Estimation of Lowell

Norman Mailer places Robert Lowell’s poetry at the bottom of a well and looking up. In the Armies of the Night, when Ed Sanders and the Fugs go about the business of conjuration via calls of ‘Hari, Hari, Rama’ as they and Lowell, Mailer and thousands other, chant to raise the Viet Nam era Pentagon building in Washington, he perceived some unease for Lowell as the grope-freak rhythms of the inspired Fugs’ spiral.

Lowell wrote poetry, says Mailer, from the place that ‘gave one the sense of living in a well, the echoes deep, and [the] sound was finally lost in moss on stone’. The Fugsian rhythms here were alien to Lowell , though he soldiered on a graceful Yankee with the march on the Pentagon.

The point can be taken in this season of Lowell re-estimation. His collected poems have been released, and this has been enough to center some attention on gauging Lowell’s eventual position in the poet pantheon.  As his life bordered several distinct movements, his position at times would be naturally tenuous.

This much can be said: Lowell was a heck of a poet, and you could trace his lines back to early vitally important poets such as Hart Crane and T.S. Elliot. And very influential Confessional school poetry sprung immediately from his symposia via two excellent Boston students Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. But the Beats like Sanders at the door, who did in some turns influence his work over the ‘50s, but from who his distance remained measured, and the deluge of Confession that followed, left Lowell legacy a bit out to dry.

Time and collections are useful here in bringing Lowell back, though maybe not back to the absolute big top big time, though, what does that matter? Robert Lowell came too comfortably after Elliot and Crane and too uncomfortably before the Beats and the Confessionals. He had a bit more head for history than a lot of this fellow scribes. His early work sang more than most poets’ work. In The Holy Innocents, he describes this mangy scene late in WWI:

...Still

The world out-Herods Herod; and the year,

The nineteen-hundred forty-fifth of grace,

Lumbers with losses up the clinkered hill

Of our purgation; and the oxen near

The worn foundations of their resting-place,

Lowell had the whammy of Back Bay blue bloodedness in his very name. Allen Ginsberg described him as part of “middle echelon thinkers and old American classic figures.” This became an alcove he could not quite break out of – again, with time passed, that seems to matter less.

As he went forward, he further refined irony as dominant poetic mood, and, in his well, he found resonating sounds that moved from line to line like God’s own dominoes. His irony was unique as it was hard earned - as he was jailed as a CO in WWII, as he stood up for Lenny Bruce, as he marched on the Pentagon, etcetera. He was a Puritan generous enough to convert for a while to Catholicism. The tension between private dread and honor to important public cause is most notable in his later For the Union Dead

There were a lot of post war poets, and Lowell was chief among these in the late ’40s. Rereading his poems in this Collection reminds that his poetry was exceptional. His  work in the later ‘60s and early ‘70s did not have the same ‘new car’ smell of the earlier work, but this is quibble of small matter now that time has played its coda. How many other great artists have muted end notes?

New York Times’ reviewer puts it thus:

It was as if, being early on crowned as America's premier poet and a ''political'' one to boot, Lowell had no place to go but down ... In his poems and prose tributes, many of them to other writers, Lowell got more out of the mid-century American scene -- literary, cultural, political -- than anyone else. Vendler's name for his peculiar quality was ''difficult grandeur.'' No one will deny the grandeur, from ''Lord Weary'' through the hundreds of sonnets; but assessments of the difficulty that went along with it vary, as seen in the divergent verdicts by serious poets and critics of his contribution to poetry over all.”

The Lowell -- and Cabot and Adams and Shaw – Boston line stood for much. Its rulers hip in the arts world would fade same as Brahmin political clout. In For the Union Dead the era is played out in a few stanzas with force many hundreds of pages were needed to muster the equivalency of in Louis Menard’s The Metaphysical Club.

The Collection here was a long time coming. For me, The Union Dead still stands out. Before I got to this city I knew it in this poem. This is where modern Boston, with its Commons dug up for an underground car park, is end-plated by a buttressed statue, which faces the State House at the Hub of the Universe, of Colonel Shaw and his Civil War Negro militia. A statue that, Lowell writes, ‘sticks like a fishbone in the city’s throat.”

Colonel Shaw

is riding on his bubble,

he waits for the bless`d break

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,

giant finned cars nose forward like fish,

a save servility

slides by on grease.

The new world coming is certain in its crassness, ironic in its crudeness, and here at least musical in its Lowellness. It doesn’t care about you and me. Ahhh. Well done, Robert.

Mailer’s Armies of the Night
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0452272793/002-0702996-5529606

Ginsberg’s Deliberate Prose

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060930810/002-0702996-5529606

Lowell’s Collected Poems

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374126178/002-0702996-5529606

Last update: 7/7/2003; 11:59:20 AM.