My Favourite Poet

 My Favourite Poet

Robert Lowell’s poetry style is characterized, as Confessional poetry, which is a style of poetry that emerged in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s that has been, described as poetry "of the personal." The content of confessional poems is autobiographical and marked by its exploration of subject matter that was considered taboo at the time.

This subject matter included topics like mental illness, sexuality, and suicide.

Robert Lowell began his poetic career by studying with New Criticism poets such as Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren. He wrote rigorously formal verse and at thirty was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his second book, Lord Weary's Castle. However, his most famous book, Life Studies, was a radical departure not only from his earlier work, but also from the larger poetry scene at the time of its publication in 1959.

Lord Weary’s Castle

The depth of this book of poems is incredible. I won't pretend to understand it, but there were moments where I was grasping at and glimpsing whatever it was Lowell was offering. I felt like a child reading this, which was both annoying, and beautifully enlightening...

The rhyme and meter and cadence are outstanding. Outstanding. I don't know of any poet who writes this way anymore. He's the last of his kind, and a transitional poet into its current form.

Lowell really draws from the classics - Greek and Latin. I don't know Latin, and wish I did. He'd include a line here and there in his poems.

He also drew upon the Bible quite heavily. I was never sure about what he was saying though - whether it was religious, or sacrilegious... I know he converted to Catholicism, and then left the Catholic church, but I'm not sure when all of that happened.

The book was great. The book was beautiful. I'm surprised so few on here have read it. It's definitely worth looking into.

That and Lowell's life seems pretty intense. Manic depressive on lithium? Imprisoned for being a conscientious objector during WWII? Constantly changing his views on God...

As we begin the new year and anticipate those activities that lie ahead in 2013, I also would like to take a moment for a brief look backward with the introduction of an early poem by Robert Lowell, appropriately titled “New Year’s Day” from his second book, Lord Weary’s Castle. Although most readers know Lowell as the “confessional” poet whose somewhat relaxed and straight-forward style amazingly helped reshape American poetry in the last half of the twentieth century, a reminder of Lowell’s roots as a more formal and lyrically elaborate poet might at times be needed as well.

Indeed, this year will mark the fifty-four years since Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) signaled his shift in writing style and thoroughly transformed the literary landscape. When Life Studies won the National Book Award in 1960, Lowell stated: “Two poetries are now competing, a cooked and a raw. The cooked, marvelously expert, often seems laboriously concocted to be tasted and digested by a graduate seminar. The raw, huge blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience are dished up for midnight listeners. There is a poetry that can only be studied, and a poetry that can only be declaimed, a poetry of pedantry, and a poetry of scandal.”

“New Year’s Day” stands among the “cooked” poems published in Lord Weary’s Castle, Robert Lowell’s collection that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 and first established Lowell as a dominant figure in American poetry when the younger poet still might be regarded as a New Criticism formalist. The works in his first few volumes seem to demonstrate his initial influences (T.S. Eliot, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ransom, among others), as well as his interest in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century metaphysical poets. As I have written in a previous post, “Robert Lowell’s Legacy: Life Studies,” on the occasion of Lowell’s birthday last March:

Clearly, Robert Lowell’s first couple of poetry collections, Land of Unlikeness (1944) along with the subsequent volume titled Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), display characteristics developed under the direction of those formidable figures who helped shape his early writing. As Frank Bidart explains in his introduction to Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems: “What most people think of as his first book, Lord Weary’s Castle, is not a ‘revision’ of Land of Unlikeness—less than a quarter of it transforms material from the earlier book—but it is, I think, the book that Land of Unlikeness wanted to be.” Lord Weary’s Castle quickly achieved critical praise and proved a successful introduction into the literary world for Robert Lowell when that volume was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1947.

The young poet was lauded for his precisely wrought formal poems, heavily metrical lines with meaty language often presented in a tightly wound syntax that seemed knotted by metaphors or similes. Already, some critics began to view Lowell as an ascending star, perhaps a major poet whose style would solidify an approach to poetry they appreciated. However, when his follow-up book of poetry, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, appeared in 1951 to a mixed reception by critics, some of whom had held higher expectations for the new work, Lowell’s disappointment may have caused him to pause for reconsideration of his writing style. Indeed, for various reasons, eight years would pass before Lowell’s next collection, Life Studies, was published in 1959.

