Little Review: Robert Lowell, Collected Poems

[I wrote this a few months ago, before I took Ron Silliman to task about his "School of Quietude" business. It's really just a scan of the book -- the "Mills of the Kavanaughs" is probably more a curse than a blessing, even for "Lowell fans," but I still think the book is important and a great read. I think my lines about Browning, brief as they are, are key considering Browning's huge impact on Pound -- I think Lowell got Browning much better than Pound did (a comparison of the three pre "Cantos" and "Mesmerism" to "After Surprising Conversions" testify to that), even if he could never achieve the scale. There's a little Browning in all of us -- even in Charles Bernstein ("The Klupzy Girl" especially) and in that poem of RS's dedicated to CB, "What," which starts with an allusion to that very poem. I'll explain all of this later in my radio interview with the BBC.]

Robert Lowell
Collected Poems
Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Lowell died in 1977, about a year after John Ashbery -- a poet who writes nothing like him, but who would displace him as the major living figure of his time -- won a triple crown of literary awards (including the Pulitzer) for Self Portrait In A Convex Mirror, which in hindsight could be seen as the oblique, Chinese cousin of the elder poet's landmark 1959 collection Life Studies. One can't help, reading through this massive, spellbinding volume, mourning some of what has been lost in American poetry since Partisan Review crowd was in the ascendant: an earnestness about writing (and rewriting) poetry in a bid for immortality (Berryman's narcissism may have killed any frank courting of this instinct), an intellectual aggressiveness that was more ethical than theoretic in nature (like Auden, Lowell's pacifist politics were often transparent, and he was a conscientious objector in WWII), an imagistic impulse that was best typified by Lowell's unerring sense of visual detail ("...octagonal red tiles, / sweaty with a secret dank, crummy with ant-stale; / a Rocky Mountain chaise lounge, / its legs, shellacked saplings." [162]) and an embodied, phantasmagoric sense of history and geography, highlighting that generation's greater chronological proximity to Pound and, before him, Robert Browning (and the Victorian habit of comparing one's "age" with a prior historical epoch, especially that of the Roman Empire). The greatest misfortune of Lowell's critical reception is that he would be called a "confessional" poet -- as Bidart's afterward essay notes, not only did Lowell carefully sift through details to preserve those with greatest aesthetic effect (he seemed to aspire to a Mallarmean impersonality despite his accented vulnerability), but these details themselves were sometimes stolen from the lives of his peers, such as the following famous "autobiographical" lines, lifted from an anecdote told by Delmore Schwartz's wife: "It's the injustice… he is so unjust -- / whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five. / My only thought is how to keep him alive. / What makes him tick? Each night now I tie / ten dollars and his car key to my thigh…" Lowell fans will be delighted to see the full version of "The Mills of the Kavanaughs," cut down to a handful of stanzas for the Selected Poems, as well as the complete Land of Unlikeness, his awkward first book which he never allowed to be reprinted (and which, containing earlier versions of poems in award-winning Lord Weary's Castle, appears as a humbling appendix); a small group of unfinished and late poems is also included. The ambitious blank verse sonnet-sequence History, never as popular as the "confessional" books, shows him confronting the specter of Browning with prismatic, distinctive voicings of historical figures from Caligula to William Carlos Williams: "Ninth grade, and bicycling the Jersey highways: I am a writer. I was a half-wasp already / I changed my shirt and trousers twice a day." (578) Not enough can be said to encourage the reader to absorb, even attack, this book, from beginning to end or skipping around, to make an adventure of how Lowell's style -- "lurid, rapid, garish, grouped / heightened from life, / yet paralyzed by fact" (838), from his earliest poems to several late, unfinished works -- remained constant, yet occasionally swerved revealingly, with each poetic challenge.