The Poetry of Lowell by Robert Lowell

First published:Land of Unlikeness, 1944; Lord Weary’s Castle, 1946; The Mills of the Kavanaughs, 1951; Life Studies, 1959; Imitations, 1961; For the Union Dead, 1964; Near the Ocean, 1967

Critical Evaluation:

Of the generation of American poets who came to prominence in the years following World War II, Robert Lowell has emerged as the acknowledged master and, evidently, the most likely candidate for greatness, the odds-on favorite to fill the shoes of our century’s first generation of poets, the generation which included Pound, Eliot, Williams, Stevens, and Frost. In the 1960’s he has managed to win acceptance and unquestioned recognition by all cliques and schools of contemporary poetry and by a dazzling array of critics at home and abroad. While it must be admitted that some of his reputation is the result of pervasive American insistence upon celebrity in all aspects of our culture, still it represents no slight achievement for Lowell and, equally important, seems to indicate an end to the long, tedious, and largely phony cold war between “the academics” and “the Beats.” In point of fact, Robert Lowell has been recognized as a poet of repute since his LORD WEARY’S CASTLE was published and won for him the coveted Pulitzer Prize, but for a poet to fulfill his early promise and to gain steadily in stature and popularity is rare, especially during a period of literary conflict, questioning, and change.

LORD WEARY’S CASTLE was a powerful and, within the extremely limited precincts of the world of modern poetry, popular introduction to the new formalism which dominated American poetry for a decade following. World War II interrupted the continuity of American poetry. It is hard, except by going through the books and anthologies of the 1930’s, to remember or recapture the prewar literary milieu, but in general the establishment was characterized by a deep concern for the social problems of the Depression, an attempt to employ the vernacular American idiom in poetry, not only for more freedom and richness and variety in language, but also in the hope of reaching out to a larger audience. The underground movement of that period was composed of the Fugitives, who cultivated journalism in verse, together with ambiguity, intellectual and personal complexity, traditionalism, and an apparently aristocratic view of the poet’s function. Politically and socially they called themselves Agrarians, being so at least in their distaste for the excesses wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Regionally they were Middle Southern, and theologically they tended to be high church Episcopalians with definite affinities toward Roman Catholicism. They were academics at a time when the relationship between writers and the academics were not so cozy as they are today. Their leader was John Crowe Ransom and their special hero was T. S. Eliot in England. It is hard to realize the influence these men and women have had on American poetry and fiction. The exemplary amount of either produced by the group has been relatively small. But they wrote a great many reviews and a great deal of criticism, taking over and breathing life into quiet quarterlies, and they taught, directly and in a formal context, many of the young men who would in the years following World War II move to prominence on the literary scene. One of these was Robert Lowell.

It is possible that Lowell, at least in his early books, is the best pupil the Fugitives ever had; and they rallied around him and his work with alacrity and enthusiasm. Yet he seems an unlikely representative of the movement. Coming from a long and distinguished New England tradition, he has shown little sympathy for the South or things Southern or, indeed, interest in these things. His heritage was Puritan, yet he rebelled against it and became a convert to Catholicism, with the additional complexity that he was a conscientious objector during World War II, at a time when his new-found Church did not recognize that position as legitimate. Nor did the courts, and he was punished by imprisonment for his beliefs. This personal courage and commitment became meaningful to the poets, those who survived to write poems, who came back; and Karl Shapiro spoke for many of them when he referred to Lowell as the conscience to which other young poets returned.

There are many conflicts obvious in even this impersonal and casual view of Lowell as poet, and conflict is the essence of LORD WEARY’S CASTLE. His personal struggles with his heritage and the present and future of the society are reined in tightly in strict forms, strict rhythms, and solid rhymes. The effect is often the moment before an explosion, a highly dramatic moment. The verse is demanding, requiring as was the custom at the time, some notes, ambiguous, allusive, knotty, and what was then called “tough-minded.” The transitions were swift and almost cinematic in abruptness. But the essence of any poetry is voice, the language and especially the verbal texture, which distinguishes the work of one poet from another. Lowell showed from the first a good ear for a wide range of language, from the straightforward cadences of the spoken idiom to the high resonance of classical and Biblical rhetoric. The texture was as rough and rocky as the New England earth, almost anti-poetic in its hardness. There was a “tension”—a word very popular with the Fugitives who by this time were called the New Critics—between the rugged texture and the smoothness of felicitous metrics and exact rhymes.