One wonders what directions Robert Lowell’s poetic style, as well as the eventual progression of American poetry, might have followed had Lowell not received such disappointing reactions to The Mills of the Kavanaughs and had he not been prompted by personal experiences or public observations to reexamine his whole approach to composing poetry, presenting a vastly different style of writing, one he wasn’t sure was “a death-rope or a life-line,” as he once stated. David Perkins suggests in his book, A History of Modern Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1987): in his first decade of publishing poetry, “Lowell’s verses had frequent spondees and caesuras yet were strongly enjambed, with an effect of energy blocking itself and then suddenly exploding. His images were violent, telescoped, and bristling with ambivalent implications; transitions between them were difficult and sometimes impenetrable; yet in the clotted awkwardness there was intellectual strength.”

As accomplished and polished as pieces, such as “New Year’s Day,” written by Robert Lowell for those first three books appear to be to close readers of poetry, they also now seem more like relics of modernism and Lowell’s fervor for religious allusion or symbolism—glimpsed today perhaps as odd historical artifacts from an earlier time period—than clear evidence of a new voice about to alter the course of American literature. Patrick Cosgrave characterizes the closing stanza of Lowell’s “New Year’s Day” in his volume of criticism, The Public Poetry of Robert Lowell (Taplinger Publishing, 1972), as typical of that stage of the poet’s career, containing heightened rhetoric “intensified by a highly alliterative iambic line and heavy rhyming, while the sense escapes understanding, though a desperate effort is clearly being made to reach truth”:

NEW YEAR’S DAY

Again and then again . . . the year is born

To ice and death, and it will never do

To skulk behind storm-windows by the stove

To hear the postgirl sounding her French horn

When the thin tidal ice is wearing through.

Here is the understanding not to love

Our neighbor, or tomorrow that will sieve

Our resolutions. While we live, we live

To snuff the smoke of victims. In the snow

The kitten heaved its hindlegs, as if fouled,

And died. We bent it in a Christmas box

And scattered blazing weeds to scare the crow

Until the snake-tailed sea-winds coughed and howled

For alms outside the church whose double locks

Wait for St. Peter, the distorted key.

Under St. Peter's bell the parish sea

Swells with its smelt into the burlap shack

Where Joseph plucks his hand-lines like a harp,

And hears the fearful Puer natus est

Of Circumcision, and relives the wrack

And howls of Jesus whom he holds. How sharp

The burden of the Law before the beast:

Time and the grindstone and the knife of God.

The Child is born in blood, O child of blood.

—Robert Lowell

Lowell's Works...

Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, and Peter Taylor in front of The Presbytere at Jackson Square in New Orleans in 1941. Photo by Robie Macauley.

1940s

Lowell's first book of poems, Land of Unlikeness (1944), did not receive much attention. However, in 1946, Lowell received wide acclaim for his next book, Lord Weary's Castle, which included five poems slightly revised from Land of Unlikeness, plus thirty new poems. Among the better known poems in the volume are "Mr Edwards and the Spider" and "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket." Lord Weary's Castle was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. Randall Jarrell praised the book, writing, "It is unusually difficult to say which are the best poems in Lord Weary's Castle: several are realized past changing, successes that vary only in scope and intensity--others are poems that almost any living poet would be pleased to have written. . .[and] one or two of these poems, I think, will be read as long as men remember English."

Lowell's early poems were formal, ornate, and concerned with violence and theology; a typical example is the close of "The Quaker Graveyard" -- "You could cut the brackish winds with a knife / Here in Nantucket and cast up the time / When the Lord God formed man from the sea's slime / And breathed into his face the breath of life, / And the blue-lung'd combers lumbered to the kill. / The Lord survives the rainbow of His will." He was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1947−1948 (a position now known as the U.S. Poet Laureate).

