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<text>
<title>
(1960s) Poets:The Second Chance
</title>
<history>Time-The Weekly Magazine-1960s Highlights</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
TIME Magazine
June 2, 1967
Poets: The Second Chance
</hdr>
<body>
<p> In a scene that draws forever the line between the poet and
the square, Hamlet, prince and poet, converses with the busy
bureaucrat Polonius:
</p>
<qt>
<l>Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape</l>
<l>of a camel?</l>
<l>Polonius: 'Tis like a camel, indeed.</l>
<l>Hamlet: Or like a whale.</l>
<l>Polonius: Very like a whale.</l>
</qt>
<p> Poets, their heads being in the clouds, are those who see
whales and camels where others see only a chance of rain. That
is why poets will always be more important that meteorologists.
Poetry is a great imponderable, since it describes and changes
the climate of the mind. It is a touchstone by which the
spiritual condition of man may be tested.
</p>
<p> In that respect, the testing is proceeding at a pace never
before felt in the history of American literature. Two
generations ago, many poets were at work in the U.S.--probably
a greater number of major poets than at present--but their
world seemed narrower. The literary quarterlies spent more space
and passion discussing poetry, but their audience was limited.
Slowly, poetry moved out of the parlors of overstuffed gentility
into the academy--out of college lit courses and esoteric
coteries--back to where it was when minstrels sang their
verses in the marketplace. It exists once again in an ambiance
of instant feeling. Poets are declaiming their works before
large, theater-size audiences in the cities and on the
campuses. Government grants, foundation funds and universities
with chairs for poets-in-residence are all conspiring to
strengthen or at least amplify their voices in the world at
large. Their poetry books trip ever more briskly off the
presses, and their phonograph recordings feed a flourishing
market.
</p>
<p> "There's poetry all over the place," says Robert Lowell.
"The world is swimming with it. I think more people write it,
and there are more ways to write it. It's almost pointless--there's no money in it--but a lot of them become teachers,
and a lot of them write quite good poems and read to a lot of
people. Poets are a more accepted part of society, and I don't
know if it's bad for us or not, but it's pleasanter. I don't
suppose even now parents are very glad when their children
become poets, but it's not such a desperate undertaking. Still,
being good isn't any easier."
</p>
<p> Robert Lowell, 50, is better than good, as far as such a
judgment can ever be made of a working, living artist, he is,
by rare critical consensus, the best American poet of his
generation.
</p>
<p> What They Seek. As Critic Edmund Wilson puts it, Lowell has
achieved a poetic career on the old 19th century scale. Of the
score or so of American poets who now stir the campuses, he is
easily the most admired. Not that the suspicious young readily
take to heroes, literary or otherwise, or are very clear about
what they seek in poetry. Says Mount Holyoke Poet and History
Professor Peter Viereck: students "crave the ever more shocking
and ever more new. They are looking more for emotional release
than purely artistic merit." Verse for edification or moral
uplift, he adds, "is totally dead. A poem like Tennyson's Merlin
and the Gleam would be a laughingstock of a coffee-house today."
</p>
<p> Says Albert Gelpi, assistant professor of poetry at
Harvard: students like poetry "because it seems to crystallize
experience more deeply. One boy left school after reading Hart
Crane, and I began to wonder what sort of power I am unleashing
to them. They are willing to accept a variety of poetry as long
as they get the sense that the poet respects the complexities
of the world. They reject oversimplifications."
</p>
<p> Prose commands their minds, but poetry envelops their
senses. They are aware of hard, sharp words that can clobber the
emotions, that communicate one-to-one, man-to-man. Says Lowell:
"The strength of the novel is that it tells a story and has real
people. But so many novels have been written that when you pick
one up you feel you've read it before. The problem with poetry
is that it doesn't necessarily have the connection with life and
can be rather obscure. But poetry has the wonderful short thrust.
By the time you get to the end of a poem, there's a whole
interpretation of life in 70 lines or less. It's hard to get
that in a novel, hard to get the heightening, hard to leave
things out. And amid the complex, dull horrors of the 1960's,
poetry is a loophole. It's a second chance of some sort: things
that the age turns thumbs down on, you can get out in poetry."