The complexity of Lowell’s imagery is vaguely reminiscent of Hart Crane, and it may be relevant that Allen Tate, who was Lowell’s teacher and friend as well as a friend of Hart Crane, has written that what prevented Crane from greatness was the lack of an ordered and controlling philosophy or a belief like Roman Catholicism. Finally, it should be noted that Lowell displayed a real affinity toward the Fugitives in his strong dislike for the things of modern civilization.

With LORD WEARY’S CASTLE, Lowell had arrived. Four years later came THE MILLS OF THE KAVANAUGHS, described as “a collection of seven dreams, fantasies, and monologues.” These were long poems, basically narrative in form, yet combining the strict formality of his earlier work in the longer forms, and sustaining and expanding the areas of interest demonstrated in the earlier book: history, his heritage, Catholicism, the classics, and the Bible. There was no diminishment of power, and the poems represent a remarkable achievement of sustained power and energy. They carried certain aspects of Lowell’s technique to its limits, almost to the breaking point. This book served to consolidate his reputation, yet at the same time it raised a question: where would he go from there? Eight years later LIFE STUDIES appeared, surprising many with its apparent difference and new directions. During those years the American literary scene had changed somewhat. Men of Lowell’s generation, most of them formalists, were now respectable in the academies. Most of them were teaching and already gifted pupils were turning out good and passable imitations of their work. Meanwhile another group, equally academic in education and background, was rebelling. These were the so-called Beats. In one sense they represented a nostalgic return to the prewar poetry. They rejected the rules and idiom of the New Critics. They made an effort to be popular poets, to speak in the vernacular idiom, including obscenity and profanity, to and for a larger audience. They rejected Eliot and set up William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound as literary heroes. They received a great deal of publicity and they devoted a large amount of their time, effort, and their verse to attacking the “Academics.” LIFE STUDIES came as a great relief to many poets and critics on both sides, for they all knew one another and many had been schoolmates. They wanted some form of negotiated peace, and Lowellseemed to supply the answer. The Academics were willing to listen to reason, willing to relax to keep up with the times, and the Beats were realizing that publicity and popular interest did not increase the reading audience of poetry. There remained a limited audience which would have to be shared by both. The conditions were ripe for settlement. Robert Lowell was acceptable to both sides. He had proved himself to the formalists. His passion, indignation, suffering, and the now widely-known vicissitudes of his personal life qualified him, by definition, as at least an honorary Beat.

LIFE STUDIES is a mixture of things. Part One contains a few exciting poems in his earlier manner. Part Two, entitled “91 Revere Street” is a long, personal reminscence in prose, a kind of short novel. Part Three is a short collection of literary sketches or snapshots, sometimes using rhyme, but more free and colloquial than anything he had done so far. The final section returns to his personal concerns, his family background and present troubles, but with a significant difference. It is now much more explicitly personal, sometimes openly confessional. The verse is often free in form. The old tough texture and the voice is there, but the form and method seem new. Moreover, this quality of the explicit manifests itself in a direct dealing with social concerns. Lowell speaks out against racial prejudice, injustice, urban blight, and President Eisenhower. In short, LIFE STUDIES, while compromising none of his skill and power, manages to make a wedding of the two dominant and established modes of the period.

In the years following LIFE STUDIES, Lowell seems to have devoted himself to translation, to assimilation of those voices in the European tradition which interest him. His free adaptation of PHAEDRA was performed and highly praised, and in 1961 IMITATIONS, a collection of his translations appeared, together with an introduction which explained his method of translation and, by implication, a part of his developed poetics. The book was intended as a special kind of European poetry anthology, exploring the dark, working against the grain, and in historical time ranging from Homer and Sappho through Boris Pasternak. It was to be called IMITATIONS because, in fact, these were original poems, based on the tone and mood of the model in another language and filtered through the consciousness and sensibility of Lowell himself. It is possible that Lowell exaggerated the novelty of his method; for this kind of translation by adaptation and imitation has a long history in our language, and Lowell had already done some similar versions—“War /(After Rimbaud),” “Charles the Fifth and the Peasant/(After Valery),” “The Shako/(After Rilke),” the “Ghost/(After Sextus Propertius),” and others—in LORD WEARY’S CASTLE. But the significance of an entire book of these imitations, coupled with an assertive and explicit introduction, was twofold. In a personal sense it was a kind of advertisement for himself, or, perhaps better, an honest recognition that he had now achieved recognition and stature, a boldly open declaration that he was now fully a major poet. Secondly, though not unrelated to the first effect, it was a further declaration of independence from the so-called Academic school. Some of his peers and colleagues had been translating, a bit more strictly, for some time. Among the very finest of these was Richard Wilbur whose two very accurate translations of Moliere, LE MISANTHROPE and TARTUFFE, elegantly rendered line by line and rhyme by rhyme, but always with amazing flexibility, had preceded PHAEDRA in performance. But in any case Lowell’s method serves to illustrate his deliberate attempt to dissociate himself from what he believed to be a more academic approach to translation. IMITATIONS, accepted on its own terms, was seen clearly as a book bound together by what was Lowell’s and thus a major contribution to the canon of a major poet. The book not only was a critical success, but it also sold well, and this fact is quite unusual for a contemporary poet’s work. Moreover, the earlier books were brought out again in paperback and sold widely and well. For the first time in many years a serious poet at the peak of his creative powers had managed to achieve the highest critical praise and at the same time reach a wider audience than either he or his contemporaries had ever reached before. Special as it is, IMITATIONS was at once a breakthrough and a bulwark to Lowell’s already secure position.

