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

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1998 by Geoffrey Lindsay

The drama provided Lowell with a medium for activism in that decade. Like many prominent intellectuals of the period, Lowell turned from the introspection of the "tranquilized Fifties" (LS 85), as evident in Life Studies and For the Union Dead, to renewed interest in politics and the public forum. Near the Ocean, with its antiwar polemic, "Waking Early Sunday Morning," is one contribution to the political debate of the mid-60s, but as Norma Procopiow appreciates, Lowell's desire "to participate in the national mood could not be fully satisfied by poetry. Interaction with the public required a more immediate medium" (47). Through the theater Lowell could compose socially relevant plays to reflect his particular political concerns. While writing Benito Cereno, for instance, Lowell has stated that "the Civil Rights issue most of all" was on his mind (Billington 113); comparisons with the play's source have demonstrated that the changes Lowell made to Melville's novella were largely to reinforce this theme of racial inequality and conflict.(6) In a different vein, Prometheus Bound is a study of tyranny, reflecting Lowell's uneasiness with the concentration of power in a single individual's hands. Jerome Mazzaro contends that the play represents "a clear argument for the movement from intellectualism to activism" that Lowell judged necessary in the waning years of the Johnson presidency (PB 284). W. B. Yeats's political plays for the Abbey theater, Cathleen ni Houlihan and The Countess Cathleen, helped precipitate in him a new mood of socially engaged poetry; similarly, Lowell would find that Prometheus Bound and The Old Glory had an analogous effect on Notebook 1967-68.

The second way the drama influences Lowell's career is by encouraging him to experiment with a polyphonic voice. Notebook 1967-68's sonnets quote from a bewildering number of dramatic speakers. Those identifiable include Randall Jarrell, Kokoschka, Elizabeth Hardwick, daughter Harriet, Lowell's mother, John Crowe Ransom, Hitler, Sir Thomas More, Cato the Younger, Glenn Gray, Lady Cynthia Asquith, Pound, Frost, and Louis IX, among many others. Lowell quotes from diaries, letters, and history books, and records snatches of conversation, overheard anecdotes, and questions asked aloud. Sometimes this quoting takes the form of a dramatic lyric (a sonnet enclosed in quotation marks), but most often the quotations are partial, as in the last six lines of "Randall Jarrell":

They come this path, old friends, old buffs of death. Tonight it's Randall, the spark of fire though humbled, his gnawed wrist cradled like his Kitten. "What kept you so long, racing your cooling grindstone to ambition? Surely this life was fast enough. . . . But tell me, Cal, why did we live? Why do we die?" (69)

The dramatic voices are especially notable because they are the first evidence of discourse that resists the monologic impetus of Lowell's habitual, confessional voice. Prior to Notebook 1967-68, Lowell's lyric voice is resolutely monologic. Even when Lowell is quoting other voices or using the dramatic monologue, there is very little to distinguish between one voice and another. As Bakhtin observes of such poetry,