ASPECTS OF RODERT LOWELL

...but we must do these things with all our passionate heart, for our own reasons, for our people, knowing our cause is just and worthy and speaks for all...

...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...

...And if they push things, their destiny can become their crime...

...It was said Herr was having trouble finishing up, that he didn't know how to end it...

...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...

...He had known Herr in Vietnam, the Esquire pieces were the best writing about the war, period...

...in remembering, in recording, thanks to the gift of the Muse, it is the pain...

...Later, after Lowell closed out the 50's with Li]e Studies, which made him as popular as any legitimate poet is likely to become today, and especially after his poems of the 9 December 1977:784 1960's had accumulated in Notebook 1967-68, some critics saw a devolution in his poetry and enshrined Lord Weary as Lowell's masterwork...

...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...

...On release in March, I sent this folkloric device as a gift to our Father General Arrupe, who was then celebrating his golden jubilee as a Jesuit...

...had I seen the new sectien called "Illumination Rounds" which appeared in New American Review...

...Lowell ihimself admitted to spending hours, days, choosing the proper word for a line...

...no, not adult, mature...

...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...

...One might argue over details of interpretation, but details are details...

...In "Reading Myself" (Notebook 196768) Lowell shifts the metaphor of his work as honeycomb---"circle to circle, cell to cell,/the wax and honey of a mausoleum"--through that last image to the analogy, "this open b o o k . . , my open coffin...

...On Skunk Hour," The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic, Boston 1964...

...Commonweal, Oct_9 11, 1946 9 December 1977:786 poems, (while indulging in the delight and detritus of his marriages), Lowell retains an adolescent 61an, at least wistfulness: _9 . . 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...

...To Peter Taylor on the Feast of the Epiphany;' Lord Weary) The self-assurance of Lowell's poems in Lord Weary impressed...

...The best gift I can think of is our own rebirth, our liberation...

...The press got all the facts . . . it got too many of them...

...We maintain a certain minimal flame of spirit---or we do not...

...We lost more than that in an hour on Guadalcanal.' . . . And those were 9 December 1977:788...

...And how sad and serious we were...

...He was nearly finished with a book of his own about the war, Two ot the Missing, but there was no edge of professional competitiveness in his voice when he talked about Herr's book...

...This is the alchemy, the witch's brew that once taken, levels our stature...

...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, off-centeredness in his evocations of the past, present and himself in relationship to himself--a difficulty in getting the equations right, a lack of perception...

...Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win i t . . . ' " "Hearts and minds, People o/the Republic, tumbling dominoes, maintaining the equilibrium o~ the Ding-dong by containing the ever-encroaching Doodah . . .'" "How do you /eel when a 19-year-old kid tells you /ram "the bottom o~ his heart that he's gotten too old/or this kind o/ shit...

...The open question ----open like a wound--was what it was, what it meant...

...But to speak out, to act out, to translate good intentions into sensible acts...

...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 himmthe sentiment is surely his...

...Death is the simple fact ("You were alive...

...The rhymes are necessary to Mr...

...We shall now have rhyme again for a while, rhymes completely missing the incentive...

...The history and politics of the war had been settled, more or less...

...a kind of American Yeats 1. 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...

...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...

...Change became a matter of shuffling lines, replacing words: rewriting became a prime writing method...

...We were at a party...

...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 hook-length...

...Hooker's heels Kicking at nothing in the shifting snow, A cannon and a cairn of cannon balls Rusting before the blackened Statehouse, know How the long horn of plenty broke like glass In Hooker's gauntlets...

...one raises nothing, not the dead, not a few questions of life and death...

...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...

...In its bed The ancient speckled serpent will appear, And black-eyed susan with her frizzled head_9 When Chancellorsville mowed down the volunteer, "All wars are boyish," Herman Melville said...

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

...Lowell...

...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...

...The issue I had hoped to raise, the deadly and doughy silence of American Jesuits and American Christians, with regard to the likely annihilation of all who walk the world, was of course not engaged...

