Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

late 1950s — early 1960s

Robert Lowell, born in 1917, is the Prodigal Son of the “Pilgrim Fathers,” the Concord Transcendentalists, and the nineteenth-century industrialists. He is considered by nearly all of the good critics, American or English, as the greatest poet of the generation following that of Pound, Cummings, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, etc. In the years 1940–1950, his work was for Americans a surprise almost as great as that, some years later and in a totally different way, of Dylan Thomas for the English.

T. S. Eliot predicted that, with the battle won for “free verse” and demotic language in poetry, there would be a return to formal meter and stanza, even “intricated,” and to strict rhyme. The poems of Robert Lowell seem to have come to fulfill that prophecy, and sooner than was expected. His first book, Land of Unlikeness, was published in 1944, in an edition limited to 150 copies. His first trade book was Lord Weary’s Castle, 1946, which made him famous and for which he received, among other honors, the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Some years later there appeared The Mills of the Kavanaughs, and more recently Life Studies. Since the publication of Life Studies, Lowell has devoted some of his time to translation; in 1961, we had his translation of Racine’s Phaedra. A book of shorter translations, from Baudelaire, Rilke, Montale, Pasternak, etc., appeared recently under the title Imitations. Lowell deliberately chose this word to describe his technique in translation; the poems are far from being literal translations; they constitute, in reality, new poems, in the already famous Lowell style. And as such they are praised by those who admire that style and criticized by those who prefer the more common form of word-for-word translation.

Lowell is of course a famous New England name. There is a city called Lowell that evolved around the Lowell mills of cotton textiles in the early nineteenth century. Robert Lowell is related to the famous nineteenth-century poet James Russell Lowell (who for many years was Ambassador to England) and also to the celebrated poet of “free verse,” Amy Lowell. He was born and raised in Boston, with the privileges but also the burdens accompanying that powerful local name. As expected, he went to Harvard, but he couldn’t adapt, and two years later transferred to Kenyon College, in Ohio, where he had as his “mentor” the southern Agrarian poet and “New Critic,” John Crowe Ransom.

At the beginning of the war, Lowell made a first attempt to enlist in the navy (his father had been a naval officer), but he was rejected for reasons of health. During the course of the war, however, he changed his mind about things and, when he was finally drafted for military service, he refused to serve. The United States had hundreds of conscientious objectors working in hospitals and special camps, but since Lowell had failed to register as a “pacifist,” he was sent to jail as a common criminal. Before that, he had already shocked his family and the city of his birth, by turning against New England Calvinism, even to the point of becoming a convert to Catholicism. I believe that at this time — like Eliot, Auden and others — he is a practicing Anglican. His poetry is profoundly religious and rich in biblical and ecclesiastical images, primarily so in his first two books. His religious interpretation of the world is in the tradition of his New England “ancestors”: the Mathers, Jonathan Edwards, Thoreau (who also went to jail), Hawthorne, etc. and the Brook Farm group.

It cannot be denied that, to the uninitiated reader, his poetry is difficult. Yet (in contrast, I think, to some of the more popular poems of Dylan Thomas), Lowell’s poetry, always totally honest with the reader, is invariably written in perfectly logical syntax and meaning. One’s initial difficulty, at times, lies in knowing what the poem’s subject actually is. Many of his poems are dramatic, spoken by different characters; on this score, he has been frequently compared to Browning. But, once one knows the scene and the character, the poem itself, despite its being subtle, involved, and full of linguistic associations — an astonishing mixture of demotic and formal language — is always lucid.

In the strange title of his second book, Lord Weary’s Castle, there is already embedded in part an explanation of Lowell’s poetry. It comes from the old ballad about a poor stonemason named “Lambkin” who built a castle for one Lord Weary, but who was deprived of his just payment. In this legend Lowell sees a parable for the modern world — the “castle”—the crushing superstructure of our civilization. Randall Jarrell, in Poetry and the Age, describes Lord Weary’s Castle : “The poems understand the world as a sort of conflict of opposites. In this struggle one opposite is that cake of custom in which all of us lie embedded … the inertia of the stubborn self … the obstinate persistence in evil that is damnation … imperialism, militarism, capitalism, Calvinism … the ‘proper Bostonians,’ the rich.… But struggling within this … is everything that is free or open, that … willingness that is itself salvation … the Grace that has replaced the Law, of the perfect liberator whom the poet calls Christ.”

The poems in this book and in The Mills of the Kavanaughs are almost all in rigorous stanzaic form with the frequent enjambment that has become Lowell’s characteristic mark. This technique gives these poems of profound religious belief and anguish, which were written during the war, their affect of urgency, panic almost.

In Life Studies, published in 1959, the heavy-beat rhythms and trumpet sounds are modified, modulated. The lines still rhyme, but irregularly so, and their extension depends more on phrasing that is natural or breath-like than on strophic forms. These poems are almost always elegiac and autobiographical, on everything that is his, family, father and mother, wife (he is married to Elizabeth Hardwick, the renowned literary critic and novelist) and only child. Lowell’s language is as grand, as moving, as brutal, at times, as formerly — but the poems are full of “humor,” of compassion, and of a simple affection for persons and places.

I have heard Brazilians affirm that the American writer Dreiser, for example, is a better writer than Henry James! And I believe that the same type of Brazilian reader might well make the same mistake about Lowell’s poems by deciding that Robert Frost or Carl Sandburg or even our rather pathetic “beat poets” come closer to the idea than he does to what should be the true “American” poet. To those readers I can only say this: the idea they have of American literature (and, incidentally, of America itself) is wrong. Our great, though difficult, artist-craftsmen — including, among others, James and Lowell — are the finest representatives of American literature.

Simply because the course of the language of poetry in English diverged so much from the same course in the Latin languages, Lowell will probably appear to the Brazilians to be more exotic stylistically than he really is. The battle to write poetry that is “at least as well written as prose,” as Pound used to say, and in spoken language, had almost been won by 1920. It must be difficult for Brazilian readers to realize that in this domain (I refer only to demotic language versus “poetic” language), English poetry is many decades ahead of poetry in the Latin languages. Lowell represents a sharp change in direction, even, if you wish, a turning backwards. Like Dryden, he once again made poetry hard, difficult, soaring, and masculine. In reality, the arts, it is clear, cannot be compared, but, by means that are very different from those employed by our “action painters,” Lowell expresses, with the same energy and beauty, the problems that any citizen of the United States who is over forty, has already faced and continues to face: the Depression, the War (or Wars), the Affluent Society, the ethics of foreign relations, the Bomb.