1950s

In 1950, Lowell was included in the influential anthology Mid-Century American Poets as one of the key literary figures of his generation. Among his contemporaries who also appeared in that book were Muriel Rukeyser, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell, and John Ciardi, all poets who came into prominence in the 1940s.

In 1951, Lowell published The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951) which centered on its epic title poem and which failed to receive the high praise that his previous book had received. Following the disappointing reception of The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Lowell hit a creative roadblock and took a long break from publishing.^[6] However, by the end of the decade, he started writing again and was able to revive his reputation with Life Studies (1959) which won the National Book Award for poetry in 1960 and became the most influential book that Lowell would ever publish.^[38][23][39] In his acceptance speech for the National Book Award, Lowell famously divided American poetry into two camps: the "cooked" and the "raw."^[40] This commentary by Lowell was made in reference to the popularity of Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation poets and was a signal from Lowell that he was trying to incorporate some of their "raw" energy into his own poetry.

The poems in Life Studies were written in a mix of free and metered verse, with much more informal language than he had used in his first three books. It marked both a big turning point in Lowell's career, and a turning point for American poetry in general. Because many of the poems documented details from Lowell's family life and personal problems, one critic, M.L. Rosenthal, labeled these poems "confessional." Lowell's editor and friend Frank Bidart notes in his afterword to Lowell's Collected Poems, "Lowell is widely, perhaps indelibly associated with the term 'confessional,'" though Bidart questions the accuracy of this label.^[41] But for better or worse, this label stuck and led to Lowell being grouped together with other influential confessional poets like Lowell's former students W. D. Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton.

1960s

Lowell followed Life Studies with Imitations (1961), a volume of loose translations of poems by classical and modern European poets, including Rilke, Montale, Baudelaire, Pasternak, andRimbaud, for which he received the 1962 Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize. However, critical response to Imitations was mixed and sometimes hostile (as was the case with Vladimir Nabokov'spublic response to Lowell's Mandelstam translations).^[42] In the book's introduction, Lowell explained that his idiosyncratic translations should be thought of as "imitations" rather than strict translations since he took many liberties with the originals, trying to "do what [his] authors might have done if they were writing their poems now and in America." ^[43]

His next book For the Union Dead (1964) was widely praised, particularly for its title poem, which invoked Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead." For the Union Dead was Lowell's first book since Life Studies to contain all original verse (since it did not include any translations), and in writing the poems in this volume, Lowell built upon the looser, more personal style of writing that he'd established in the final section of Life Studies. However, none of the poems in For the Union Dead explicitly addressed the taboo subject of Lowell's mental illness (like some of the poems inLife Studies did) and were, therefore, not notably "confessional." The subject matter in For the Union Dead was also much broader than it was in Life Studies. For instance, Lowell wrote about a number of world historical figures in poems like "Caligula," "Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts," and "Lady Raleigh's Lament."

In 1964, Lowell also tried his hand at playwrighting with three, one-act plays that were meant to be performed together as a trilogy, titled The Old Glory. The first two parts, "Endecott the Red Cross" and "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" were stage adaptations of short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the third part, "Benito Cereno," was a stage adaptation of a novella by Herman Melville. The Old Glory was produced off-Broadway in New York City in 1964 and won five Obie Awards in 1965 including an award for "Best American Play."^[44][45] The play was published in its first printing in 1965 (with a revised edition following in 1968).

In 1967, Lowell published his next book of poems, Near the Ocean. With this volume, Lowell returned to writing more formal, metered verse. The second half of the book also shows Lowell returning once again to writing loose translations (including verse approximations of Dante, Juvenal, and Horace). The best known poem in this volume is "Waking Early Sunday Morning," which was written in eight-line tetrameter stanzas (borrowed from Andrew Marvell's poem "Upon Appleton House") and showed contemporary American politics overtly entering into Lowell's work.

Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war—until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.

