I had hoped that Robert Lowell, after the disastrous collections of recent years, would emerge into old age with energy and genius as Yeats had done. But when Lowell died last September, he had just published Day by Day, a volume as slack and meretricious as Notebook and History which preceded it. The great poet died thirteen years earlier, with the publication of For the Union Dead.

One would not know it, from the book reviews or from the academy. The Literature Industry manufactures truisms like slogans. For years … we have known that Robert Lowell was our greatest living poet. No matter how self-indulgent his latest self-imitation, the New York Times Book Review would agree to its genius. I suspect that this inflation—made windier now by his death—helped precipitate the appalling decline in Lowell's achievement. (p. 7)

After I read Day by Day, depressed by its trashiness, I looked back at Lord Weary's Castle again; it is great poetry, and with The Mills of the Kavanaghs, Life Studies, and For the Union Dead adds a strong poet to American literature. But our literature … is characterized by writers who do not grow old in their art, but who fly high and explode and crash. We do not deny the height if we deplore the crash. Lowell's downfall began earlier, but was confirmed by Notebook 1967–1968 in 1969, and by the frantic revisions and new poems—seven volumes in nine years—that followed. The original Notebook assembled hundreds of blank verse fourteen-liners—diffuse and self-serving gossip, slovenly clichés assembled with a zeal like Roget's. And the New York Times, in a front page review, declared it a masterpiece. (p. 8)

If one had spent the years since Life Studies in Antarctica, let us say, and visited one's local book store on one's 1977 return to check up on Lowell—one would have discovered … cliché. Not ironic cliché, not arguable cliché—just good old Edwin Newman cliché, the sort of cinderblock that publicity releases are built with: "I blushed to acknowledge …" / "… His heart is swallowed in his throat…." For hyperbole one would have found: "a limb that weighed a ton." For a clever way to describe restoring a house, one would have found, "putting the place on its feet."…

Day by Day has more dead metaphors than it has live ones. These dead metaphors—"lost in the clouds" / "brink of adolescence"—carry no lively sense of idiom, as one might hope …, but reveal a poet no longer custodian of the language of the tribe….

One result of dead metaphor is mixed metaphor. When Lowell has children ["dart like minnows"], he turns them into swift objects ejected from blow-guns by pygmies (or into feathered toys hurled in English pubs); then he turns the children instantly into tiny fish; because of the deadness of both metaphors, we take neither image seriously, so the dart's feathers do not metamorphose into fins—at the precise expense of image, of intensity, of concentration. (p. 9)

Day by Day is as loose in grammatical connections as it is loose in metaphorical coherence; lines wander down the page, unconnected with each other…. [The many] endstopped parallel lines—rhythm gone slack—leave us no sinew or syntax to hold the one perception to the other.

If the language of Day by Day is trite, and its connections unfixed, its overall tone proclaims the lassitude and despondency of self-imitation. Again and again, Lowell heaps adjectives before a noun, collapsing clauses into modifiers, a mannerism which once carried energy and invention. Again and again, Lowell fakes cloture with a little leap to one side, away from his poem's apparent thrust—a routine that was new in Life Studies. Self-imitation—the famous "voice" for which critics praise Lowell—appears adjunct to self-regard. A weary narcissism pervades these poems, whining its complaints. (pp. 9-10)

I don't know whether Lowell sought criticism in his last decade. If he found good criticism, he paid it no heed. His own sad generation of poets died off. Replacing it—or what it might have been—was the uncritical and automatic paean of the Literature Industry, which allowed no thought that Homer, flattered and celebrated and growing old, might nod into imbecility.

In twenty years, no one will praise Day by Day. There will be reaction against Lowell, and it will be severe, unfair, and sheep-like. Sheep-critics will throw Lord Weary's Castle and Life Studies out with Notebook and For Lizzie and Harriet. In the longer run, of course, the poetry will endure: as long as there are libraries, as long as there is an American language, "After the Surprising Conversions," "Mother Marie Therèse," and "Skunk Hour" will sing out their lines to the ears of people who love poems. Day by Day will remain a sad footnote to the corruption of a great poet, and to the corruption of the Literature Industry in the latter third of our century. (pp. 11-12)