By 1965, Lowell had a double bill of plays, THE OLD GLORY, successfully produced in New York and had seen published his most important collection of poems to date, FOR THE UNION DEAD. This book, containing poems written between 1956 and 1964, is varied and dazzling in its variety. It can also be seen as exemplary of internal peacemaking, for he includes poems in the earlier, taut manner as well as poems as free in form and more so than those in LIFE STUDIES. In addition, he acknowledges in a “Note” at the beginning that he has gone back to recast or rewrite some of the earlier poems. There is in FOR THE UNION DEAD not only a greater sense and appreciation of the audience, but also a firm commitment to poetry as a responsible rhetorical dialogue with that audience. Though the same basic subjects and concerns are there, there is at the same time a greater ease, frankness, and open quality than ever before, a confidence in his place and power. The title poem, a set piece of reminiscence and association based on the St. Gaudens bronze relief of Colonel Shaw and the bell-cheeked Negro infantry he led, which had appeared as the final poem in FOR THE UNION DEAD, becomes the key to the “new” Lowell. In the ever-present, very present conflict of racial integration and assimilation, he sides proudly, in fact vehemently for a conscientious objector, with the old New England abolitionist tradition, fire-breathing in his condemnation not only of injustice elsewhere but also in his rage and contempt for the indifference of his own townsmen.

At an age when poets of the recent past, men of great stature like Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, were just beginning to receive the first preliminary signs of recognition, Robert Lowell has already earned as a matter of course the appellation “leader of mid-century poetry.” As his audience has grown and together with it the audience for modern poetry, and as he himself has continued to grow and develop, it would seem that Robert Lowell may stand the best chance of any poet of his generation to earn and receive the laurels reserved for the truly great poets. But there are obstacles ahead. For one thing, it is possible to argue that his poems have changed very little except superficially, not half so much as his critics and he seem to believe, from the earliest poems. There are slight differences in form, but the concerns and attitudes may or may not have deepened and matured. The matter is ambiguous and debatable. Success has not always been kind to American writers. Early and sustained success tends, if history is a guide, to be unkind. The child of Fortune often ends as the slave of Fortune. In recent interviews as well as in the introductory notes to his last two published volumes Lowell has shown a disconcerting and dangerously self-conscious concern for ratings on what Robert Frost called “the literary stockmarket” and his place in it. It has sometimes proved a fatal mistake to try to write history in advance. Finally, now that Lowell’s deep personal problems are public property, in the sense that he has made frank and explicit use of them in his poems, there is, inevitably, a genuine question in the mind of his reader as to whether or not he has or ever will overcome some of these problems. So long as they are manageable they are subjects for poetry, but the question remains as to whether these confessional poems are therapeutic and liberating, as Lowell would seem to think, or perhaps symptomatic and ultimately inhibiting. Neither concern and hopeful wishes nor Lowell’s firm belief will answer these questions. History will write its own answers in due time. Meanwhile America has a first-rate poet whose art has earned for him a place of honor and distinction.

Bibliography

Axelrod, Steven Gould, ed. The Critical Response to Robert Lowell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Cosgrave, Patrick. The Public Poetry of Robert Lowell. New York: Taplinger, 1970.

Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1982.

Mariani, Paul L. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.

Perloff, Marjorie G. The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973.

Wallingford, Katherine. Robert Lowell’s Language of the Self. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Williamson, Alan. Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974.