“

”

From "Waking Early Sunday Morning,"
Near the Ocean (1967)

During 1967 and 1968 he experimented with a verse journal, published as Notebook 1967-68 (and later republished in a revised and expanded edition, titled Notebook). Lowell referred to these fourteen-line poems as sonnets although they sometimes failed to incorporate regular meter and rhyme (both of which are defining features of the sonnet form); however, some of Lowell's sonnets (particularly the ones in Notebook 1967-1968) were written in blank verse with a definitive pentameter and a small handful also included rhyme. Regarding the issue of meter in these poems, Lowell wrote "My meter, fourteen line unrhymed blank verse sections, is fairly strict at first and elsewhere, but often corrupts in single lines to the freedom of prose."^[46]

In the Notebook poems, Lowell included the poem "In The Cage," a sonnet that he'd originally published in his first book, Lord Weary's Castle. He also included revised, sonnet versions of the poems "Caligula" and "Night-Sweat" (originally published in For the Union Dead) and of "1958" and "To Theodore Roethke: 1908-1963" (originally published in Near the Ocean). In his "Afterthough" at the end of Notebook 1967-1968, Lowell explained the premise and timeline of the book:

This is not my diary, my confession, not a puritan's too literal pornographic honesty, glad to share private embarassment, and triumph. The time is a summer, an autumn, a winter, a spring, another summer; here the poem ends, except for turned-back bits of fall and winter 1968. . .My plot rolls with the seasons. The separate poems and sections are opportunist and inspired by impulse. Accident threw up subjects, and the plot swallowed them--famished for human chances. I lean heavily to the rational, but am devoted to surrealism.^[47]

In this same "Afterthought" section, Lowell acknowledges some of his source materials for the poems, writing, "I have taken from many books, used the throwaway conversational inspirations of my friends, and much more that I idly spoke to myself." Some of the sources and authors he cites include Jesse Glenn Gray's "The Warrior," Simone Weil's "Half a Century Gone," Herbert Marcuse, Aijaz Ahmad, R.P. Blackmur, Plutarch, Stonewall Jackson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.^[48]

Steven Gould Axelrod wrote that, "[Lowell's concept behind the sonnet form] was to achieve the balance of freedom and order, discontinuity and continuity, that he [had] observed in [Wallace] Stevens's late long poems and in John Berryman's Dream Songs, then nearing completion. He hoped that his form . . . would enable him 'to describe the immediate instant,' an instant in which political and personal happenings interacted with a lifetime's accumulation of memories, dreams, and knowledge." ^[49] Lowell liked the new form so much that he reworked and revised many of the poems from Notebook and used them as the foundation for his next three volumes of verse, all of which employed the same loose, fourteen-line sonnet form.

1970s to the present

The first book in Lowell's Notebook-derived trilogy was History (1973) which primarily dealt with world history from antiquity up to the mid-20th century (although the book does not always follow a linear or logical path and contains many poems about Lowell's friends, peers, and family). The second book, For Lizzie and Harriet (1973), describes the breakdown of his second marriage and contains poems that are supposed to be in the voices of his daughter, Harriet, and his second wife, Elizabeth. Finally, the last work in Lowell's sonnet sequence, The Dolphin (1973), which won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize, includes poems about his daughter, his ex-wife, and his new wife Caroline Blackwood whom he had affectionately nicknamed "Dolphin." Notably, the book only contained new poems, making it the only book in Lowell's sonnet trilogy not to include revised poems from Notebook.

A minor controversy erupted when Lowell admitted to having incorporated (and altered) private letters from his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick into poems for The Dolphin. He was particularly criticized for this by his friends, fellow-poets Adrienne Rich^[50] and Elizabeth Bishop.^[35] Bishop made an eloquent and thoughtful argument to Lowell against publishing The Dolphin. In a letter to Lowell regarding The Dolphin, dated March 21, 1972, before he'd published the book, Bishop praises the writing, saying, "Please believe that I think it is wonderful poetry." But then she states, "I'm sure my point is only too plain. . .Lizzie [Hardwick] is not dead, etc.--but there is a 'mixture of fact & fiction' [in the book], and you have changed [Hardwick's] letters. That is 'infinite mischief,' I think. . .One can use one's life as material--one does anyway--but these letters--aren't you violating a trust? IF you were given permission--IF you hadn't changed them. . .etc. But art just isn't worth that much."^[51]

