1958
Blurb for Life Studies
by Robert Lowell
As a child, I used to look at my grandfather’s Bible under a powerful reading-glass. The letters assembled beneath the lens were suddenly like a Lowell poem, as big as life and as alive, and rainbow-edged. It seemed to illuminate as it magnified; it could also be used as a burning-glass.
This new book begins on Robert Lowell’s now-familiar trumpet-notes (see “Inauguration Day”), then with the autobiographical group the tone changes. In these poems, heartbreaking, shocking, grotesque and gentle, the unhesitant attack, the imagery and construction, are as brilliant as ever, but the mood is nostalgic and the meter is refined. A poem like “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” or “Skunk Hour,” can tell us as much about the state of society as a volume of Henry James at his best.
Whenever I read a poem by Robert Lowell I have a chilling sensation of here-and-now, of exact contemporaneity: more aware of those “ironies of American History,” grimmer about them, and yet hopeful. If more people read poetry, if it were more exportable and translatable, surely his poems would go far towards changing, or at least unsettling, minds made up against us. Somehow or other, by fair means or foul, and in the middle of our worst century so far, we have produced a magnificent poet.
1959
“Writing poetry is an unnatural act…”
Writing poetry is an unnatural act. It takes great skill to make it seem natural. Most of the poet’s energies are really directed towards this goaclass="underline" to convince himself (perhaps, with luck, eventually some readers) that what he’s up to and what he’s saying is really an inevitable, only natural way of behaving under the circumstances.
Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria, in his discussion of Wordsworth, has a famous sentence. It says: “the characteristic fault of our elder poets is the reverse of that which distinguishes too many of our recent versifiers; the one conveying the most fantastic thoughts in the most correct and natural language, the other in the most fantastic language conveying the most trivial thoughts.” He then goes on to quote some of George Herbert:
VIRTUE
“Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky:
The dew must weep thy fall tonight;
For thou must die!”
LOVE UNKNOWN
that begins
“Dear friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad:
And in my faintings, I presume, your love
Will more comply than help. A Lord I had…”
Another Herbert: LOVE
“Love bade me welcome, but my soul drew back,
Guiltie of dust and sinne.”
and ends:
“‘You must sit down,’ sayes Love, ‘and taste my meat.’
So I did sit and eat.”
This, I later discovered in Waiting for God, was Simone Weil’s favorite; she translated it and knew it by heart.
The three qualities I admire in the poetry I like best are: Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery. My three “favorite” poets — not the best poets, whom we all admire, but favorite in the sense of one’s “best friends,” etc. are Herbert, Hopkins, and Baudelaire.
THE CHURCHE-FLOORE
“Hither sometimes Sinne steals, and stains
The marbles neat and curious veins: …
Sometimes Death, puffing at the doore,
Blows all the dust about the floore…”
His magnificent poem, THE SACRIFICE
“Arise, arise, they come. Look how they runne!
Alas! What haste they make to be undone!
How with their lanterns they do seek the sunne!
Was ever grief like mine!”
He has spontaneity, mystery, and accuracy, in that order?
Hopkins, WRECK OF THE DEUTSCHLAND
“Ah, touched in your bower of bone
Are you! turned for an exquisite smart,
Have you! make words break from here all alone,
Do you!—”
THE GRANDEUR OF GOD “it will flame out like shining from shook foil…”
“I am all at once what Christ is, / since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.”
Auden’s
B [Baudelaire] here—
“Altogether elsewhere, vast
herds of reindeer move across
miles — miles of golden moss
silently and very fast.”
It’s accurate, like something seen in a documentary movie. It is spontaneous, natural sounding — helped considerably by the break between adjective and noun in the first two lines. And it is mysterious.
The first lines of D. Thomas’s “Refusal to Mourn”:
“Never,
Miss Moore’s — [“Plagued by the Nightingale”:]
Frost’s—
[Wordsworth, Shakespeare’s “Prithee undo this button”—everyone is moved to tears by it; it certainly is the height of spontaneity, and yet it is so mysterious they are still arguing as to whether it’s his own button or his daughter’s button …]
Burns — lacks mystery, maybe — but — weaker in the mystery—
“No matter what theories one may have, I doubt that they are in one’s mind at the moment of writing a poem or that there is even a physical possibility that they could be. Theories can only be based on interpretations of other people’s poems, or one’s own in retrospect, or wishful thinking.”
I’m not a critic. Critics can’t rest easy until they have put poets in descending orders of merit; they change the lists every night before they go to bed. The poet doesn’t have to be consistent.
Marianne Moore, MARRIAGE, that begins:
“This institution,
perhaps one should say enterprise…”
NEW YORK
“the savage’s romance,
accreted where we need the space for commerce—
the center of the wholesale fur trade…”
accuracy: from A GRAVE
“The firs stand in procession, each with an emerald turkey-foot at the top…”
skeleton
FROST: the ghost that “carried itself like a pile of dishes.”
ending of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
Auden here—
a single word does it all
ROBERT LOWELL:
“Remember, seamen, Salem fishermen
Once hung their nimble fleets on the Great Banks.”
hung suggests the immensity, the depths of the cold stormy water and the tininess, the activity of the small “nimble” ships — and yet it’s the simplest sort of natural verb to use—
THE DEAD IN EUROPE
“After the planes unloaded, we fell down
Buried together, unmarried men and women…”
“O Mary, marry earth, sea, air and fire;
Our sacred earth in our day is our curse.”