Robert Lowell
Wednesday, March 27, 1957, 8:30 p.m.
San Francisco Museum of Art
Biographical Particulars
Born March 1, 1917, in Boston, of a family entrenched in New England tradition. Studied at Harvard, then at Kenyon where he was a pupil of John Crowe Ransom and graduated in classics (1940). The same year he became a convert to the Roman Catholic Church. During World War II he served a jail sentence as a conscientious objector. With his second book Lord Weary's Castle in 1946, Lowell received honors--in 1947, the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the office of Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. He has had a Guggenheim fellowship and an Institute of Arts and Letters grant. Between 1950 and 1953 he traveled in Europe. At the present time, no longer Catholic, married to the writer, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell teaches at Boston University.
Notes
His sense of outrage is constant
and involved, not aloof. In style, tone, concept, feeling, he
is resistant to ease, responsive throughout to terror; holds happiness
taboo. He has an obsession with the Dragon's spoor. "You
(the Puritans) planted here the Serpent's seeds of light,"
"He is the only happy man in Lent," "Will his breath
(Saint Patrick's) scorch the red dragon on my nerves to death?"
"When we try to kiss, our eyes are slits and cringing, and
we hiss; Scales glitter on our bodies as we fall." In the
Mills of the Kavanaghs a sort of path (the Way) "serpents
down a hill and graveyard." He gathers great force here,
but perilously. For drama, he dwells in the Accusation. We are
rightly wary that the Accusation in itself might be a false aspect
of the Judgment. Thus, Virgil in the interest of the Paradiso
warns Dante in the Inferno: "Now keep looking, a little longer
and I quarrel with thee!"
Denunciation of Evil, inspired with Christian
wrath, gave Lowell in Land of Unlikeness a commandng voice. "Freedom
and Eisenhower have won Significant laurels where the Hun and
Roman kneel" was informed by divine irony. "Tonight
the venery of capital Hangs the bare Christ-child on a tree of
gold... I am cold, War's coddling will not warm me up again."
"The ship of State is asking Christ to walk on blood."
These judgments are clear. They may belong to what Lowell in "91
Revere Street" (the first chapter of a forthcoming autobiography)
calls his "adolescent war on my parents"; but they were
inspired by and spoken with that major power of poetic voice which
we recognize as righteousness, the tone was Lordly. Land of Unlikeness
bristles with conviciton and hence definition: the evil is not
vague but named--the state, the industrialists, the military in
the contemporary scene; the Pilgrims whose eschatologies "fascinated
like a Walpurgis Nacht" in the New England past. In later
books conviction falters (see the poem "Christmas Eve in
the Time of War" in Land of Unlikeness and the poem "Christmas
Eve under Hooker's Statue" in Lord Weary's Castle where the
theme of profiteering is eliminated), and perplexity grows.
The perplexity of mind is there in the first
work. Like Donne, Vaughn, Crashaw--other perplexed Christian poets--Lowell
thrived on earnest conceits, "mannerism." "Mother
of God, whose burly love" he addresses Mary. Consternation
gave beauty of tragedy to his prayers. In later work, the emotional
character remains, but it is developed in dramatic monologues,
out of Robert Browning, with the exception that Lowell's personae
are voices of a constant complex of feeling. The larger task remains
for him of giving voice to human variety. To ask it, one suspects,
might be as naive as George Sand was in asking Flaubert for a
simple soul. Chaucer's or Shakespeare's or Balzac's human comedy
is universal; yet the genius of Flaubert, Strindberg or here,
of Lowell, that, possessed, is a Universe itself demands our admiration.
William Carlos Williams notes, of Lowell's rhyme and metrics:
"He must to his mind, appear to surmount them"; "Could
he break through, he might surmount the disaster." In Alexander
Pope, the heroic couplet where rhyme and metric are wedded to
syntax is method for the greatest freedom, clarity and definition
of intellect. But Lowell mistrusts intellect; in "Beyond
the Alps" he sees Santayana's work as "Machiavellian
vision charged with good," and exclaims "Minerva, the
miscarriage of the brain." Lowell's couplets bring us the
long way around to the 18th century; they contradict syntax and
appear as restraints, as obstacles. The mind circumvents. Under
the glass spell of the count we sense that he is at odds with
the restraint. The loss is so passionately felt. Yet the line
as Lowell has made it has the aesthetic virtue he sees in Picasso:
"lithe, steely, classical, outrageous." And Lowell is
sensitive to the aesthetic vice we see contained in the line;
of Golding's translations from Ovid, he says: "Often the
form seems like some arbitrary and wayward hurdle, rather than
the very backbone of what is being said." All realizations
in Art are so dynamic, at once virtuous and vicious, in relation
to new necessities which they call into being.
"Dante, Villon, Ben Jonson, Donne, Herbert,
and Milton" Lowell names as Masters in the art. Writing of
Hopkins, Lowell says: "To be thoroughly in act is human perfection."
These give dimension of man's unobstructed vision, where measure
and syntax are in concord; they surpass the biographical, the
psychological, the traumatic. Given the passionate involvement
which had informed all Lowell's work, and his attendant powers,
we may not do wrongly to await new perspectives. "My children,"
Lowell in "91 Revere Street" hears ancestor Myers, untainted
by Puritan fury, counsel: "Accept graciously the loot of
our inheritance. We are all dealers in second-hand furniture."
It is the grace that might in moving from adverb become noun and
verb: this the imagination apprehends.
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