DYLAN THOMAS:
“Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls…”
A REFUSAL TO MOURN
“Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness…”
Baudelaire: “Les soirs illumines par l’ardeur du charbon…” where charbon is the telling word — surprising, accurate, dating the poem, yet making it real, yet making it mysterious—
Spontaneity — Marianne’s “Marriage,” “N.Y.”—
Herbert’s EASTER
“Rise, heart; the Lord is risen.”
Hopkins’ “Glory be to God for dappled things”—
My maternal grandmother had a glass eye. It fascinated me as a child, and the idea of it has fascinated me all my life. She was religious, in the Puritanical Protestant sense and didn’t believe in looking into mirrors very much. Quite often the glass eye looked heavenward, or off at an angle, while the real eye looked at you.
“Him whose happie birth
Taught me to live here so, that still one eye
Should aim and shoot at that which is on high.”
Off and on I have written out a poem called “Grandmother’s Glass Eye” which should be about the problem of writing poetry. The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of the poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye.
(call the piece “Grandmother’s Glass Eye”???)
spontaneity occurs in a good attack, a rapid line, tight rhythm—
Brazilian Poetry: I am reading B.P. I began naturally with the living poets & I intended to work backwards into Brazilian and Portuguese poetry. I’ve found many good things, but I feel that I don’t know the language well enough, or the body of poets. To say anything about it at present would be an impertinence.
late 1950s — early 1960s
Some Notes on Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell, born in 1917, is the Prodigal Son of the “Pilgrim Fathers,” the Concord Transcendentalists, and the nineteenth-century industrialists. He is considered by nearly all of the good critics, American or English, as the greatest poet of the generation following that of Pound, Cummings, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, etc. In the years 1940–1950, his work was for Americans a surprise almost as great as that, some years later and in a totally different way, of Dylan Thomas for the English.
T. S. Eliot predicted that, with the battle won for “free verse” and demotic language in poetry, there would be a return to formal meter and stanza, even “intricated,” and to strict rhyme. The poems of Robert Lowell seem to have come to fulfill that prophecy, and sooner than was expected. His first book, Land of Unlikeness, was published in 1944, in an edition limited to 150 copies. His first trade book was Lord Weary’s Castle, 1946, which made him famous and for which he received, among other honors, the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Some years later there appeared The Mills of the Kavanaughs, and more recently Life Studies. Since the publication of Life Studies, Lowell has devoted some of his time to translation; in 1961, we had his translation of Racine’s Phaedra. A book of shorter translations, from Baudelaire, Rilke, Montale, Pasternak, etc., appeared recently under the title Imitations. Lowell deliberately chose this word to describe his technique in translation; the poems are far from being literal translations; they constitute, in reality, new poems, in the already famous Lowell style. And as such they are praised by those who admire that style and criticized by those who prefer the more common form of word-for-word translation.
Lowell is of course a famous New England name. There is a city called Lowell that evolved around the Lowell mills of cotton textiles in the early nineteenth century. Robert Lowell is related to the famous nineteenth-century poet James Russell Lowell (who for many years was Ambassador to England) and also to the celebrated poet of “free verse,” Amy Lowell. He was born and raised in Boston, with the privileges but also the burdens accompanying that powerful local name. As expected, he went to Harvard, but he couldn’t adapt, and two years later transferred to Kenyon College, in Ohio, where he had as his “mentor” the southern Agrarian poet and “New Critic,” John Crowe Ransom.
At the beginning of the war, Lowell made a first attempt to enlist in the navy (his father had been a naval officer), but he was rejected for reasons of health. During the course of the war, however, he changed his mind about things and, when he was finally drafted for military service, he refused to serve. The United States had hundreds of conscientious objectors working in hospitals and special camps, but since Lowell had failed to register as a “pacifist,” he was sent to jail as a common criminal. Before that, he had already shocked his family and the city of his birth, by turning against New England Calvinism, even to the point of becoming a convert to Catholicism. I believe that at this time — like Eliot, Auden and others — he is a practicing Anglican. His poetry is profoundly religious and rich in biblical and ecclesiastical images, primarily so in his first two books. His religious interpretation of the world is in the tradition of his New England “ancestors”: the Mathers, Jonathan Edwards, Thoreau (who also went to jail), Hawthorne, etc. and the Brook Farm group.
It cannot be denied that, to the uninitiated reader, his poetry is difficult. Yet (in contrast, I think, to some of the more popular poems of Dylan Thomas), Lowell’s poetry, always totally honest with the reader, is invariably written in perfectly logical syntax and meaning. One’s initial difficulty, at times, lies in knowing what the poem’s subject actually is. Many of his poems are dramatic, spoken by different characters; on this score, he has been frequently compared to Browning. But, once one knows the scene and the character, the poem itself, despite its being subtle, involved, and full of linguistic associations — an astonishing mixture of demotic and formal language — is always lucid.
In the strange title of his second book, Lord Weary’s Castle, there is already embedded in part an explanation of Lowell’s poetry. It comes from the old ballad about a poor stonemason named “Lambkin” who built a castle for one Lord Weary, but who was deprived of his just payment. In this legend Lowell sees a parable for the modern world — the “castle”—the crushing superstructure of our civilization. Randall Jarrell, in Poetry and the Age, describes Lord Weary’s Castle: “The poems understand the world as a sort of conflict of opposites. In this struggle one opposite is that cake of custom in which all of us lie embedded … the inertia of the stubborn self … the obstinate persistence in evil that is damnation … imperialism, militarism, capitalism, Calvinism … the ‘proper Bostonians,’ the rich.… But struggling within this … is everything that is free or open, that … willingness that is itself salvation … the Grace that has replaced the Law, of the perfect liberator whom the poet calls Christ.”
The poems in this book and in The Mills of the Kavanaughs are almost all in rigorous stanzaic form with the frequent enjambment that has become Lowell’s characteristic mark. This technique gives these poems of profound religious belief and anguish, which were written during the war, their affect of urgency, panic almost.