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S T E V E N GOU L D A XE LROD
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Steven Gould Axelrod
Finally, I wish to focus attention on Lowell’s least noted voice, which I will
term metapoetic. Throughout his career, Lowell cited and revised the words
of his precursors, letting them speak again while simultaneously recalibrat-
ing his relation to them. In his latter days he also meditated self-reflexively
on his own contributions to poetry. These three voices – autobiographi-
cal, public, and metapoetic – are distinguishable though confluent. Together
they moved American poetry along new pathways, helping to create an
ever-changing, ever more complicated network of words.
1
Lowell’s renovation of the poetics of privacy occurred in 1957–1959 with
his work Life Studies. Critics have often termed the volume “a break-
through,” though James Longenbach has ironized this perspective by refer-
ring to it as the “ ‘breakthrough’ narrative.”6 That is, it is merely a story we
tell ourselves rather than an accurate descriptor. Longenbach’s point is that
Lowell did not really “break” from the canons of modernism but repeated
them. Certainly there is some truth in Longbach’s demurral. Literary change
does not obliterate the past but modifies practice in some crucial regard,
selecting from the usable past in some novel way. That almost goes with-
out saying. Lowell modestly framed his change of direction in Life Studies
thusly: “Literary life is just one little wave after another . . . One manner
seems as bad or as good as another; it freshens the atmosphere for a moment
and then seems to have faults as disastrous as the ones they were fighting
against” (Interviews 74–75).
Reacting to and against the anonymity of modernism, Lowell created in
Life Studies a poetry that was clearly identified with his own “experience”
(Interviews 55). Instead of listening to Tiresias or to a voice from nowhere,
we hear the figure of Robert Lowell. It is telling that when Longenbach
turns to Lowell’s texts to prove his point about modernism’s endurance, he
largely avoids Life Studies. Attached to modernism, he minimizes resistance
to it as a mere narrative in scare quotes and then deflects attention to mod-
ernism’s lingering vestiges.
It was not simply Lowell’s critics who have spoken of a breakthrough
but also Lowell himself and the poets who were influenced by him. In an
interview after the publication of Life Studies, Lowell argued that writing
had become “divorced” from culture and unable to “handle much experi-
ence” (Interviews 55). “It’s become a craft, purely a craft, and there must be
some breakthrough back into life.” Lowell was not characterizing his own
volume as a poetic breakthrough but rather expressing the hope that he had
broken through to lived experience by constructing a style linked to interior
328
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The Three Voices of Robert Lowell
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Steven Gould Axelrod
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The Three Voices of Robert Lowell
shouts to his parents at Sunday dinner, “I won’t go with you, I want to stay
with Grandpa!” (Poems 163). The poem contrasts his discord with his par-
ents to his harmony with his grandparents. The style complicates conversa-
tional rhythms with a startling array of dictions and an extensive network of
irregular off rhymes (water-dinner-summer-farms-poplars; Norman-garden;
pine-pioneering). The only line in the first verse-paragraph that doesn’t end
in an off rhyme is that first dissonant rebuke to the parents – an exception
that highlights the rebellion articulated in the line and indeed the poem. But
the poem’s very last verse-paragraph reveals a till-then unspoken detail that
gives new focus to the entire poem: “My Uncle was dying at twenty-nine”
(Poems 166). The poem thus moves unexpectedly from an already momen-
tous topos, the shattered family, to one even more destabilizing: the presence
of death. The dissonance of the poem’s initial unrhymed line is counterpoised
by the poem’s awkward last couplet, which refers back to the poem’s recur-
rent image of black earth and white lime: “Come winter, / Uncle Devereux
would blend to the one color” (Poems 167).
A similar pattern of an already disturbing scene eventually yielding a fur-
ther shock occurs in “Commander Lowell.” The poem begins with a depic-
tion of the mother-son dyad, indicating the father’s insignificance even in
a poem named for him. When he does finally appear, he is far from com-
manding: “ ‘Anchors aweigh,’ Daddy boomed in his bathtub” (Poems 173).
The childlike father receives no praise, and the poem offers little consola-
tion for his demise. If “My Last Afternoon” surprises us by turning into an
elegy, “Commander Lowell” disturbs us by hardly being one. “Sailing Home
from Rapallo” similarly deflates the figure of the dead mother. In the open-
ing lines, we encounter the speaker expressing a more or less traditional
grief: “tears ran down my cheeks” (Poems 179). But by the end, he wears
an unnerving smile: “The corpse,” he says, “was wrapped like panetone in
Italian tinfoil.” The corpse, not even her corpse. Once an eminence capa-
ble of elbowing her husband aside, she has now disappeared from her own
poem, leaving a loaf of festive bread in her stead.
