted?) Catholicism and its influence on his early poetry. In retrospect, though, Lowell's true faith appears to have been in the Western tradition, T. S. Eliot pastor, rather than in the Catholic Church, which became, for a time, the exoskeleton of his emotions, ideas and images. And the farther we follow Lowell through his career the more we see his own mind, insofar as it assimilates the history and cultures of Western civilization as well as the data of his own experience, becoming his real church. Under its vault he worships not only the occasional order its rituals conjure, but the cracks in its walls, the dissolution implicit in accepting one's self in the world as the manifest sign of poetry. Thus his titles evolve from the symbolic prominence of Land of Unlikeness and Lord Weary's Castle to the pop-tune lyric, Day by Day.

Wondering over the course of his poetry, Lowell says in one of his last poems ("Unwanted," Day by Day)

     I was surer, wasn't I, once …
     and had flashes when I first found
     a humor for myself in images,
     farfetched misalliance
     that made evasions a revelation?

If those first poems were evasive, they were evading an audience already tantalized. If Lowell's marriage to his emblems was far-fetched, not many seemed to have noticed. Or his revelation sufficed.

But Lowell himself, long before his nostalgia in Day by Day, had reacted against the lineal descendants of his highly-praised Lord Weary works, in commenting upon poems he had been writing in the 1950's: "Their style seemed distant, symbol-ridden and willfully difficult … my own poems seemed like prehistoric monsters dragged down into the bog and death by their ponderous armor." ("On Skunk Hour," The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic, 1964.) Later, after Lowell closed out the 50's with Life Studies, which made him as popular as any legitimate poet is likely to become today, and especially after his poems of the 1960's had accumulated in Notebook 1967–68, some critics saw a devolution in his poetry and enshrined Lord Weary as Lowell's masterwork. Others (including those for whom he became a confessional darling), and Lowell apparently came to regard Lord Weary's mode as some archaic-baroque shell of the poet's past.

Between the publications of Life Studies and Notebook 1967–68, Donald Hall, writing the introduction to the Penguin Contemporary American Poetry (1962), concluded: "When he wrote Life Studies, Robert Lowell sent his muse to the atelier of William Carlos Williams (from that of Allen Tate)." To Williams's atelier, though, just for diction lessons. Even after the shift from "rhetorical stanzas" to "common speech" (as Hall puts it), Lowell keeps us in a world skewed by his mind's impositions, an introverted mythos, rather than in the sort of garden of realized common-place that Williams gives us. As after his exit from Catholicism, figures of that faith (or the faith of his puritanical forebears) keep slithering through his lines, pets of the tradition he extends).

Following Lowell's break from rhetorical stanzas, his movement into freer verse forms, and his settling for a long while on blank verse sonnet-sections, he suffered less drastically from distaste for his own work. Change became a matter of shuffling lines, replacing words: rewriting became a prime writing method. Through the 60's, into the 1970's, Lowell rewrote incessantly, his poetry suggests, and the nature of this revision implies some amount of disintegration, offcenteredness in his evocations of the past, present and himself in relationship to himself—a difficulty in getting the equations right, a lack of perception. Yet it implies too Lowell's immense care for getting the poem right, his attention to focusing better, pulling his work, and so perhaps himself, together. Sometimes the changes perplex. Lines and sets of lines move from one poem to another in consecutive volumes; changing contexts as well, from historical to private or vice-versa. Lowell insists on our staying in his flux while he manipulates for us the data of history and memory in order to fix (but just momentarily?) his vision of his (our?) world. This is not Williams's Paterson regenerating itself beyond its designed end, but Lowell's notebook- history-life—Lowell's life become poem life, as Stephen Yenser claims—rehearsing as if unready to be apprised of its end.

In "Randall Jarrell" (History) Lowell has his fellow poet tell him, "You didn't write, you rewrote'." Lowell himself admitted to spending hours, days, choosing the proper word for a line. Farther and farther away from the devotional structures of his early poetry could Lowell hope to invest his work with any of the certainty whose lack his later poetry, as we've seen, seems on occasion to lament, in spite of his dismissing the "prehistoric monsters"?

      Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
      why are they no help to me now
      I want to make
      something imagined, not recalled?
      ...
      We are poor passing facts,
      warned by that to give
      each figure in the photograph
      his living name.

From effects of stained glass to the snapshots with which Lowell ends "Epilogue," last poem of Day by Day, his last book.