Lowell published his last volume of poetry, Day by Day, in 1977, the year of his death. In May 1977, Lowell won the $10,000 National Medal for Literature awarded by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters,^[52] and Day by Day was awarded that year's National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. In a PBS documentary on Lowell, Anthony Hecht said that "[Day by Daywas] a very touching, moving, gentle book, tinged with a sense of [Lowell's] own pain and the pain [he'd] given to others."^[53] It was Lowell's only volume to contain nothing but free verse. In many of the poems, Lowell reflects on his life, his past relationships, and his own mortality. The best-known poem from this collection is the last one, titled "Epilogue," in which Lowell reflects upon the "confessional" school of poetry with which his work was associated. In this poem he wrote,

But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?^[54]

The book has received significant critical attention from the literary scholar and critic Helen Vendler who has written about the book in essays and in her book Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (2010). In her essay "Robert Lowell's Last Days and Last Poems," she defends the book from attacks following its publication in reviews, like the one written byDonald Hall in which he called the book a failure.^[55] Vendler wrote that some critics who came to this conclusion were disappointed because Lowell's last book was so much different than any of his previous volume, abandoning ambitious metaphors and political engagement for more personal snapshots. She wrote, "Now [Lowell] has ended [his career], in Day by Day, as a writer of disarming openness, exposing shame and uncertainty, offering almost no purchase to interpretation, and in his journal-keeping, abandoning conventional structure, whether rhetorical or logical. The poems drift from one focus to another; they avoid the histrionic; they sigh more often than they expostulate. They acknowledge exhaustion; they expect death." She praises some of Lowell's descriptions, particularly his descriptions of impotence, depression, and old age.^[56]

Lowell's Collected Poems, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, was published in 2003. The Collected Poems was a very comprehensive volume that included all of Lowell's major works with the exception of Notebook 1967-1968 and Notebook. However, many of the poems from these volumes were republished, in revised forms, in History and For Lizzie and Harriet. On the heels of the publication of The Collected Poems, The Letters of Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton, was published in 2005. Both Lowell's Collected Poems and his Letters received overwhelmingly positive critical responses from the mainstream press, and their publication has since led to a renewed interest in Lowell's writing.

Pulitzer Prize Winner Reads Poetry at 

Robert Lowell Memorial Lecture

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Robert Lowell

In 1917, Robert Lowell was born into one of Boston's oldest and most prominent families. He attended Harvard College for two years before transferring to Kenyon College, where he studied poetry under John Crowe Ransom and received an undergraduate degree in 1940. He took graduate courses at Louisiana State University where he studied with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks.

His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, at the age of thirty), were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy. Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he wrote rigorously formal poetry that drew praise for its exceptionally powerful handling of meter and rhyme. Lowell was politically involved—he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War and was imprisoned as a result, and actively protested against the war in Vietnam—and his personal life was full of marital and psychological turmoil. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized.

Partly in response to his frequent breakdowns, and partly due to the influence of such younger poets as W. D. Snodgrass and Allen Ginsberg, Lowell in the mid-fifties began to write more directly from personal experience, and loosened his adherence to traditional meter and form. The result was a watershed collection, Life Studies (1959), which forever changed the landscape of modern poetry, much as Eliot's The Waste Land had three decades before. Considered by many to be the most important poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century, Lowell continued to develop his work with sometimes uneven results, all along defining the restless center of American poetry, until his sudden death from a heart attack at age 60. Robert Lowell served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1962 until his death in 1977.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Land of Unlikeness (1944)
Lord Weary's Castle (1946)
Poems, 1938-1949 (1950)
The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951)
Life Studies (1959)
Imitations (1961)
For the Union Dead (1964)
Selected Poems (1965)
Near the Ocean (1967)
The Voyage and Other Versions of Poems by Baudelaire (1968)
Notebooks, 1967-1968 (1969)
The Dolphin (1973)
For Lizzie and Harriet (1973)
History (1973)
Selected Poems (1976)
Day by Day (1977)

Prose

The Collected Prose (1987)

Anthology

Phaedra (1961)
Prometheus Bound (1969)

Drama

The Old Glory (1965)