</p>
<p> From Pound to the Beats. In the 20th century so far, the
devotees of the "second chance" have constituted a remarkable
poetic pantheon. The Zeus of that lofty company is himself still
alive, though he has long since had his say. Ezra Pound, 81,
now living in Italy, fathered modern English poetry, freed it
from excessive strictures of meter, rhetoric and prosody. One
of his earliest converts was T.S. Eliot, who sensed the dilemma
of modern, urban and areligious man, and whose dry, ironic style
and endless rhythmic ways of weaving contemporary sounds are
echoed in virtually every poet's work today.
</p>
<p> Of Eliot's generation, Robert Front seemed a throwback;
yet, while he adhered to established norms, he commanded a
deceptively simple vision of man's vanities, his heart and his
land. More experimental, and less accessible, were William
Carlos Williams, a true avant garde poet and master of the
spare, stripped-down image, and Wallace Stevens, a pointillist
of light, color and all intangible things. Marianne Moore, now
79, constructs unique mosaics from conversations, newspaper
clippings and even scientific tracts.
</p>
<p> W.H. Auden and Allen Tate were both, in Auden's words,
"colonizers" of the terrain that Pound and Eliot discovered.
Theodore Roethke was already a major poet when he died in 1963
at 55. The late Dylan Thomas, with his crosscountry sweep of
public performances, helped carry poetry into the floodlit
arena. So did the beats. Of them, only Allen Ginsberg retains
any influence, perhaps less for his poems that for his
relentlessly acted role as the bewhiskered prophet of four-
letter words, homosexuality, pot and general din. Still, in
their better moments, the beats, now fitfully imitated by the
hippies, gave poetry a starling air of spontaneity.
</p>
<p> Against this background stands Robert Traill Spence
Lowell. Echoes of many of his predecessors and colleagues can
be found here and there in his work, although he lacks the
resigned elegance and orthodox Christianity of Eliot, the
homespun philosophy of Frost, the intellectual subtlety of
Stevens, the wit of Auden, the wild (and currently
unfashionable) lyricism of Thomas. He has created a body of work
distinctly his own, and most of it stands at the heart of a
genre that has been called "confessional" poetry.
</p>
<p> His latest book of verse, Near the Ocean, published this
year, seals a productive decade that brings his output to 130
poems and 69 "imitations" from the classics collected in Life
Studies, For the Union Dead, Lord Weary's Castle, The Mills of
the Kavanaughs, and Land of Unlikeness. He has also written
three short plays collectively titled The Old Glory, and a
translation of Racine's Phaedra (recently staged in
Philadelphia). His new prose play Prometheus Bound, produced
this month at the Yale School of Drama, is not so much drama as
an oratorio streaked with images of visceral intensity, as
exemplified in the paintings of his friend, Artist Sidney Nolan.
The play is a loose adaption of the Greek tragedy by Aeschylus,
but Lowell has typically given it a punishing comtemporancity.
A parable of human pride and torment, it becomes all the more
poignant with the realization that Lowell himself is a man riven
by deep conflicts.
</p>
<p> Indeed, the bulk of his best poetry is seared with a fiery
desperation, fed by rage and self-laceration. The world's ills
become his own, and his own the world's:
</p>
<qt>
<l>I hear</l>
<l>My ill-spirit</l>
<l>Sob in each blood cell.</l>
<l>As if my hand were at its throat...</l>
<l>I myself am hell.</l>
</qt>
<p> Lowell's friend, Poet Elizabeth Bishop, says that
confessional poetry "is really something new in the world. There
have been diaries that were frank--and generally intended to
be read after the poet's death. Now the idea is that we live in
a horrible and terrifying world, and the worst moments of
horrible and terrifying lives are an allegory of the world."
Speaking of some of Lowell's countless imitators, she adds:
"The tendency is to overdo the morbidity. You just wish they'd
keep some of these things to themselves."