II. His Life, His Death: His Poetry

As much as history, legend and myth overshadow Lowell's work, he remains at the center of his poems, in the context of his life, from childhood to death and caught inextricably between.

Lowell's "childhood, closer to me than what I love" ("Returning," History) draws him, throughout his poetry, in its direction, at times back to encounters with his parents, at other times toward a life-force in his work, as well as in others': "the supreme artist, Flaubert, was a boy before the mania for phrases dried his heart" ("Les Mots," Notebook).

His fascination for childhood in places recalls Jarrell's. Even some of the same yearning for a child-like love occurs, as in Jarrell's brother-sister poems, or the folk tales he used to render:

      Here nature seldom feels the hand of man,
      our alders skirmish. I flame for the one friend—
      is it always the same child or animal
      impregnable in shell or coat of thorns
 
      ("Long Summer," Notebook)

And all Lowell's visions of childhood root in his own memories of Boston during the 1920's. In "91 Revere Street," a rare piece of Lowell prose which serves as Part Two of Life Studies in the American edition, Lowell precisely details his family life as a child. The sketch ends with a joke, as obliquely as it began, neatly sliced. A joke, however, that aptly completes the poet's portrayal of himself. Lowell's father, in the piece, has been forced by his superior to spend nights away from home at the naval compound, and he is ribbed about this by an old Navy buddy: "I know why Young Bob is an only child."

But drawn in one direction by his childhood, Lowell is drawn even within the memories of his childhood in the other direction by death. "(A)lways inside me is the child who died," he says in "Night Sweat" (For the Union Dead), "always inside me is his will to die—" And, Lowell avers in "Death and the Maiden" ("Circles, 19," Notebook), "A good ear hears its own death talking."

Death is the simple fact ("You were alive. You are dead.": "Alfred Corning Clark," For the Union Dead) that opens to the common mystery, the ultimate poet's question: "'But tell me, / Cal, why did we live? Why do we die?'" ("Randall Jarrell," History). It becomes in fact part of Lowell's grim bond with his fellow poets and the source of a wry recapitulation of his career:

      Ah the swift vanishing of my older
      generation—the deaths, suicide, madness
      of Roethke, Berryman, Jarrell and Lowell,
      'the last the most discouraging of all
      surviving to dissipate Lord Weary's Castle
      and nine subsequent useful poems
      in the seedy grandiloquence of Notebook.'
 
      ("Last Night," History)

Consistently through Lowell's corpus death supplies a haunting keynote:

      Fifty-one years, how many millions gone—
 
               … hear it, hear the clopping
      of the hundreds of horses unstopping … each
      hauls a coffin.
 
      ("Half a Century Gone, 5," Notebook)

And at an extreme death grows to an embodiment of the poet's work. In "Reading Myself" (Notebook 1967–68) Lowell shifts the metaphor of his work as honey-comb—"circle to circle, cell to cell, / the wax and honey of a mausoleum"—through that last image to the analogy, "this open book … my open coffin."

Even though his poetry virtually embalms him before our eyes, Lowell is not averse to gallows humor. Or is this the undertone of an unearthly wish?

      sleep is lovely, death is better still,
      not to have been born is of course the miracle.
 
      ("Heine Dying in Paris, I: Death and Morphine," Imitations)

Impossible miracle for the child already born into life's continuum, prey to its inevitable changes: "They say fear of death is a child's remembrance / of the first desertion." ("During a Transatlantic Call," The Dolphin).

Yet even while chronicling his own aging in his poems, (while indulging in the delight and detritus of his marriages), Lowell retains an adolescent élan, at least wistfulness:

                        … it's the same for me
      at fifty as at thirteen, my childish thirst
      for the grown-ups in their open cars and girls….
 
      ("Through the Night, 1," Notebook 1967–68)

Growing old he does not, perhaps, grow adult. Writing for his adolescent daughter, Lowell sees her growing "too fast apace, / too fast adult; no, not adult, mature." ("Growth," Notebook 1967–68) He too, perhaps, matures without calcifying.

Born and bred of good Boston stock, Lowell set out, like Yeats, to do just one thing, to write poetry well, according to Hugh B. Staples, the first critic to deal with Lowell's poetry at book-length. Equipped with the wherewithal to live, and so the leisure to write, appropriately bull-headed (skeptical indeed of Yeats's achievement; what did Yeats really accomplish, he once told Staples, aside from leaving us "about four-hundred lyrics"), Lowell became a poet, discovering in the process that "Poets die adolescents" ("Fishnet," The Dolphin).

