Drama and dramatic strategies in Robert Lowell's Notebook 1967-68

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1998 by Geoffrey Lindsay

Pity the editor entrusted with putting together Robert Lowell's Collected Poems. How to decide which version of "The Well" or "The White Goddess" to use, for instance, the version in Notebook 1967-68, Notebook, History, or all three? "In the Cage" first appeared in Lord Weary's Castle, but what should be done with the three subsequent versions that appear in the volumes just named? Should the shortened, sonnet versions of "Water" in Notebook and History - adaptations of that superb poem for Elizabeth Bishop from For the Union Dead - be included? And, can a strong case be made for treating Notebook 1967-68 in its entirety as a volume separate from Notebook in a Collected Poems?

Editors faced with a choice of texts usually rely on the last verifiable version, since the latest revision usually has the author's blessing. However, this is often problematic: Auden's politics changed in time, and his revisions reflect that change, often to the detriment of his early work. John Crowe Ransom wrote two notable books of poetry and tinkered with those poems for the rest of his life, mostly to their detriment. The controversy over the order and choice in Yeats's Collected Poems should make any editor wary of the far more difficult task of sorting through Lowell's texts, especially Lowell's later work. His Selected Poems, for instance, exists in original and revised editions, and Lowell admits in a note to that volume that he has made changes, often "going back to discarded versions" (vii). An editor's choice may be to accept Lowell's revisions and to keep only the final version of a poem (where ascertainable), or to view all revisions as successive evolutions of a developing idea, the output of a continuous process poem.

Perhaps in the postmodern critical climate these questions are less pressing than they once were. The sonnet volumes (Notebook 1967-68, Notebook, For Lizzie and Harriet, History, and, to a lesser extent, The Dolphin) are postmodern, in the sense that they refuse to remain fixed, static, and determined; they present, instead, provisional narratives. As a provisional narrative, for instance, "Topless," Lowell's meditation in Notebook on a girl dancing, can become a dramatic monologue, "Cleopatra Topless," in History, providing that poem with an entirely new frame of reference. Ideas can be inverted: "common the clay, kingly the workmanship" ("Agamemnon: A Dream" N 41) becomes "kingly the clay, common the workmanship" ("Orestes' Dream" H 33).(1) A sequence set in 1967 in Notebook 1967-68, "Long Summer," can be rewritten and relocated in the 1930s in History. The poems' contents and contexts are amorphous, constantly shifting and recombining, spinning out new "meanings" as the sonnets are rewritten, shuffled, and renamed.

As Jonathan Veitch has noted, the world of Lowell criticism is divided between those critics who prefer History and those who defend one or the other of the Notebook volumes. While each side has impressive spokespersons,(2) the History faction seems to have the upper hand in recent years, especially since the problem of interpreting history has become central to current critical debate, and Lowell's emphasis on history as "his story" is in accord with contemporary concern with the subjective interpretation of history. Veitch, for instance, prefers the "oedipal drama" in History to the "phenomenological jungle of the day-to-day" (461) in the Notebook poems, while Nicholas Ruddick concludes that the Notebooks are "a solipsistic shambles" of only passing interest (13). Such criticism tends to dismiss Notebook 1967-68 as a rough draft on the way to Notebook, which is then refitted and recast into Lowell's definitive arrangement in History (at least until his Selected Poems). In the meantime, some of the personal poems Lowell could not fit into History were spun off in a companion volume, For Lizzie and Harriet.

Lowell himself has, of course, contributed to or perhaps guided our sense of progressive refinement (hence our appreciation of the "finished" product) by apologizing in Notebook to those who had to "buy this poem twice" (264), and for claiming in History that he had finally "cut the waste marble from the figure" ("Note" [7]). However, in contrast to the prevailing view, I would like to explain why I believe that Notebook 1967-68 is, except for The Dolphin (which is similar in technique and theme), the most interesting and boldly original of the sonnet volumes, for reasons that have not been explored before and that have to do with the influence of the theater on Lowell's work in the years 1967-68. Subsequently, the changes made from Notebook 1967-68 through to History move Lowell steadily away from Notebook 1967-68's initial idea, which was to adapt for his poetry a dramatic strategy learned from the writing of drama in the 1960s. The "refinement" of the sonnet volumes, therefore, is actually a corruption of Notebook 1967-68's central premise, a distorting rather than a clarifying of his initial inspiration.