Alan Williamson: Looking back at Robert Lowell -- Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell by Paul Mariani / Robert Lowell's Life and Work: Damaged Grandeur by Richard Tillinghast

American Poetry Review, The, May 1995 by Williamson, Alan

But, from twenty-five years' distance, the Notebook poems seem less limited by these traits than by what Lowell probably hoped would make them appear more "normal." It is the breezy, rueful, seen-it-all, allusive social voice, the attempt at generality, that haunts lines like "We're warpage in the drift to fin-de-sicle"; "the vagabond Alexander passed here, romero"; or

Regret those jousting aristocracies,

war-bright, though useless, their lives a round of games;

sex horsed their chivalry, even when

the aggressor was only an artless dragon....

One has only to read any issue of the New York Review of Books from the mid-1960's to see where this style came from. It is snobbish, not because it presumes a knowledge of history and literature; or even because it treats a life of relative wealth and leisure as a norm; but because it presumes that anyone of true intelligence will see the world through the same smoke-darkened glass. Like all styles that overvalue the sophistication of a particular era, it has aged fast.

But then, there was a further change; the mix thinned out. In his last two books, The Dolphin and Day by Day, Lowell returns to autobiography, and his peculiar genius reemerges. These books make heart-rendingly clear how far Lowell's deepest subject was always the balancing of his two perspectives, the moment of illumination against the "downward glide/ and bias of existing" that "wrings us dry." Take "The Day," a poem still resonant with the Catholic imminence of Last Things, "Dies illa, dies irae, " but, from another point of view, as transparent as a haiku by Basho:

It's amazing

the day is still here

like lightning on an open field

terra firma and transient

swimming in variation,

fresh as when man first broke

like a crocus all over the earth

Or take this delicate vignette from The Dolphin, "Morning Away from You":

This morning in oystery Colchester, a single

skeleton black rose sways on my flour-sack window-

Hokusai's hairfine assertion of dearth.

Few living poets indeed could manage that third line, the way the sounds turn each other inside out, the way "dearth" skirts but avoids "death." This is the intellectual Lowell at his best, calm, exact, without a hint of patronizing superiority.

Life intrudes on this severe austerity, with its burden of squalor, changing mores, insult and opportunity:

My host's new date,

apparently naked, carrying all her clothes,

sways through the dawn in my bedroom to the shower.

Goodmorning.

The poet, feeling still more cast out, has a moment of Hardyesque terror, trying to imagine unimaginable annihilation: "I lie thinking myself to night internalized." He consoles himself with the thought of his new beloved and their child, "happy you save m[y blood] and hand it on." Finally,

when I open the window, the black rose-leaves

return to inconstant greenness. A good morning, as often.

The two faces of life stand before us, in those "rose-leaves." And in "good morning": a heartless cliche, and at the same time a truth, the truth Lowell finds hardest of all to accommodate.