...I had not, but later an American journalist living in Jerusalem, John Broder--he was waiting for Herr's book, too---sent me a Xerox copy, and it was just as good as Perry had said...

...Mary, hear O Mary, marry earth, sea, air and fire...

...Eliot pastor, rather than in the Catholic Church, which became, for a time, the exoskeleton of his emotions, ideas and images...

...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, Commonweal: 783 New York 1970...

...No ideas but in things," Williams proclaimed...

...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...

...Thus his titles evolve from the symbolic prominence of Land ol Unlikeness and Lord Weary's Castle to the pop-tune lyric, Day by Day...

...sleep is lovely, death is better still, not to have been born is of course the miracle...

...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 diem" And, Lowell avers in "Death and the Maiden" ("Circles, 19," Notebook), "A good ear hears its own death talking...

...When Satan scatters us on Rising-day, O Mother, snatch our bodies from the fire: Our sacred earth in our day was our curse...

...And secondly, we must offer strange gifts to authority...

...even before Nixon left office the American people had felt all they were going to feel about Vietnam...

...For dramatizing this unusual thought, I was sentenced to thirty days...

...We would see them maybe a hundred yards ahead, and we would get close enough to hear them laughing and talking together...

...Or is this the undertone of an unearthl~ wish...

...Journalists by legion had passed through the country...

...In "Randall Jarrell" (History) Lowell has his fellow poet tell him, "You didn't write, you rewrote...

...Growth," Notebook 1967-68) He too, perhaps, matures without calcifying...

...It is a time of leveling...

...IlL 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...

...Only a few objections have been recorded...

...His precocious success with Lord Weary, his circling through his works the last decade, writing and rewriting, self-absorbed (insecure...

...Not just another book on Vietnam--there were already dozens of those--but the big book on the war people felt had to be there, waiting to be written...

...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...

...Auden and Yvor Winters and Wyndham Lewis and Joyce and Christopher Dawson...

...As usual he has taken the rhyme~track for his effects...

...Something embarrassing, something sublime...

...But as soon as they noticed us we would turn back and walk in the other direction, /or we pitied them and/elt that our presence was an intrusion...

...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...

...Not crown of thorns, not ixon, not Lombard crown, Not grilled a~d spindle spires pointing to heaven Could save us...

...Alfred Coming Clark," For the Union Dead) that opens to the common mystery, the ultimate poet's question: . . . . But tell me,/Cal, why did we live...

...his vision of his (our...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...They were not expecting a book which would finally make America Wake Up...

...In its obituary of Robert Lowell last September 14, the Bangor (Me...

...If those first poems were evasive, they were evading an audience already tantalized...

...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 fellowartists 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 r a c e / . . , that great man Philander Chase...

...Santa in red Is crowned with wizened berries...

...On our walks through the country--never more than two or three of us together--we talked and talked, but 1 think none of us ever listened to anyone's talk but his own...

...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...

...world...

...Shall I hear, (O Mary...

...Twenty years ago I hung my stocking on the tree, and hell's Serpent entwined the apple in the toe To sting the child with knowledge...

...What will come of the intellectual tradition that many have taken Lowell to represent...

...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...

...We must not go in their direction hang dog, like dogs to their own hanging...

...First of all, we must continue to slip the chattels and cuffs from our hands (and feet and tongues and souls...

...unmarried man and powder-puppet, Witness to the Devil...

...H i s fascination for childhood in places recalls Jarrell's...

...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...

...Pray For us whom the blockbusters married and buried...

...Even though his poetry virtually embalms him before our eyes, Lowell is not averse to gallows humor...

...Last Night," History) Consistently through Lowell's corpus death supplies a~haunting keynote: Fifty-one years, how many millions gone--_9 . . hear it, hear the clopping of the hundreds of horses unstopping . . . each ROBERT LOWELL The Commonweal Poems THE DEAD IN EUROPE After the planes unloaded, we fell down Buried together, unmarried men and women...

...Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme--why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled...

...Michael Herr was doing a book on Vietnam...

...His stocking is full of stones...

...A straightfaced letter came back in due course, thanking me...