The pattern of deferred shock reaches its apogee in “Skunk Hour.” Lowell
explained: “The first four stanzas are meant to give a dawdling more or less
amiable picture of a declining Maine sea town . . . Then all comes alive in
stanzas V and VI.”8 Again, his wandering description enfolds a revelation
that troubles the preceding discourse: “I myself am hell” (Poems 192). The
poem and the sequence lead to this. Afterward the poem recovers its rueful
humor while implying the ironies of survival.
Lowell continued to employ a personal mode throughout the rest of his
career, though for some years he resisted returning to the autobiographi-
cal. He had a congenital fear of repeating himself. The autobiographical
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Steven Gould Axelrod
2
Lowell’s public voice sounded at the very outset of his career, in the privately
printed Land of Unlikeness, in his first trade book, Lord Weary’s Castle, and
in a publicly circulated letter to President Franklin Roosevelt refusing the
draft (Prose 367–370). This voice continued to speak, in poetry and other
discursive genres, until the end of his life, though its period of greatest flu-
ency was surely the 1960s, evidenced in such texts as “For the Union Dead,”
“Waking Early Sunday Morning,” “Central Park,” and Notebook 1967–68.
In midcareer, Lowell told Stanley Kunitz that a poem should include a
poet’s “contradictions” (Interviews 85). He described one side of himself as
332
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The Three Voices of Robert Lowell
“a conventional liberal, concerned with causes, agitated about peace and jus-
tice and equality.” His other side, though, was “deeply conservative, wanting
to get at the root of things, wanting to slow down the whole modern process
of mechanization and dehumanization.” (Interviews 85–86). Clearly, he was
articulating here a conception of conservatism rather different from the ones
prominent in popular discourse today. The point is that Lowell believed that
“all of our compulsions and biases should get in, so that finally we don’t
know what we mean.” This willingness to delve below the ideological ego
and superego to explore the political unconscious has subjected Lowell to
some critique.10 He seemed to turn political poetry into another arena for
inner debate rather than a basis for action.
Lowell’s early work burst at the seams with “compulsions and biases.”
Influenced by such thinkers as Pound, Eliot, Allen Tate, and Etienne
Gilson, Lowell presented himself as an idiosyncratic conservative, condi-
tioned by his New England Puritan influences, his southern agrarian men-
tors, and his newly acquired Roman Catholic beliefs. Jerome Mazzaro
has termed this phase Lowell’s “early politics of apocalypse.”11 Lowell
himself eventually looked back and ruefully commented, “I thought that
civilization was going to break down, and instead I did” (Interviews 77).
Lord Weary’s Castle found two strands in the political sphere particularly
to condemn. The first was the materialism and uniformity bred by cor-
porate capitalism. He japed in the opening lines of “Concord” that “ten
thousand Fords are idle here” in search of “a tradition” (Poems 30). The
poem suggests that the pallid affirmations of the Unitarian Church, as
Emerson called them, ultimately proved powerless to control “Mammon’s
unbridled industry.” The second, worse strand of our politics was war
and the drive for dominion. “Concord” ends by mourning the Indians
slaughtered in King Philip’s War or Metacom’s Rebellion (1675–1678). In
Lowell’s view, it was not the revolutionists’ “shot” that was “heard round
the world,” as Emerson put it, but rather Metacom’s “scream” whose
“echo girdled this imperfect globe.” As we will see, the early, “conserva-
tive” Lowell had much in common with the “liberal” and at times radical
figure he later became.
In Life Studies, Lowell flagged his turn from “the city of God” to a sec-
ular “tragic liberalism.”12 He did so overtly in the sonnet “Inauguration
Day: January 1953,” which mourns Eisenhower’s election in imagery of
iron and ice, paralysis and death. The bathos of “the Republic summons
Ike” says it all (Poems 117). One imagines a pause between the first three
words and the fourth as if to say, is this all you can come up with? Not even
“General Dwight David Eisenhower,” the crusader in Europe, but rather
the anodyne, smiling stick figure of “Ike”? Moreover, Lowell implicitly
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Steven Gould Axelrod
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The Three Voices of Robert Lowell
The first was Near the Ocean (1967), which tied original poems
together with translations of Horace, Juvenal, and others. In his preface,
Lowell wrote that the connecting theme of the translations “is Rome, the
greatness and horror of her Empire” (Poems 381). He then disingenuously
added, “How one jumps from Rome to the America of my own poems is
something of a mystery to me.” If it was a mystery, Lowell himself was
the only person incapable of solving it. The first original poem, “Waking
Early Sunday Morning,” excoriates the rise of an American empire with its
“hammering military splendor” (Poems 385). In the poem’s final stanza,
arguably the greatest Lowell ever wrote, the speaker eulogizes not simply
a fallen empire but a ruined planet, “a ghost” forever lost in “our monot-
onous sublime” (Poems 386). Another original poem, “Central Park,”
also takes a distinctly Juvenalian tone, observing the nation’s endemic
“stain of fear and poverty” and the “knife” or “club” hidden behind each
bush (Poems 393).