</p>
<p> Man Who Has Everything. There is very little that Lowell
keeps to himself. He writes freely about how, overpressed with
anxieties, he periodically checks himself into a mental
institution for a few weeks. In Waking in the Blue, he evokes
a morning in the hospital, reminding himself that he is a
"screwball" among patients whose "bravado ossified young":
</p>
<qt>
<l>My heart grows tense</l>
<l>As though a harpoon were sparring for the kill</l>
<l>We are all old-timers,</l>
<l>Each of us holds a locked razor.</l>
</qt>
<p> Marbling this blood-tinged fragility is an incomparable
richness and density of classic imagery. Lowell draws habitually
from the inexhaustible theater of the Bible and loots many
mythologies for his art--as well as modern life. He recalls
seeing the condemned murderer Louis Lepke:
</p>
<qt>
<l>Flabby, bald, lobotomized,</l>
<l>he drifted in sheepish calm,</l>
<l>where no agonizing reappraisal</l>
<l>jarred his concentration on the electric chair--</l>
</qt>
<qt>
<l>He shudders at the new Boston, the motorized city:</l>
<l>The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,</l>
<l>giant finned cars nose forward like fish:</l>
<l>a savage servility</l>
<l>slides by on grease.</l>
</qt>
<p> In Near the Ocean, the first few pages bring together
Goliath, God, Joan Baez, Cotton Mather, Jesus Christ, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Monteverdi, Trollope, civil rights clergy, Homer,
his own New England roots, Calvin, and even the President of the
U.S.--seen in the White House swimming pool:
</p>
<qt>
<l>girdled by his establishment</l>
<l>this Sunday morning, free to chaff</l>
<l>his own thoughts with his bear-cuffed staff.</l>
<l>swimming nude, unbuttoned sick</l>
<l>of his ghost-written rhetoric.</l>
</qt>
<p> And when he writes in an adaption of Juvenal, "What do you
hope from your white pubic hairs," it is not just another
attempt to render Latin into English verse, but to say something
sharp and contemporary about the current U.S. cult of youth and
happiness, through sex, bears down heavily on older man.
</p>
<p> Love and Grace. How has Lowell made so many disparate
things recognizably his own? It is a riddle and a mystery.
Something important and complex happens in the poetry of this
complicated man, whose art can also be readily understood not
because it is merely simple but because it is the single outcome
of many conflicting forces. His poetry leaps with disconcerting
metamorphoses at every turn of speech. The bullets that "a
stringy policeman" counts become rosary beads. The swan-shaped
boats on the ornamental ponds of the Boston Public Garden become
mythological birds taking his grandfather, Arthur Winslow,
"beyond Charles River to the Acheron/ where the wide waters and
their voyager are one."
</p>
<p> Stones crop out all over, and one feels not only the weight
of them but also their sublapidary meaning. In Lowell's vision,
Moses' tablets of the law become "the stones we cannot bear or
break." The great slab of rock upon which Prometheus is chained
by Jupiter for his technological hubris in bringing fire from
heaven is the center stage of Lowell's version of Aeschylus.
Much of Lowell's poetry is indeed stony. It is hard with the
condemnation of his age and his society. Just as his
confessionals are far beyond personal confession, his
condemnations are far beyond "protest." His most immediate
concerns with war or injustice are never merely topical but
involved with the greatest and most permanent themes--life,
death, love and grace. His anger is hot, but it is never
unshaded by compassion. His disgust with the times is great, but
it is never unqualified by a sense of the past. He knows that
evil as well as good is in specific men, but also that it is
in all men; that it is today, but also that it was yesterday.
</p>
<p> Dialogue. A great deal of this knowledge is connected with
his sense of family history. A gibe heard when he published Life
Studies was not entirely unjust: "He writes as if Christ was
crucified on the Lowell family tree."
</p>
<p> He chose not to wear his ancestry as a social decoration
but to accept it as a present doom and to argue with the Pilgrim
Fathers as if they were living men. His poems call the Puritan
spirit of New England to sharp account and make his ancestral
portraits step from their frames and answer to Lowell. Thus his
dialogue becomes an argument about his own nature, in terms of
the Calvinist obsessions with sin, damnation, God and Satan.
