ROBERT LOWELL

 

by

 

Burton Raffel

 

Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.

New York, NY

 

Hardcover, 157 pages

ISBN 0-8044-2707-0

 

 

 

These days there is not so much said about Robert Lowell, though Burton Raffel said much in Robert Lowell, a sometimes harsh critique of the poet s work, beginning at the age of 18 when Lowell attended Harvard, lasting but two years:

He seems to have done very little work, to have drunk much and smoked up a lot, and to have pursued and conquered a girl some half a dozen years older than himself in a quarrel with his father, over this young lady, he hit and knocked down the older man. He did not like Harvard, and Harvard did not much like him. Robert Frost, visiting the university, found the young man s early poetry long-winded and boring, as indeed it was.

 

Lowell moved on to imitate William Carlos Williams but it did not work. Urged by others to visit Allen Tate in Tennessee (Tate led a group of southern writers known as the Fugitives) Lowell showed up uninvited at Tate s home and asked if he could stay, to which Tate responded that he d have to camp out on the lawn in a tent. Which Lowell promptly did for the summer of 1937.

Mentally unstable, married three times, and in and out of mental institutions, what Lowell must have inflicted on those close to him probably cannot be measured. His unfortunate early model was T.S. Eliot, including Eliot s theory that a poet writes from a constantly amalgamating experience of chaos and fragments. Despite this hindrance in his poetic upbringing, Lowell won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 at the young age of 30 for Lord Weary s Castle but thereafter lost his faith, his politics, his wife, and his mind. And his poetry drifted. Nearly a decade later, at age 39, a cousin told him he was written out and done for.

Whatever personal issues haunted Lowell, Raffel found elements of Lord Weary s Castle to be admirable. Image material is now subordinated to theme; it no longer runs wild, and the poem no longer runs to excess. Raffel also praised the extraordinary economy of these lines, which move tautly, firmly toward an organized presentation, a controlled presentation. He also admired the movement within the lines as more relaxed, at times gracious, and what musicians call through composed. That is, instead of using structural devices of a repeating nature, like the stanza, the poet allows the structure of the poem to evolve organically, as it were, out of the poem s own imperatives. Instead of stanzas, Lowell used what Raffel cals strophes verse paragraphs that do not match one another in length, in structure, or in rhyme patterns. But what Lowell continued to struggle against, and move beyond, was the poetry of T.S. Eliot. As Raffel says:

it is the farthest thing from easy to escape the towering presence of a predecessor in any art. How many musicians did Beethoven swallow? How many painters are struggling, still, to escape Picasso?

 

Raffel contends that Lowell ultimately did move past Eliot, and that when he did so, he produced his best work, Life Studies. But to do so, like other confessional poets, Lowell had to open his own veins, something unsustainable by anyone.

In his later poetry, Lowell s style relaxed yet again, adding syllables to avoid too tight a style, and moving close to prose. I felt that the best style for poetry was none of the many poetic styles in English, but something like the prose of Chekhov or Flaubert. To avoid the more formal style of the past, he capitalized the first word of a line only when it was the first word in a sentence. He also used rime faible and slant rhyme. But where Lowell succeeded in Life Studies, Raffel found failure in his 850 free-form sonnets which Raffel criticized as a form of distinguished poetic journalism. As Lowell himself conceded in 1968, I no longer know the difference between prose and verse. Raffel describes such work as easy-flowing, virtuosic poetry, which does not dig very deep. For one particular sonnet, he states:

And though there are felicities, sometimes delightful felicities, scattered all across the poem, choicely phrased lines within the reach of very few poets, we are engaged only in a limited way. This is immensely attractive poetry; it is distinctly successful in what it tries to do. But it does not try to do very much . . .

 

In contrast are these lines which Raffel praises:

 

Now twelve years later, you turn your back.

Sleepless, you hold

your pillow to your hollows like a child;

your old-fashioned triage

loving, rapid, merciless

breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.

 

What Raffel finds worthy here is the blunt power with which Lowell has dealt with this relationship. Elsewhere Raffel also finds lines which he calls singularly sparse, without the slightest sentimentality or exaggeration, and which paint the world with devastating abruptness. He similarly praises a line which strikes like a cobra.

But he has little tolerance for poems with lines which break for no apparent reason, which use repetition merely for poetic flavor, which settle for something not much more musical than good evocative prose. This criticism, written in 1981, could apply equally well to much of what passes for poetry today. As Raffel states at one point:

in what way are these lines much more than clean prose? They report; they do not stir, they do not sing.

 

He levels similar criticism at the use of images:

 

They have no focus, they are merely descriptive. And competent description is the bare beginning of poetry, not the finished product.

 

The same is true of how a poem may express an idea:

 

poetic linkage requires more than mere idea to justify it and, above all, to charge it with feeling and life.

 

After the journalistic poetry of Lowell s sonnets, he found more success in his last volume, Day by Day, published just before his sudden death in a taxi in New York in 1977. Consider these lines from Suburban Surf:

You lie in my insomniac arms,

as if you drank sleep like coffee.

 

As Raffel recognizes, there is a powerful sense of everything that is needful having been said and not a syllable more. Raffel s comments on these poems are instructive:

What Lowell has begun to learn, it seems to me, is that words are enough, have power to say what they are given to say. There is no need to pile layers and then still more layers of overwrought action and thought on top of the bare, sufficient reality. Indeed, it is precisely that reality that truly carries the power, both of ideas and emotions. To wrap it in abstractions and poke it with sticks in order to make it writhe more vividly is to kill it, not quicken it.

 

Raffel concludes that art is not a snapshot, something which cannot rise above the trivial. Rather, artists may struggle a lifetime to vainly strip away the layers that interfere between artist and that living essence, that living reality, that simple, basic truth. What Raffel recognizes is that although Lowell did not do it often, he did it some, which many do not do at all.

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