Are we, in fact, to regard him as a chronic adolescent? His precocious success with Lord Weary, his circling through his works the last decade, writing and rewriting, self-absorbed (insecure?), so seriously cocooning himself in the orbit of his psychic concerns—America's grand adolescent laureate?

III. His Reputation

Robert Lowell's persistent rewriting might have made us wonder at one time whether he would ever surpass the "four-hundred lyrics" he credited to Yeats. Yet today the critical writing on Lowell's position in American letters grows redundant. He has become for some a kind of American Yeats, not only bridging poetic tradition and the ragbone present, but turning out as well dramas that recast for us Classical and American myths, plays like those of the Old Glory trilogy that test our ancestral beliefs against our ancestors' and our own actions. In our present mood of eulogy, as in the wake of his lionization three decades ago, to evaluate Robert Lowell's work in a mode other than speculative is to attempt the common and the impossible.

What will come of the intellectual tradition that many have taken Lowell to represent? What of Robert Bly, called by some Lowell's most intransigent critic? Are his attacks on the Kenyon Review clique, Lowell included, and the anti-surrealist academics, along with his advocacy of "leaping poetry" (see Leaping Poetry, 1975), part of communist plot, or has Bly revealed the arc that will carry American poetry into its future? What of some voices who have been plainly showing us truths all along: Denise Levertov, David Ignatow, William Stafford, all poets in our world? And what do the Irish think of Yeats today anyway?

In its obituary of Robert Lowell last September 14, the Bangor (Me.) Daily News remarked, "James Russell Lowell, foremost American man of letters in his times, was Robert Lowell's great-grandfather…." Born in 1819, James Russell Lowell died in 1891. In our time we remember too that Walt Whitman lived from 1819 to 1892.

So we might do well, at least for now, to think of Robert Lowell as a person and a poet in his own age, instead of as an idol for the ages.

While he attended Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, after a requisite year at Harvard, Robert Lowell roomed with Peter Taylor, today one of our finest storytellers. During their time under the tutelage of John Crowe Ransom (Jarrell appearing as Instructor for a year as well), Taylor, Lowell and a handful of hardy fellow-artists also survived the rigors of watching the frat-jock parades down Kenyon's famed Middle Path, where every Tuesday night's songfest included a lyrical toast to "The first of Kenyon's goodly race / … that great man Philander Chase." A friend who has just graduated from Kenyon assures me that not only was Philander Chase a real personage, but the parading and singing still go on along the Middle Path. As in Taylor's story of double romantic disillusionment, "1939," Lowell and his friends, reprobates all, continue to haunt Kenyon.

Lowell has written: "In truth I seem to have felt mostly the joys of living; in remembering, in recording, thanks to the gift of the Muse, it is the pain." ("Afterthought," Notebook)

Thanks to "1939" we see Lowell, even before he knows the harsh reality of love lost in Manhattan, in the self-consumed, self-consuming, sober attitude of the artist as youth that pervades his work, that causes us perhaps to call him a latter-day and peculiar Romantic, in this case the adolescent the father of the man:

We walked the country road for miles in every direction, talking every step of the way about ourselves or about our writing, or if we exhausted those two dearer subjects, we talked about whatever we were reading at the time. We read W. H. Auden and Yvor Winters and Wyndham Lewis and Joyce and Christopher Dawson. We read The Wings of the Dove (aloud!) and The Cosmological Eye and The Last Puritan and In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. (Of course, I am speaking only of books that didn't come within the range of the formal courses we were taking in the college.) On our walks through the country—never more than two or three of us together—we talked and talked, but I think none of us ever listened to anyone's talk but his own. Our talk seemed always to come to nothing. But our walking took us past the sheep farms and orchards and past some of the stone farmhouses that are scattered throughout that township. It brought us to the old quarry from which most of the stone for the college buildings and for the farmhouses had been taken, and brought us to Quarry Chapel, a long since deserted and 'deconsecrated' chapel, standing on a hill two miles from the college and symbolizing there the failure of Episcopalianism to take root among the Ohio country people. Sometimes we walked along the railroad track through the valley at the foot of the college hill, and I remember more than once coming upon two or three tramps warming themselves by a little fire they had built or even cooking a meal over it. We would see them may be a hundred yards ahead, and we would get close enough to hear them laughing and talking together. But as soon as they noticed us we would turn back and walk in the other direction, for we pitied them and felt that our presence was an intrusion. And yet, looking back on it, I remember how happy those tramps always seemed. And how sad and serious we were.