Lowell does not possess his ancestors; they possess him.
</p>
<p> One of them was Mary Chilton, the first woman to step off
the Mayflower. Another branch of the family produced Harvard
President A. Lawrence Lowell. Great-Great-Uncle James Russell
Lowell (1819-1891) was a Harvard professor of belles-lettres and
modern languages, an abolitionist, Ambassador to Spain and the
Court of St. James's, author of The Bigelow Papers, and of
course poet and perfervid hymn writer ("By the light of burning
martyrs, Jesus' bleeding feet I track"). From yet another
family branch came Amy Lowell (1874-1925), who wrote passable
"imagist" verse, smoked cigars, and drove a claret-colored
limousine. "To my family," says Robert Lowell, "James was the
Ambassador to England, not a writer. Amy seemed a bit peculiar
to them. She was never a welcome subject in our household."
</p>
<p> Badgered. Robert comes from the Russell-Spence branch of
the family, whose most notable member, Great-Great-Grandmother
Harriet Traill Spence, seems to have had her kinky side--although no one is quite certain what it was. Family Chronicler
Ferris Greenslet writes that the Spences possessed "a certain
mystical dreaminess that sometimes obscured the need for
immediate action in the small, imperative affairs of daily
living." In family privacy, that trait was dignified with a
genteel euphemism; it was called "the Spence negligence."
</p>
<p> In a melancholy memoir, 91 Revere Street, Lowell tells of
life with Father and Mother in Boston. Father was Commander
Lowell (Annapolis 1906), a dim, mumbling man who left the Navy
for a series of sad civilian jobs, ending as a brokerage
customers' man "with himself the only customer." The real
commander was Mother, a Winslow, who nagged her husband into
resigning from the Navy and badgered him out of the deeds to his
own house. In Life Studies, Lowell recalls contemptuously:
</p>
<qt>
<l>"Anchors aweigh," Daddy</l>
<l>in his bathtub.</l>
<l>"Anchors aweigh,"</l>
<l>When Lever Brothers offered to pay</l>
<l>him double what the Navy paid,</l>
<l>I nagged for his dress sword</l>
<l>with gold braid,</l>
<l>and cringed because Mother, new</l>
<l>caps on all her teeth, was born anew</l>
<l>At forty. With seamanlike celerity,</l>
<l>Father left the Navy,</l>
<l>and deeded Mother his property.</l>
</qt>
<p> Celestial Robes. Lowell came early to his vocation. He was
a fifth-form schoolboy at St. Marks, the prestigious Episcopal
prep school in Southborough, Mass., when he received his
calling. Awkward, myopic, shy, dull in class except for history,
he shambled about the sham Tudor buildings. His friends called
him "Cal." after Caligula, because he was so uncouth; he liked
that, and today is still known as Cal. His nature became clear
to classmates after he started reading commentaries on the Iliad
and Dante's Inferno. As his roommate, Artist Frank Parker,
recalls: "The point was that you could put yourself into heaven
or hell by your own choice. You could make your own destiny.
That became Cal's text."
</p>
<p> To test this theory, Lowell threw his powerful but ill-
coordinated body into football. The theory was sound; he won his
letter as tackle. "It was more will power than love of the
game," says Parker. "It was his way of exercising the moral
imperative." But would the theory be valid for poetry?
</p>
<p> Lowell plodded doggedly into an epic on the Crusades. His
first published poem, Madonna, was pretty bad, even for a school
magazine: "Celestial were her robes/ Her hands were made divine/
But the Virgin's face was silvery bright/ Like the holy light!
Which from God's throne/ Is said to shine."
</p>
<p> But he was lucky to have as one of his teachers Poet
Richard Eberhart. "At the beginning of his senior year,"
Eberhart recalls, "Lowell brought me a book of 30 poems--the
first fruits of his labors--shyly placing it on my desk when
I was not there. I cherish this unpublished book to this day.
It showed the young poet heavily influenced by Latin models, but
true strokes of imagination came through."
