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Doing a spacewalk, keeping faith with the grit
Robert Lowell’s poetry goes beyond writing and overflows the usual boundaries between life and art
BY TOM SLEIGH

TREATED BY reviewers as if it were a tombstone, rather than a stepping stone to fresh perspectives, Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems seems to be falling into the byways of received ideas about his life and work. Instead of focusing on how and why this superbly edited collection will prove a fire source to future readers and writers of poetry, most reviewers are falling back on dated, a little vulgar, predictable rehashes of his marriages and divorces, mental illness, and Boston Brahmin lineage. The poems are treated as poor relations to the life, and they get buried with the kind of expected paeans that are the last clods kicked into the grave of a " great " dead writer expected never to rise — or be read with a fresh eye — again.

Reading some of these reviews, I wanted to pass a law against the use of the word " confessional " to describe Lowell’s subject matter, and debar anyone from repeating the old saw that Lowell’s late poems represent a falling off from his earlier work. (Rather than waste time debunking the term " confessional, " I’ll leave the reader to Frank Bidart’s trenchant afterword, which shows how insufficient, if not downright banal, such a term is.) The idea that Lowell went dead as a writer after he published Near the Ocean in 1967 is perhaps the revenge of later generations that resented his fame, his worldly success, and who were plainly intimidated by his talent and ambition for discovering wholly unexpected ways to write. No one reading Life Studies in 1959 could have predicted the hesitant, wayward, heartbroken calm of his last great book, Day by Day, published the year of his death in 1977. And if you compare " Waking in the Blue " (from the former), and " Home " (from the latter) — both superb poems depicting Lowell’s sojourn in a mental hospital — you would think completely different poets had written them.

This chameleon-like quality has always made Lowell a difficult writer to see whole. But when Czeslaw Milosz writes that the purpose of poetry " is to remind us/how difficult it is to remain just one person,/for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,/invisible guests come in and out at will.... " , he puts his finger on one of Lowell’s central concerns: the shape-shifting of identity, and the burden that imposes on us as moral and social beings. The lens that he uses to explore this burden is the lens of history, not history as large, impersonal forces working themselves out above and beyond mere human beings, but history as the concatenation of many human personalities caught up in their own intensely personal struggles.

For Lowell, history is a kind of phantasmagoria of collective human strivings, folly, and aspirations. His obsession with autobiography is a historical obsession with first-person, eyewitness accounts that give back to history the feel and texture of flesh-and-blood experience. A quick look at the index of titles reveals hundreds of proper names, ranging from " Abraham Lincoln " as the first entry to " Xerxes and Alexander " as the next to last. The sheer density of reference in poem after poem to historical figures imagined not as abstractions, but as human beings caught up in the struggle of day-to-day life, suffuses Lowell’s work from first to last. Conceived of in these terms, history becomes the sum total of every human being’s autobiography. Lowell’s generosity in devoting his life’s work to that intuition is part and parcel of his interest in his own family legacy. But that legacy is only one small part of an immense mosaic that comprises the entire human family.

The house that Lowell keeps for all these different aspects of humanity is truly a haunted one. How many of Lowell’s best early poems are about the slipperiness of identity, often dramatized as a form of possession? The intrusion of the supernatural, frequently figured as demons or the Devil entering into a struggling soul, as in " After the Surprising Conversions " (the demon of despair enters one of Jonathan Edwards’s flock who goes mad and kills himself), is one of Lowell’s main ways of exploring the difficulty of remaining just one person. Another favored device is his use of visionary dreams, in which the dreamer is possessed by another spirit. In " Falling Asleep over the Aeneid, " an old man opportunely named Vergil forgets to go to morning service, and instead dreams that the spirit of Aeneas enters into him at the funeral of Pallas. As Aeneas, he wakes to a second self completely enthralled by the violence and wildness of pagan funeral pageantry until a Concord Sabbath church bell rings him awake to " dust/On the stuffed birds " on his mantel. But his identity is still called into question by the ending of the poem, in which he stares at a bust of young Augustus that " scowls into my glasses at itself. " This sense of one face imposed on another face implicates the old man in another series of regressions — the regressions back through history to the world of myth. Vergil the old man, as the brainchild of Robert Lowell, the author of the poem, is linked in literary lineage to Virgil, the author of the Aeneid. As I suggested earlier, it’s as if history were conceived of as an immense composite personality, one personality overlaid on another until the Virgilian world of myth and the present-day world of Lowell’s poem fuse inseparably together.

Lowell’s insistence that the private and the public, the mythic and the ordinary, the historical and the subjective must be bodied forth as the living texture of individual minds suggests that his career could be read as a massive reaction against the technocratic impulse to reduce experience to a set of manageable abstractions. And so to restore to history the multidimensional sensations of lived and felt experience, the poet made of himself a laboratory of empathetic imagination. The chemical reaction between his own subjective life and historical figures fused biography with deeply introspective and at times phantasmagoric imaginings about the motives and minds that create history — and not simply famous names, but friends, relations, fellow writers, wives, children, and husbands in all their multifarious roles. In other words, Lowell was possessed by the identities of others as subjects of historical inquiry, this sense of possession and inquiry lasting all through the many different phases of his career. His own autobiography was only one among many that he subjected to this highly original, fascinating, and kaleidoscopic view of history.