If Lowell’s “Near the Ocean” sequence depended on his rediscovery of
“Marvell’s elegant baroque stanza,” his next book, Notebook 1967–68,
required his development of “unrhymed, loose blank verse sonnets”
(Interviews 156). Although both volumes juxtaposed Lowell’s public
voice with his autobiographical and metapoetic voices, it was the public
tone that dominated. Among the first sonnets Lowell wrote for Notebook
1967–68 were “The March” I and II, composed the very day he par-
ticipated in the Pentagon March (Poems 545–546). These poems were
soon joined by others on Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Che
Guevara, the Napoleonic wars, the Civil War, World War II, the Vietnam
War, the 1968 election campaign, and so on. Although Burton Feldman
critiqued the volume as “protest-placard” poetry,13 it’s not that at all.
It’s a complicated series of meditations on power, nation, and individual
agency.
Lowell reengaged with his political Furies one last time, in his valedic-
tory poem, “George III.” Initially published in Newsweek, the poem com-
pares and at times merges George III with Richard Nixon, both deformed
by mental illness and tyrannical impulse. Yet the poem empathizes with
these “mad, bad” figures, leaving us with rather poignant images of
George III singing a hymn to his harpsichord and Nixon listening dis-
consolately to his own voice on tape (Poems 843–845). Lowell’s public
voice was resolutely complex. He once wrote, “I wish to turn the clock
back with every breath I take, but I hope I have the courage to occasion-
ally cry out against those who wrongly rule us.”14 His cry against others
inevitably involved a self-critical awareness of his own investments in the
iniquities of power.
335
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Steven Gould Axelrod
3
Lowell’s metapoetic voice complements his private and public ones. Whereas
the other voices speak of people, events, and an inner life inherently separate
from literary discourse, the self-reflexive voice is wholly textual and inter-
textual, making no effort to negotiate the world dimensional. This voice
utters only a written language. One might say that it is Lowell’s most post-
modern voice, though I think that his alternative voices – in addressing the
problematics of author, culture, politics, and form – also qualify as post-
modern. Still, his metapoetic poems provide the spaces in which he most
fully inhabits what J. Hillis Miller calls “the linguistic moment.”15
At first Lowell’s metapoetic voice could be heard mostly through his
translations and imitations, which appeared in almost every volume he pub-
lished. His first trade book, Lord Weary’s Castle, includes at least six such
poems, and his later volume, Imitations, is composed of nothing but. In his
imitations, Lowell engages with precursory poets, playing with both his own
voice and that of the predecessor, and unfixing both frames of reference in
the process.
In a linked strategy, Lowell also deposited the language of others in what
was essentially an original poem. He often took passages from prose, and,
like Kathy Acker, did not identify his sources. For example, “The Quaker
Graveyard in Nantucket” silently adapts sentences from the Bible, Milton,
Thoreau, Melville, Hopkins, and E. I. Watkin’s Catholic Art and Culture.
“Hawthorne” includes almost no words not written by Nathaniel Hawthorne
himself. “George III” takes so much from Oscar Sherwin’s Uncorking Old
Sherry that Lowell defensively labeled it a “translation.”
Another of Lowell’s intertextual strategies was to pay homage to fellow
writers, to celebrate and mourn their unique gift but also to search out cre-
ative qualities they shared with others. This strategy comes to the fore in
Lowell’s poems about Ford, Santayana, Schwartz, and Crane in Life Studies.
It reaches its apogee in History, where numerous poems depict creative mas-
ters from the distant past (Sappho, Cicero) and from Lowell’s personal expe-
rience (Eliot, Pound, Frost, Williams, Bishop, Berryman, Jarrell, Plath).
Another manifestation of Lowell’s metapoetic project was his constant
self-revision, especially in Notebook 1967–68, Notebook, For Lizzie and
Harriet, and History. Some of the revisions there involve alternative phras-
ing, whereas others produce major reversals, as when “these are words”
becomes “we are words” (Poems 600). Lowell’s revisionary practice subverts
the traditional conception of a sovereign author who puts his thoughts into
words and instead interpellates the poem as a differential textual endeavor,
an assemblage of words upon words, something both written and rewritten.
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The Three Voices of Robert Lowell
N OT E S
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Steven Gould Axelrod
F U RT H E R R E A DI N G
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The Three Voices of Robert Lowell
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