...Homosexuals should be content with their crepuscular status...

...If Lowell's marriage to h i s emblems was far-fetched, not many seemed to have noticed...

...Once I came from Mass...

...Yet today the critical writing on Lowell's position in American letters grows redundant...

...There was no end of things one might say about it, in the manner of people discussing a divorce, or a falling out among friends, or a death in the family...

...Equipped with the wherewithal to live, and so the leisure to write, appropriately bull-headed (skeptical indeed of Yeats's achievement...

...But we are old, our fields are running wild: Till Christ again turn wanderer and child...

...H. His Lile, 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...

...When publishers talked about the big book on the war they meant something which would land like a bombshell, major ad promo and national author's tour, Book-of-the-Month and a million dollar paperback contract, front-page review in the Times and a Time or Newsweek cover, all America talking and stacks a hundred high in the book section of every department store in the land...

...But our walking took us past the sheep farms and orchards and past some of the stone farmhouses that Commonweal: 787 are scattered throughout that township...

...Why do we die?'" ("Randall Jarrell," History...

...You are Commonweal: 785 dead...

...Between the publications of Life Studies and Notebook 1967-68, Donald Hall, writing the introduction to the Penguin Contemporary American Poetry (Baltimore 1962), concluded: "When he wrote Life Studies, Robert Lowell sent his muse to the atelier of William Carlos Williams (from that of Allen Tate...

...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...

...Our Mother, shall we rise on Mary's day In Maryland, wherever corpses married Under the rubble, bundled together...

...Inthe early poems of Land ol Unlikeness and Lord Weary's Castle he writes at his most emblematic...

...Catholicism and its influence on his early poetry...

...As we were rounded up, I ~,as able to slip from my wrists the plastic cuffs wherein I was held, and conceal them on my person...

...And the artifice of Lowell's third volume, The Mills o] the Kavanaughe, caused Williams to temper a favorable review: In his new book Robert Lowell gives us six firstrate poems of which we may well be proud...

...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...

...In "91 Revere Street," a rare piece of Lowell prose which serves as Part Two of Lite Studies in the American edition, Lowell precisely details his family life as a child...

...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...

...I am cold: I ask for bread, my father gives me mould...

...Michael Herr, Dispatches People were talking about it as long ago as 1969...

...What of some voices who have been plainly showing us truths all along: Denise Levertov, David Ignatow, William Stafford, all poets in our world...

...Raise us, Mother, we fell down Here hugger-mugger in the jellied fire: Our sacred earth in our day was our curse...

...Lowell has written: "In truth I seem to have felt mostly the joys of living...

...The sketch ends with a joke, as obliquely as it began, neatly sliced...

...come along, that freedom road...

...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...

...But it never ]ound a way to report meaningluUy about d e a t h . . . " " "Oh, two hundred isn't anything...

...We were declaring, however symbolically and mildly, that the destruction of the world by ever bigger and newer nukes, seemed a not good idea...

...Or his revelation sulficed...

...as a public event the war was over...

...Snakes, dragons, other biblical and/or allusive figures haunt Lowell's pages...

...But drawn in one direction by his childhood, Lowell is drawn even within the memories of his childhood in the other direction by death...

...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...

...We read The Wings of the Dove (aloud...

...But the book did not appear...

...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 commonplace that Williams gives us...

...In February last, I was placed in durance once more by the United States for standing at the Pentagon along with some friends...

...A joke, however, that aptly completes the poet's portrayal of himself...

...As in Taylor's story of double romantic disillusionment, "1939," Lowell and his friends, reprobates all, continue to haunt Kenyon...

...In retrospect, though, Lowell's true faith appears to have been in the Western tradition, T.S...

...so seriously cocooning himself in the orbit of his psychic concerns--America's grand adolescent laureate...

...American society, and the American church, will tolerate us as parasites, or peaceniks, or good abstract paper-pushing academics, or hapless citizens with grievances to be referred to Congress or polls or votes or bread or circuses or confession or good works...

...The cannon on the Common cannot stun The blundering butcher as he rides on Time-The barrel clinks with holly...