</p>
<p> By the time he left St. Marks for Harvard in 1935, Lowell
had written in an essay on the Iliad: "Its magnitude and depth
make it almost as hard to understand as life." So soon, Lowell
had put art and life on a parity. At Harvard, he lolled in his
room, surrounded by prints of Leonardo and Rembrandt, listening
to Beethoven on his phonograph. He wrote poems full of violence
and foreboding, black roses, a "plague" that "breathed the decay
of centuries." No one then at Harvard was interested, so Lowell
took his verses to Robert Frost, who was living nearby. Frost
read the first page of the Crusades opus. "You have no
compression," he said, and then read aloud a short poem by
Williams Collins, How Sleep the Brave. "That's not a great poem,
but it's not too long." Lowell recalls that Frost was "very
kindly about it."
</p>
<p> Lowell chafed at Harvard and the stifling pedantry of its
literature courses, and he seethed against the tensions of his
home. The first of his crises was mounting. It came with his
announcement, later rescinded, that he was quitting college to
elope with a girl to Europe. Father and son quarreled. The
violence that churned in Lowell's poetry burst out, and he
knocked his father to the floor. As Commander Lowell saw it,
his crazed son would have to be packed off to an asylum, but
family friends convinced him that his poet son needed not so
much the company of keepers as that of other poets--specifically, those living in Tennessee.
</p>
<p> Heady Summer. Tennessee in the '30s was the center of a
poetic renaissance. Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, fathers
of the "New Criticism," had done much to impose form and
coherence on the gaseous and self-indulgent free-verse fashion
of the time. Thus Lowell at 20 found himself at a reform school--poetic reform. When he arrived "ardent and eccentric" at the
Tate's house in Monteagle, near Chattanooga, he was told there
was no room. "You would have to camp on the lawn," said Mrs.
Tate, who was already busy with a novel, her family, three
guests and the cooking. Lowell bought a pup tent at Sears.
Roebuck, pitched it on the lawn, moved in and slept there for
two months.
</p>
<p> It was a heady summer. Lowell recalls: "It seemed to be one
of those periods when the lid was being blown...when a power
came into the arts which we perhaps haven't had since." After
that, the poet's eye was in a fine frenzy rolling; he was now to
find a focus in the forms of tradition.
</p>
<p> He returned to Cambridge to muddle through a bit more and,
although it seemed impious to his parents for a Lowell to reject
Harvard, he was allowed to transfer to Kenyon College in
Gambier, Ohio, where Ransom and Randall Jarrell now taught. They
were to make the Kenyon Review into a dominant force in American
poetry and criticism for the next three decades. "I am the sort
of poet I am because of them," Lowell acknowledges simply.
</p>
<p> The heavy burden of learning and the rigorous formal
demands of the New Criticism of Ransom and Tate dammed up the
freshest of his verse. His poems were blocked with a deliberate
opaque quality, as if he feared that clarity was a sign of
mediocrity. Still, he seemed stimulated by restraint. He
emerged from Kenyon summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa and class
valedictorian. He also emerged a Roman Catholic convert and a
husband.
</p>
<p> Just after graduation, he married Jean Stafford. Two years
his senior, she was intense, beautiful, a gifted writer of
fiction (she later wrote Boston Adventure, and The Mountain
Lion) and an assistant professor at Stevens College in Columbia,
Mo. And so, with his marriage, his graduation and his
conversion, he at last stood outside the long shadow of Beacon
Hill. He would deal with its traditional claims upon him only
in his own terms; in poetry. And he would write New England's
epitaph rather than a Frostian celebration.
</p>
<p> Then began a life pattern that would soon become familiar
in U.S. cultural pursuits--in which hundreds of the gifted,
the talented or the merely qualified would live from grant to
mouth, or move, like the modern Lollard friars, from college to
college, claiming hospitality by right of authorship. The
Lowells drifted to Louisiana State University, and then back to
Kenyon. Lowell's poetry was excruciatingly difficult and
ambiguous; as he said later, "it really wasn't poetry."
</p>
<p> With his wife, he moved to Manhattan's Greenwich Village,
where he labored briefly for the Catholic publishing house of
Sheed & Ward. This period gave him the metropolitan imagery
necessary to a contemporary poet; he needed less an eye for the
four seasons of Walden Pond than for the five boroughs of New
York City. He was to write: "Now the midwinter grind/ is on me.