Seen from this perspective, his work up through Near the Ocean elaborates his obsession with history as a web of personal circumstances that overlap and build up into elaborate systems of human folly, ambition, greed — human personality projecting heights and depths of sublimity and depravity. Perhaps no other poet has captured the hopelessness of our moment in history as do these lines from " Near the Ocean " :

No weekends for the gods now. Wars

flicker, earth licks its open sores,

fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance

assassinations, no advance.

Only man thinning out his kind

sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind

swipe of the pruner and his knife

busy about the tree of life ...

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.

This grim recognition of a stagnant, bloody world dissolving into ghostliness informs his last four books. They project history as a spectral interweaving of the many different voices that inhabit us, none of them authoritative over the others, all vying and colluding to present experience as unique, unrepeatable, fleeing constantly ahead of all attempts to codify it. Correlative to this pinwheel shifting of perspectives is a sense of spiritual vertigo, of stoical heartbreak and nobly doomed futurity as in these lines from Day by Day, pitched midway between Lowell’s voice and the voice of Ulysses in his poem " Ulysses and Circe " :

Young,

he made strategic choices;

in middle age he accepts

his unlikely life to come;

he will die like others as the gods will,

drowning his last crew

in uncharted ocean,

seeking the unpeopled world beyond the sun,

lost in the uproarious rudeness of a great wind.

The calm of this acceptance of unavoidable disaster is a hallmark of late Lowell, and represents a major shift from his early poems. But my account of the poet’s career as a historian who wants to give, as he says in " Epilogue, " " each figure in the photograph/his living name, " leaves out the dynamism of his changes as expressed through the radically different kinds of music his poems make over the course of his career. Contrast the way the line units and grammatical units move down the page in stately synch in the Ulysses passage, in which Ulysses and Lowell are possessed by one another’s histories, with the smashing, crashing, booming wildness of section V in his early poem " The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket. " In the following lines the sense of possession, of a vast force invading the will and threatening to overthrow its tenuous coherence, is everywhere implied by Lowell’s uneasy relationship to meter and rhyme, in which you feel his verbal violence taking possession of the traditional forms and pushing them to the breaking point:

The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears,

The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears

The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,

And hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags

And rips the sperm-whale’s midriff into rags,

Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather ...

The over-the-top insistence of the rhymes, the relentlessness of the syntax, and the violent enjambments all communicate the sensation of a mind both relishing and repulsed by the whale’s dismemberment. The image of the sperm-whale’s midriff being ripped into rags by the " gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail " depicts a body being possessed by an outside force of such violence that the body explodes into gobbets of blubber overrunning the natural world of wind and weather. This exemplifies with a vengeance what Milosz means by " invisible guests come in and out of us at will, " both on the level of image-making, and on the more subliminal level of the poem’s hammer-and-tongs music. Invisible guests they may be, but do they ever come with an agenda!

That agenda could be summoned up by saying that Lowell invented ways of writing about the self that, if he were better understood, would illuminate, and more important, ground much of the previous 30 years’ intellectual and artistic debate over the status of the self and its relationship to history. His generosity as an artist extends not only to putting our everyday concerns on an equal footing with strutting abstractions like History. Lowell also dramatizes how individual lives and history are as much about the shadowy colloquy between our own obscure inner voices and the world at large, as they are about verifiable subjects with names like Alexander the Great, Marcus Cato, Joinville, Robert Frost, and of course, Robert Lowell.

In keeping with this sense of history as a projection of liminally shifting identities, Lowell was the kind of artist who could only keep his work alive by constantly changing his stylistic spots. His fundamental orientation to language in one book was often an impediment to his writing the next. So to talk about his development is to talk about not only what he learned, but what he unlearned. Essentially, he oscillated between wanting to make a verbal equivalent of experience in all its physical immediacy, as in Life Studies, and wanting to trust to the currents of language to overbear experience, to make experience serve language in all its wayward associativeness, as in Day by Day. As an example of this oscillation, Lowell’s early obsession with descriptive vividness as a way of grounding experience gives way to an obsession with aural plenitude, in which his poems become permeable to many different voices, all speaking from their own unique perspectives and resounding together in the echo chamber of the poet’s mind.

Both as a creature of language and as a writer who would make language serve the shining surfaces of the world, Lowell showed himself supremely gifted. His fidelity to each way of writing, as well as his immense skill in fusing these modes together, seems to me part of the overflow of possibilities that Lowell offers to younger poets and readers who are lucky enough not to have suffered through the long night of critical commentary devoted to " confessional poetry. " No other poet of his century could make words do a wilder spacewalk while keeping faith with the daily grit.

What his example so generously teaches younger poets is how to use antithetical conventions — whether of collage and fragmentation, or the equally difficult ones of lyric narrative — to make a poem too messy to be thought of as an artifact, and too wrestled with and considered to be condescended to as process. Lowell, a compulsive reviser, wanted the labor to show: effortlessness and ease, a kind of spurious, surface perfection went against his impulse to roughen things up, to break down the expected boundaries between life and art. In all its variety and attractive virtuosity, its calculated messiness that challenges and defies and shrugs off the usual assumptions about the purpose of collected poems, his poetry teaches us that art is something you do today for today, while acknowledging that the past can never be anything other than provisional, an educated guess about a phantasm that bears uncanny resemblances to the one hazarding the guess.

Tom Sleigh is a poet who lives in Cambridge and New York City.


Issue Date: December 20 - 26, 2003
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