...He must, to his mind, appear to surmount them...

...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...

...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, o n c e . . . and had flashes when I first found a humor for myself in images, farfetched misalliance that made evasions a revelation...

...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...

...And there are worse outcomes...

...But Herr could write, his eyes had been open, his early pieces on Khe Sanh and Hue in Esquire in no way resembled the flat, grey reports which appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post...

...Our talk seemed always to come to nothing...

...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 mow sters dragged down into the bog and death by their ponderous armor...

...Or we do not...

...We can go along with their silencing us, we can go along to their jails...

...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, Boston 1975), part of a communist plot, or has Bly revealed the arc that will carry American poetry into its future...

...i ASPECTS OF ROBERT LOWELL JOHN DRUSKA For some...

...Thus they (and we) take risks...

...Unlike so many journalists, Herr seemed to have known from the beginning that the war was . . . a war . . . Admittedly the talk of Michael Herr's book took place within a very small circle...

...What of Robert Bly, called by some Lowell's most intransigent critic...

...Dear brother John McNeill, we shall have to content ourselves with perhaps two simple acts, which I take it are nearly all we can do today...

...Now storm-clouds shelter Christmas, once again Mars meets his fruitless star with open arms His heavy saber flashes with the rime, The war-god's bronzed and empty forehead forms Anonymous machinery from raw men...

...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...

...Writing for his adolescent daughter, Lowell sees her growing "too fast apace,/too fast adult...

...But within a small circle of people for whom the war had been a personal event--some had been to see it, some not--Vietnam carried the weight of a childhood trauma...

...Our sacred earth in our day is our curse...

...Anything, that is to say, which amounts to moral limpness, silence, the city morgue...

...as many as 600 had been there at one time in late 1967 and early 1968...

...Lowell's first works, for which he was lionized by much of the critical establishment, might I JOHN DRUSKA is a writer who currently teaches high school in Indianapolis...

...other societies, other times, have known how to deal with them, not in grudging toleration, but condignly...

...During a Transatlantic Call," The Dolphin) Yet even while chronicling his own aging in his CllRlSTMAS EVE UNDER BOOKER'S STATUE Tonight a blackout...

...In a Mood of tragedy _9 . .": ibid...

...The people talking about Herr's book did not care about all that...

...And yet, looking back on it, 1 remember how happy those tramps always seemed...

...Sometimes the changes perplex...

...I remember a conversation with Perry Deane Young in the early 1970s...

...Commonweal, July 12, 1946 hauls a c o f f i n . ("Half a Century Gone, 5" Notebook) And at an extreme death grows to an embodiment of the poet's work...

...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...

...it was too late for that...

...Mother, my bones are trembling and I hear The earth's reverberations and the trumpet Bleating into my shambles...

...t ) and The Cosmological Eye and The Last Puritan and In Dreams Begin Responsibilities...

...Are we, in fact, to regard him as a chronic adolescent...

...Man of war, Where is the summer's garden...

...The talk about Michael Herr's book was not of the sort in which publishers engage...

...We are poor passing facts, warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name...

...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...

...It brought us to the old quarry/ram which most o/the stone /or the college buildings and /or the /arrnhouses had been taken, and brought us to Quarry Chapel, a long since deserted and "deconsecrated' chapel, standing on a hill two miles/ram the college and symbolizing there the/ailure of Episcopalianism to take root among the Ohio countrypeople...

...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...

...Some: times we walked along the railroad track through the valley at the /oat o~ the college hill, and I remember more than once coming upon two or three tramps warming themselves by a little [ire they had built or even cooking a meal over it...

...And what do the Irish think of Yeats today anyway...

...In our time we remember too that Walt Whitman lived from 1819 to 1892...

...This idea is too simple to need developing...

...This was not a book all America was waiting for...

...The people waiting for Herr's book had something narrower in mind: something which would do justice to the war's reality, something which would capture what it was like...

...T~he difficulties they posed to be puzzled through impressed...

...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...

...To Williams's atelier, though, just for diction lessons...

...a dark target is harder to hit...

...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...