New York/ drills through my nerves/ as I walk/ the chewed-up
streets." And, in a cataclysmic line: "When Cain beat out his
brother Abel's brains/ the Maker laid great cities in his
soul."
</p>
<p> The C.O. It was a bad time for poets generally. There was
a war on. In 1942 Lowell tried to serve first in the Army, and
then the Navy, only to be turned down by both as physically
unqualified (eyesight alone would have disqualified him). As
the war went on, he changed his mind, or the war changed its
character. When the draft called, he refused to report and wrote
a letter to the President to explain why. He wrote not as a
dissident citizen to the all-powerful President of the U.S., but
haughtily as a Boston Lowell to a Hudson Valley Roosevelt: "You
will understand how painful such a decision is for an American
whose family traditions, like your own, have always found their
fulfillment in maintaining, through responsible participation
in both civil and military services, our country's freedom and
honor."
</p>
<p> F.D.R. understood. The judge understood. Lowell was
sentenced to a year and a day, but served only five months, part
of it in Manhattan's West Street jail. He later wrote of his
experience with jocular ferocity: "I was a fire-breathing
Catholic C.O.,/ and made my manic statement,/ telling off the
state and president, and then/ sat waiting sentence in the bull
pen/ beside a Negro boy with curlicues of marijuana in his
hair."
</p>
<p> Poor Ghost. Lowell's poetry explains better than any
presidential letter the violence of his revulsion against the
war, especially the bombing of cities, crucial to his
conscientious objection: "Raise us, Mother, we fell down/ Here
hugger mugger in the jellied fire/ Our sacred earth in our day
was a curse." Many of his antiwar poems were written at
Damariscotta Mills, Me., where he and his wife had gone as soon
as he was released from jail. Collected in Lord Weary's Castle,
his second volume, they won him, at 29, the Pulitzer Prize.
</p>
<p> But they won him no peace of mind. In a rage with the
world, Lowell found no balm in his religion, and he renounced
Catholicism. Nor was marriage a solace; it was another theater
for his inner dissension. He and his wife wrote in separate
rooms of a big old farmhouse. Years later, he remembered: "How
quivering and fierce we were/ There snowbound together/
Simmering like wasps/ In our tent of books!/ Poor ghost, old
love, speak!/ With your old voice/ Of flaming insight/ That kept
us awake all night./ In one bed and apart"...They were
divorced in 1948.
</p>
<p> Back to Roots. In the summer of 1949, Lowell married again.
The bride, another writer, was Kentuckian Elizabeth Hardwick,
who is now an editor of the New York Review of Books. That year
he taught at Iowa State University. They spent most of the next
three years in Europe, where Lowell plunged into a temporary
gambling fling at Monte Carlo. After his mother's death in 1954,
he took his wife to Boston and, with his inheritance, bought a
big, comfortable town house in Back Bay. "The idea," says a
friend, "was to recapture some roots. It was their first attempt
to be the Boston Lowells."
</p>
<p> For a while it worked. Their daughter Harriet was born.
They held expansive dinner parties at which intellectual
nourishment was served with the same elegance that accompanied
the finger bowls. Critics Edmund Wilson and Philip Rahv dined
there, and so did Poets William Carlos Williams, Richard
Eberhart and William Snodgrass, Lowell's most gifted student.
"Lowell liked the successful poets with more than just a
literary interest," recalls a friend. "They were reproductive,
they had lasted the course--they were heroes of letters."
