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

with gross black charcoaled brows and stern eyes

frowning as if they had seen the splendor

times past counting...unspoiled,

solemn as a child is serious-

light balsa wood the color of my skin.

It is all childcraft, especially

its shallow, chiseled ears.

crudely healed scar lumped out

to listen to itself; perhaps, not knowing

it was made to be given up.

Lowell's worst enemy could not have asked for more than this, the greatest of his depressive self-portraits: the eternal childishness, the heavy-handed solemnity, the blindness and deafness of self-preoccupation, the always putative claim to have "seen the splendor...." Confronting this image brings not only self-pity but terror, the terror of the "unwanted" child, the man who has looked into a universe of death:

This winter, I thought

I was created to be given away.

But the miracle of the poem is the "airy" space that arises around the gesture of voluntarily surrendering this self, its anxiety, its need to survive. Ironically, Lowell's compulsion to record himself was acutest in depression. "These days of only poems and depression," he says elsewhere in Day by Day--a line Tillinghast gravely misreads, thinking it means he regarded poetry as occupational therapy. To be healthy was to become anonymous, free to be rather than to do:

Here with you by this hotbed of coals,

I am the homme sensuel, free

to turn my back on the lamp, and work....

Free of the unshakeable terror that made me write.

So Lowell's autobiographical work (which the ex voto tacitly represents), begun in depression, has a different meaning when it is completed in health. It has become a distancing, a liberation. When Lowell writes "Goodbye nothing," to his "wooden winter shadow," one feels the paradox of a self-abandonment that is also self-forgiveness; the same paradox that is so moving in his poem to his son, "For Sheridan":

We could see clearly

and all the same things

before the glass was hurt.

Past fifty, we learn with surprise and a sense

of suicidal absolution

that what we intended and failed

could never have happened-

and must be done better.

In this mood, Lowell's poetry remains ultimately, though unclassifiably, religious. He writes to the ex voto,

I would take you to church,

if any church would take you...

In his "Epilogue," Lowell confronted, as he often did in his later years, the accusations against his work: that it was at once too literal and a melodrama, a concatenation of mannerisms,

lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,

heightened from life,

yet paralyzed by fact;

Still, he sticks by his goal: "Yet why not say what happened?" Tillinghast comments: "If you just say what happened, then you lose the interest of readers who don't find your own life as urgently fascinating as you do." But Lowell wouldn't have posed the question, if he hadn't expected tat obvious answer. He is after bigger game here. As in "Shifting Colors," he "pray[s] for" the paradoxical meeting-point of "grace" and "accuracy," of the aesthetic, and the spiritual, with the exactly everyday; what