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

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1998 by Geoffrey Lindsay

Often overlooked in discussion of the Notebook volumes is the fact that the drama was Lowell s second craft in the years leading up to and during the time the Notebook poems were written." In what might be termed Lowell's decade of drama, he wrote the bulk of seven plays - the Old Glory trilogy, adaptations of Phaedra and Prometheus Bound, two of the three plays comprising the Oresteia - and he expressed an interest in writing three others.(4) The attraction to drama was kindled in part by a Ford Foundation grant, awarded in 1960, that enabled Lowell to study opera in New York. The foundation's aim was "to take a group of established writers who had not written plays and attach them to repertory companies and see if they turn out to be good dramatists."(5) Lowell attended rehearsals and productions by the Metropolitan and New York City Opera companies during the 1960-61 season, which prompted him to draft Benito Cereno and to complete a long-delayed translation of Racine's Phedre.

Lowell's letters during this time, Ian Hamilton reports, were "full of rather boyish drama talk - the prospects for Phaedra, [and] plans for future Brechtian spectaculars that would be 'fierce and noble and indecent'" (Lowell 282). In 1961 his Phaedra was published; in 1964 two of the three Old Glory plays - Benito Cereno and My Kinsman, Major Molineux - were produced in New York. Benito Cereno was greeted with mixed reviews, but nonetheless garnered five Obie awards, including top honor as best play for that season. Robert Brustein heralded Lowell as a "brilliant new dramatist" in his introduction to The Old Glory (xiv), Phaedra premiered at Wesleyan University, and in 1966 Lowell worked on Prometheus Bound, initially to be staged by Peter Brook. In 1967 Lowell was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for a staging of Prometheus Bound at the Yale School of Drama, with Jonathan Miller directing. The following year a revised edition of The Old Glory was released, Endecott and the Red Cross premiered in New York, and in 1969, Prometheus Bound, together with Notebook 1967-68, was published. Between 1960 and 1970, then, Lowell was almost continuously involved in some dramatic project, whether writing, translating, or rewriting, staging productions of his work, teaching, granting interviews on his plays, or attending opening nights in both Britain and the United States. Given this saturation in the drama, it would be surprising if its influence were not ascertainable in the poetry of this period.

In an interview, Lowell disclosed that in writing drama "I found it a great relief to have a plot and people who weren't me at all." He goes on to say that since "the medium gave a certain freedom," he discovered that he could express concerns "that I couldn't say in a confessional poem" (Alvarez 76). Lowell's practice in the drama and his subsequent method in Notebook 1967-68 suggest that the plays were instrumental in refocusing his career in the 1960s in two distinct but related ways: in a movement to an increasingly public voice, and in a parallel movement, to an increasingly polyphonic voice. I will examine each in turn.