</p>
<p> For five years, Lowell taught at Boston University. In
1959, he published Life Studies, which included 91 Revere Street
and some of his best poetry. In Skunk Hour, which evokes a
summer's decay, he watches the animals search in the moonlight
for food:
</p>
<qt>
<l>They march on their soles up Main Street;</l>
<l>white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire,</l>
<l>under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian</l>
<l>Church.</l>
</qt>
<qt>
<l>I stand on top</l>
<l>of our back steps and breathe the rich air--</l>
<l>a mother skunk with her kitten swills the garbage pail.</l>
<l>She jabs her wedge-head in a cup</l>
<l>of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,</l>
<l>and will not scare.</l>
</qt>
<p> Even in those productive days Lowell suffered a terrible
physical strain. "He was struggling with two dynamos," says a
friend, "one leading him to some kind of creative work, the
other tearing him apart." The origin of what Lowell himself
called his "breakdowns" is attributed by some friends to the
"incredible tensions" that existed between Lowell's parents.
Says one: "I don't see how he survived the family. He has
written about it, but the reality is worse than he has written."
</p>
<p> And when he wrote, the result often surfaced not only in
recollections of childhood (I, bristling and manic,/ skulked
in the attic) but in raging descriptions of his tormented later
years. In Life Studies, he portrays a wife, murmuring about her
husband, who
</p>
<qt>
<l>"...drops his home disputes,</l>
<l>and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,</l>
<l>free-lancing out along the razor's edge...</l>
<l>What makes him tick? Each night now I tie</l>
<l>ten dollars and his car key to my thigh...</l>
<l>Gored by the climacteric of his want,</l>
<l>he stalls above me like an elephant."</l>
</qt>
<p> In the same collection, he could be familial and tender:
"Gone now the baby's nurse/ a lioness who ruled the roost and
made the Mother cry." Yet even in his more resigned moments,
he really seemed to distrust tranquility: "Cured, I am frizzled,
stale and small."
</p>
<p> He was, and apparently remains, haunted by totemistic
objects. One is the mirror, symbol of self-knowledge, in which
Lowell has seen himself as a newt and a turtle. The other is the
razor, a symbol of the knowledge of life that comes through the
contemplation of death. The Puritan-lapsed-Catholic may have
arrived at the true existentialist position--confronting the
possibility of suicide man learns the nature and possibilities
of his life.
</p>
<p> A Private Man. Soon after the publication of Life Studies,
Lowell and his wife returned to New York City. There his
reputation flourished, nourished by each successive collection
of poems, including For the Union Dead, and by the ardor of the
intellectual Establishment of the Eastern academies, who by
general agreement considered him something of a grandee.
</p>
<p> Two years ago, Lowell received a call from the White House
asking whether he would accept an invitation to a festival for
the arts. He said yes. Then, recalls his wife, "when he got the
official invitation, he decided he didn't feel at all connected
with the White House and that what the White House was doing
didn't have much connection with the arts." Thereupon Lowell,
reflecting the general dissatisfaction of intellectuals with
L.B.J., sent the President a telegram declining the invitation.
"We are in danger of becoming an explosive and suddenly
chauvinistic nation," he wrote. "Every serious artist knows that
he cannot enjoy public celebration without making public
commitments." Lowell was pleased by the "hundreds of letters"
of congratulations that ensued, but he was not prepared for a
sudden rush of demands for his support from dissident groups.
He has refused virtually all of them, for essentially he is an
intensely private man.
</p>
<p> Real Work. Nowadays, between weekly trips to Harvard, where
he teaches poetry, Lowell spends most of his time working at
home in Manhattan. He and his wife own a West Side duplex
apartment filled with books; the high living room walls are
fitted with a traveling ladder. He writes in a studio, lying on
a bed, composing his lines on a small pad. "It's such a miracle
if you get lines that are halfway right," he once explained.
"You think three times before you put a word down, and ten times
about taking it out." When he has finished his rough draft, he
begins fashioning rhymes. Later comes the "real work," which is
"to make it something much better than the original out of the
difficulties of the meter." He adds: "If you don't know a good
deal about what you're saying, you're an idiot. But if you know
too well what you're doing, you are a pedant."
