Robert Lowell and the Muse of History

...When the poet seems to be disarming the critic with a heartfelt confession, then watch out: I have sat and listened to too many words of the collaborating muse, and plotted perhaps too freely with my life, not avoiding injury to others, not avoiding injury to myself...

...How amused he must have been at the attacks on Notebook (the earlier draft) as sloppy...

...to ask compassion Robert Lowell is not really apologizing for doing what he sees as the artist's job...

...I taste my wife/And children while I hold your hands...

...Past blends fluidly into present: Cleopatra is encountered as a topless dancer in a discotheque...

...it also represents the carapaces of turtles the poet, as a boy, left to die in a garden urn...

...The aging sister now muses, "The good old times, ah yes...

...a cookbook bound like Leaves of Grass sets him musing about Beethoven's deafness...

...When it does, the effect is trivializing...

...The spire of Lowell's conversion to Roman Catholicism still points on the skyline: In Calvinist Concord, "Virgil must keep the Sabbath...

...Thus compelled, the muse of history will utter oracles, as never to those who do not respect themselves...

...Although many personae speak the poems, the overriding tone is drunk with outrage and inspiration...

...For here past and present live together in a familiar yet uncomfortable marriage, from Pulitzer Prize-winning Lord Weary's Castle (1946) to the recent History (1973...

...Nevertheless, both the Catholic pacifist of the '40s who resurreoted the heroic couplet, and the '60s antiwar liberal who invented the "un-rhymed sonnet," are classicists, striving to reconcile a passion for the past with a lively modern voice...

...to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary...

...Its latest manifestation, simply entitled His-ory (1973), intends the almost 400 "unrhymed sonnets" to be read as a single poem, a panorama of people and events from the Biblical Genesis to the Vietnam War...

...Wisely, Lowell seldom dilutes this bleak vision with redemptive hopes...

...Mary Stuart and James Bothwell murder her husband against the backdrop of a modern revolution...

...Yet even in this relatively powerful poem there is a lack of directive, and the whole seems smaller than the sum of its parts...

...it is Babylon at the Judgment, where "the scythers, Time and Death,/Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath...

...New England severity must accept the returning corpse "wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil,' a brutal and pathetic image for the indignity of death...

...As in his later books, many poems go to make up one long one, so Selected Poems may be read as a single composition about Lowell himself...

...and mocks Orphic pretentions: I rub my head and find a turtle shell stuck on a pole, each hair electrical with charges, and the juice alive with ferment...

...Alas, despite Lowell's craft, the muse of history's oracles are as obscure and unsatisfying as oracular utterances usually are...

...His Boston is not the New Jerusalem its founders hoped to build...

...Lord Weary's Castle has lost none of its startling power in 30 years...

...In the previous verse, the will sometimes did the work of the imagination...

...Near the end, Death rides over a skeletal bridge, luring us to follow him "out of life and Boston, singing with Freud:/'God's ways are dark and very seldom pleasant.' " History is actually a kind of novel, and much more like the post-Finnegans Wake product than most current fiction...

...Sailing Home from Rapallo" for example, is skillfully built on associative contrasts, as the poet, traveling with his dead mother's coffin, "Risorgimento black and gold like Napoleon's at the Invalides," leaves the flowering Italian spring for the family graveyard in Dunbarton, where "soil was changing to stone?so many of its deaths had been midwinter...

...Life Studies has its champions, and Lowell has included a greater percentage of it than of any of his other books, but I do not think it shows him at his strongest...

...In the poem "At the Indian Killer's Grave," we are told that "Blacker than these black stones the subway bends/About the dirty elm roots," but the present physical desecration mirrors an era when "State and elders thundered raca, hurled/Anathemas at nature and the land " These godly veterans of the Indian wars have sired the modern Everyman, who tells his mistress, "Man tasted Eve with death...

...The flexible sonnet form has the immediacy of modern speech, although Lowell has worked to attain this effect as carefully as Lawrence Sterne labored on the rambling monologues of Tristram Shandy...

...The famous "confessional poems" of Life Studies (1959), very often and badly imitated by others, examine raw and conflicting feelings about Lowell's own early life and family...

...Since the late '60s Lowell has been rewriting the same long Shandyesque work, taking his life as the text and history as the commentary, as Emerson advised...

...He seems to be both condemned to read history and to repeat it...

...Lowell starts thinking about the elder Cato during a telephone conversation with his wife...

...The language is today's, but the voice has become old and weary...

...Finally, Lowell can identify his sufferings as an instinctive animal with the creatures whose "crippled last survivors pass,/and hobble humpbacked through the grizzled grass.' It is an unflinching recognition that the artist's impetus can come from hurting or destroying others...

...A greater quietude is achieved in The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951...

...These worldly nuns, a wonderful metaphor for Lowell's early poetry, have cloistered themselves from the "Canuck" of New Brunswick to indulge their love of Cato and French classicism...

...But good that all's forgotten She is the only one strong enough to remember the past's foolishness and terror along with its beauty...

...Robert Lowell, that literal and spiritual scion of New England, has a thoroughly historical mind, which is to say that he has chosen a venerable mode—the mode of Gibbon, Carlyle and Marx—over a capitulation to scientific modernism...

...A world that out-Herods Herod can offer little more than "the curled up knees of Jesus choking in the air...

...Bubbles drive the motor, always purposeful The shell is the body of the lute, traditional symbol of lyric poetry...

...but Apocalypse is giving way to Stoicism...

...Lowell's great originality allows him to be apocalyptic without reminding us of Blake...

...And, indeed, there have been "surprising conversions" of poetic form and ideology that no one could have foreseen at every step of this remarkable career...

...I have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today...

...in this middle period, the memory frequently seems to do the work of both...

...Lowell's mature attitudes are nowhere better expressed than in "The Neo-Olassical Urn" (from For the Union Dead, 1964...

...It is fitting, then, that Lowell's long anticipated Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 251 pp., $12.50) should appear during the Bicentennial, when rcevaluation of history is the national sport...

...Perhaps it is time for our great American poet to remember with Aristotle that "Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history...

...An old nun reminisces about the late "Mother Marie Therese": Our world is passing...

...It would be more accurate to accuse him of overworking his material...

...The poet elegizes them in wrestling with the moral predicament of guilt...

...In this new phase his self-conscious intelligence keeps him one step ahead of his readers...

...An ironic look at his passion for classicism, it parodies the vocative?Oh neo-clas-ical white urn, Oh nymph, Oh lute...

...even she, whose trust Was in its princes, fed the gluttonous gulls That whiten our Atlantic, when like skulls They drift for sewage with the emerald tide...

...Lowell has made an excellent and representative choice of his own work, omitting translations and "imitations," and offers it to the reader without comment...

...In an early review Randall Jarrell remarked that Lowell "can use the past so effectively because he thinks so much as it did...

...Certain poems are undeniably effective...

...Thus the famous "Man and Wife" must now have its references to Miltown and the Rahvs owlishly annotated...

...Henceforth, "furtive, foiled, dissatisfied/from meditation on the true/and insignificant," the poet scrutinizes "the commonest thing,/as if it were the clue...

...This is Lowell's swan song to neoclassical narrative poetry, and to Christian themes as well...