Robert Lowell Collected Poems

Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1,200 pp., $45)

From the fall of Rome to that of the World Trade Center, a cloying, mindless and absurdist sincerity characterizes most political poetry, which often reads like paid-for newspaper memorials to lost loved ones. No one would have known better than Robert Lowell, whose long-awaited, monumental volume of collected verse appeared in June of this year, that politics suffers from the dangerous and inevitable curse of abstraction—simplistic “us vs. them” theories are perennial favorites—unless its practitioners leave behind the pleasures of bombast and partisan rivalries for the exponentially more difficult knowledge of history’s unending bloodshed.

This knowledge was both Lowell’s birthright, as a member of a Boston Brahmin family (though from the less distinguished branch, as he delighted in pointing out), and something he learned from his chief mentors, the Fugitive/ Agrarian writers John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, whose commitment to traditional aesthetics eventually morphed into a controversial economic and political movement. Lowell dropped out of Harvard and planned to attend Vanderbilt, which pleased none of the Lowells of any branch; instead he landed at Kenyon College when Ransom left Vanderbilt. At Kenyon, where Lowell followed Ransom’s advice to major in classics, he roomed with Randall Jarrell, another Nashvillian, and Peter Taylor, with whom he remained lifelong friends. Lowell addressed several poems to Jarrell and Taylor, as well as to Ransom, Tate and Warren. His years with these men, as well as his marriage to Kentuckian Elizabeth Hardwick, account for his odd Southern drawl, if not entirely for his deadly accurate understanding of questions of historical, literal and emotional hierarchies, which for Lowell were all encompassed and superseded by poetry itself.

Lowell’s most enduring subject might well be termed power: how it passes from one generation to the next; how it operates in both the public and private spheres, which collide more often than we tend to notice; how it waxes and wanes and even—terrifyingly—disappears at times; and how we use it to hurt and humiliate. Part of Lowell’s genius is to recognize himself in both the scepter-wielding emperor and his cowering, often doomed subject. For example, writing of Florence, the city which he called “patroness / of the lovely tyrannicides,” the poet’s gaze traverses the Piazza della Signoria and its statues of Perseus, David and Judith: “Pity the monsters! / Pity the monsters!” he proclaims. Why? “I have seen the Gorgon,” he continues; “The erotic terror / of her helpless, big-bosomed body / lay like slop. / Wall-eyed, staring the despot to stone, / her severed head swung / like a lantern in the victor’s hand.” The timeliness of poems like “Florence,” “The Exile’s Return,” “The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket,” “For the Union Dead” (a reply to Tate’s famous “Ode to the Confederate Dead”), “Waking Early Sunday Morning,” and entire books, like History, scarcely needs pointing out in this age of paranoiac patriotism.

For the lover of Lowell, the Collected Poems is cause for celebration and grumbling. Some of Lowell’s volumes have become difficult to find even through online bookstores specializing in out-of-print material, a problem that the appearance of Collected Poems largely erases. But editors Frank Bidart and David Gewanter’s decision to delete Notebook has its detractors. This collection, which Lowell continuously revised and expanded, became so thick with 14-line, unrhymed “sonnets” that he eventually divided the single volume into three: History, which contains the least personal poems; For Lizzie and Harriet, which centered on his relationship with Hardwick and their child; and The Dolphin, which focuses on Lowell’s decision to leave his family for the Anglo-Irish beauty Caroline Blackwood. While the poet didn’t think of Notebook as being replaced by History or its two corollary volumes, when he assembled his Selected Poems the year before his death, he chose to include History, not its predecessor. If a similar choice had to be made for a one-volume collection, as Bidart and Gewanter assert, this one seems logical, if not unassailable.

Longtime Lowell readers will support or argue with the editors’ decisions according to their own convictions. For those to whom Lowell remains a stranger, one hopes the release of Collected Poems attracts scores of new readers. The editorial notes help flesh out obscure places, names and allusions; they also give us biographical materials necessary to reading Lowell’s work in the often highly personal context it demands. Bidart and Gewanter pay just homage to Ian Hamilton’s and Paul Mariani’s biographies, which deepen that context and also chronicle the poet’s lifelong struggle with manic-depression.

Now, during our country’s latest resurgence of bloody, self-righteous imperialism, the Collected Poems not only represents the much larger chronicle of Lowell’s singular, genius-haunted life and work but also offers an indispensable perspective on the story of America since the 1940s. To protest the massive civilian bombing of cities like Dresden at the end of World War I, Lowell refused to serve and was sentenced to a year and a day in a New England state prison. What he called “the tranquilized Fifties” was a time—creepily like our own—when “giant finned cars nose[d] forward” like predatory fish, and “a savage servility [slid] by on grease.” In the ’60s, Lowell participated in the march on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War, served as advisor to Bobby Kennedy, and, after Kennedy’s assassination, campaigned across the country for Eugene McCarthy.

Finally, Lowell lived through the fallout of the ’60s, particularly regarding the family life that had been one of his best subjects since the hallmark volume Life Studies. At the same time, he wrote elegies for nearly every one of his many friends and students who died—in the cases of Jarrell, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, by suicide—during his own last years. When we read a line like “[H]istory has to live with what was here,” we’re in the presence of a heavily felt responsibility, an imperative not merely to exist but to live in the history of our own time—even if, like Lowell, we’re constantly “clutching and close to fumbling all we had.”

Riding the Sylvia train

Farrar, Straus and Giroux immediately followed Lowell’s Collected Poems with similarly magisterial editions of the works of Pablo Neruda and Ted Hughes, a welcome statement of faith in the art of poetry. “It is well that we look closely at this world of objects; they should not be underprized,” Neruda once said.

Poetry purists may grumble that the timing of the Hughes volume, which coincides with that of the movie Sylvia, betrays a crass commercialism. It’s important to note, however, that apart from Philip Larkin, Hughes is the most famous poet to emerge from post-war England, and Hughes’ collected work, while sui generis, is in the company of some of this autumn’s best poetry-related books. October saw the arrival of the paperback edition of Wintering (Anchor Books), Kate Moses’ dazzling fictional rendition of Plath’s last months, told in chapters that correspond to the original Ariel; Lydia Bundtzen’s The Other Ariel (University of Massachusetts Press), a more scholarly but infinitely readable and engaging work on the same subject; and Her Husband (Viking), Diane Wood-Middlebrook’s top-flight literary biography of Hughes focused on his years with Plath. Last but hardly least is Giving Up (St. Martin’s), Jillian Becker’s devastating account of Plath’s last days, which she spent with the Becker family, and her funeral. Among such books, and of particular local interest, is Crow Steered/Bergs Appeared (Proctor’s Hall Press), a memoir by Lucas Myers, a graduate of the University of the South. After meeting Hughes in Cambridge and starting a magazine with him, Myers became the future British Poet Laureate’s lifelong friend. He now lives in Sewanee.