</p>
<p> He is fond of reading the works of other poets, sometimes
in class, often to friends at home. Occasionally, he makes the
circuit scene to read his own work. His voice carries a faintly
Southern-accented sound, his 6-ft. frame hulks over the
microphone, and his sad blue eyes needle onto the printed page
through thick black-rimmed glasses as he intones his poems. He
receives as his fee anywhere from $250 to $1,000 or more. At
Manhattan's Town Hall recently, he introduced Soviet Poet Andrei
Voznesensky to the audience and let loose with a curious
political remark--his first such public utterance since his
telegram to L.B.J. "This is indiscreet," he said, "but both our
countries, I think, have really terrible governments. But we do
the best we can with them, and they better do the best we can
with each other or the world will cease to be here." Some people
in the hall applauded: others gasped. Voznesensky, asked later
for comment, merely turned away without a word.
</p>
<p> For relaxation, Lowell and his wife still maintain a busy
schedule of dinner and cocktail parties, usually with other
poets. When summer comes, they pile their Falcon station wagon
with books and head for the tiny summer resort at Castine in
Maine. There Lowell keeps a small house, left to him by Cousin
Harriet Winslow, who, recalls a local citizen, was "a very prim
old lady who wore white gloves to the Post Office."
</p>
<p> In Castine or in New York City, whether he is stoking his
fireplace or his thoughts, Lowell dwells on poetry and, through
it, the world. In Waking Early Sunday Morning, he concludes
</p>
<qt>
<l>Pity the planet, all joy gone</l>
<l>from this sweet volcanic cone;</l>
<l>peace to our children when they fall</l>
<l>in small war on the heels of small</l>
<l>war--until the end of time</l>
<l>to police the earth, a ghost</l>
<l>orbiting forever lost</l>
<l>in our monotonous sublime.</l>
</qt>
<p> His views on the future of American poetry are somewhat
brighter, but are not too optimistic. "It's a very dark
crystal," he says, "I don't know what poetry needs now.
Something's happening now, but it's hard to tell what it is.
Half of it is very difficult, and half of it is very quiet." He
guesses that perhaps "there has been too much confessional
poetry."
</p>
<p> Lowell is surrounded and occasionally followed by a number
of excellent poets, some of them brilliant. John Berryman, 52,
often ranked with him, is an original, jazzy, elliptical
lyricist. Richard Wilbur, 46, an elegant disciple of Eliot's,
writes cerebral, well-constructed verse. Charles Olson, 56,
founder of the Black Mountain School, has fostered the grand
vision of "projective verse"--free, direct, written to be
spoken. James Dickey, 44, is Lowell's polar opposite--facile,
exuberant, bearing joy and affirmation. Louis Simpson, 44, and
Robert Creeley, 41, are promising lyric poets. Elizabeth Bishop,
56, one of America's leading women poets, is the epitome of the
cool, detached, low-key observer. And W.D. Snodgrass, 41, who
has written some confessional poetry but is not by any means an
imitator, strikes critics as one of the most gifted of the newer
generation.
</p>
<p> Dry Stick. As for Lowell himself, greater things can surely
be expected, considering his high conception of the scope and
power of art. That conception is best expressed in the words he
found for Prometheus, as the embodiment of man's creative
facilities, which are reflections of the divine.
</p>
<p> "I taught men the rising and the setting of the stars. From
the stars, I taught them numbers. I taught women to count their
children, and men to number their murders. I gave them the
alphabet. Before I made men talk and write with words, knowledge
dropped like a dry stick into the fire of their memories, fed
that fading blaze an instant, then died without leaving an ash
behind."
</p>
<p> Lowell remains a religious man and maintains that his later
poems, in which explicit Christian symbols rarely occur, are
more truly religious than those of his Catholic period, which
were encrusted with liturgical ornament.
</p>
<p> With all his poet's pride, he remains humble and aware that
the end of man, even of poetic man, is not poetry but the simple
obligation to be good. He has constantly said, "It is harder to
be a good man than a good poet." The statement comes with double
force from a poet who has undergone such an intense struggle to
acquire his art, and from a man whose own nature is in frequent
schism with itself. Thus far, his art has found no words for
this. His fellow poet Auden might speak for him in lines written
on another New England poet-tragedian, Herman Melville:
</p>
<qt>
<l>Goodness existed: that was the new knowledge</l>
<l>His terror had to blow itself quite out</l>
<l>To let him see it...</l>
</qt>
</body>
</article>
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