Robert Lowell - 1917-1977 History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had— it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes. I watched for love-cars. Even before Robert Lowell published "Life Studies," his masterpiece, in 1959, he was widely regarded as the best American poet of his generation. By mid-poem, she is nearly speechless with complicated disgust: “Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust…. Time is the traditional arch-rival of the sonneteer, whose rosebuds must be gathered soon, and the sonnet has always been a heavy weapon against time, a palimpsest on which longings are inscribed in stone, made monumental, since that is the only way the poet might survive. and plotted perhaps too freely with my life, “Birds have a finer body and tinier brain- / who asks the swallows to do drudgery, / clean, cook, pick up a peck of dust per diem?” the poem opens, teasing a rhetorical question he might be asking of himself. It was his ability to subdue the Miltonic grandeur and heavy instrumentation hard-wired into his DNA-the “high style” we associate with “Quaker Graveyard” -and disguise it as something ragged, low and discursive. Craft and life are hardly incompatible here: the first three breathy fragments, with that optimistic caesura, swing like battering rams against the dam that breaks open, with its heavily enjambed, unstoppable pentameter. And it is hard not to see Lowell’s equation for the ornery rebuttal it was; by setting up “skill” and “craft” as somewhat incompatible with “life” and “culture” he could noisily reject his eroded New Critical ethic of formal purity and his equally eroded comfort with (what here sounds like) artificiality. In his recollection of “New Year’s Eve,” for example, he blurts: By miracle, I left the party half He concluded by quoting all of Dream Song 29 and adding these closing remarks:] The voice of the man becomes one with the voice of the child here, as their combined rhythm sobs through remorse, wonder, and nightmare. Robert Lowell 's poem "July in Washington" begins as almost an ode to the natural environment of Washington. doing all for the best, and therefore doing nothing, Brilliant, convincing handling of … what do men want? Many of the fifty books in my library on Lowell, including three I’ve written, do not even mention it … Strange, life is both the fire and fuel; and we, He won the Pulitzer Prize in Frank Bidart’s “Introduction,” with its title “You didn’t write, you rewrote,” reminds us how odd it was to watch Lowell’s sonnets proliferate in the latter half of his career, and Bidart also points out that “rethinking work, reimagining it, rewriting it was fundamental to [Lowell] from the very beginning, and pervasive until the end.” Though I must put too many crucial differences aside in order to make this comparison, I’d add that the process by which Lowell produced these sonnets is formally Byronic. She was the old foundation of western marriage… Children's Song by R. S. Thomas - We live in our own world, A world that is too small For you to stoop and enter Even on hands and knees, The adult su This is not to suggest that Lowell didn’t also write some of the best individual sonnets we have in modern English. Lowell’s own remarks on Berryman’s Dream Songs, first published in The New York Review of Books in 1964, uncannily describe his own collections of sonnets: There is little sequence, and sometimes a single section will explode my wife in her wooden crib of seed and feed…, It is not the impulse toward playful or cruel caricature that makes these poems so attractive and odd, just as they are not merely compelling as fodder for lonely biographers who wish to seek out the stench of something rotten in the Lowell-Hardwick house. Song Themes. It’s become craft, pure craft, and there must be some breakthrough back into life. [private]Lowell’s name was part of me by then, early as it was in my poetic education, if only because I’d been spoon-fed a diet of his poems in several workshops. This poem has not been translated into any other language yet. And the plot of Don Juan is ultimately subservient to the endless generation of individual stanzas, each of which is formally self-contained and kaleidoscopic, but never decisive, leaving something still to be said, compelling our poet and our hero forever onward, forever unfinished, no destination in sight. seeing as you are seen, espoused to fact. There are a number of more or less “serious” poems here and there in History, like “Watchmaker God” with its straightforward, Larkinesque dismantling of belief and its withering conclusion: Say life is the one-way trip, the one-way flight, an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting-. At first the brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder and oddness. Lowell recognizes his own bust pedestalled among theirs already, it seems; the remainder of the opening sonnet is all memento mori, self-portrait, and bad omen: “the beautiful, mist-drunken hunter’s moon ascends- / a child could give it a face: two holes, two holes, / my eyes, my mouth, between them a skull’s no-nose…”. nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future. God of our armies, who interred / It’s the injustice…he is so unjust- / whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.” Lowell pours on the dashes and ellipses here, the essential marks of punctuation that helped him produce the moribund, stammering quality so emblematic of the poems of Life Studies. One was not looking for a work of art- without striking a spark of evidence "The Dolphin" is a new sequence of love poems by America's foremost poet, winner of the first Copernicus Award, given to him by the Copernicus Society and the Academy of American Poets for keeping alive the best values of American literature. to ask compassion…this book, half fiction, knotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope; as lack-land atoms, split apart, Lowell celebrates such bizarre free-play in “For John Berryman I,” announcing, “I feel I know what you have worked through, you / know what I have worked through-we are words; / John, we used the language as if we made it. Interestingly, Stone took his title from the line that he quoted as, 'And candles gutter in a hall of mirrors.' The worst part was that I had to work it … After a while, the repeated By placing individual sonnets in the company of so many others, as he does in the three volumes of 1973 (History, For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin), Lowell’s sequences afford him room for much more gleeful untidiness (so much it is hard to think of these poems now being contained beneath the same cover that holds a spit-polished collection like Lord Weary’s Castle) and they work through accumulation, if they work at all, more than through the force of individual poems. A pivotal example of confessional, "Skunk Hour" (1956) is a tormented soliloquy that overlays deep despair with comedy. He concluded by quoting all of Dream Song 29 and adding these closing remarks:] The voice of the man becomes one with the voice of the child here, as their combined rhythm sobs through remorse, wonder, and nightmare. The numerology of this hard work is immediately impressive: there are 607 fourteen-line poems in the Collected (yes, I counted, perhaps badly-please forgive such manic math), including those fourteen liners which are decidedly unconventional, like the famous tetrameter sonnet, “In the Cage,” from Lord Weary’s Castle. The downside to this method of composition, of course, will be our frequent bemusement and dissatisfaction with so much repetition and so much of the quotidian trash of autobiography. “Fishnet” and “Dolphin” the opening and closing sonnets that bookend The Dolphin (and the best twenty-eight lines to be found there) together compose this sonneteer’s ars poetica. So Harriet is “The hurt mother” who “sleeps awake like a cat till daybreak/ stretched on the mat by the bed of our breathy child….” And in section two of “Circles”, Lowell takes a playful stab at distilling Das Ewig Weibilche (Goethe’s “eternal feminine”) as it is found in all the earth’s domestic beasts, his own unduly tortured human wife included. Robert Lowell, probably, had little intention of mediating between post-, high-, or midmodernisms. At first the brain aches and freezes at ‘Night Sweat’ by Robert Lowell was originally published in his book “For the Union Dead” in 1964. Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV (/ ˈ l oʊ əl /; March 1, 1917 – September 12, 1977) was an American poet.He was born into a Boston Brahmin family that could trace its origins back to the Mayflower.His family, past and present, were important subjects in his poetry. They achieve their effects mainly through improvisation, direct statement, and the pleasures of tragicomic anachronism. For the moment, it seems pretty generally agreed that he is the greatest of living American poets, although there is equally general doubt as to the nature of his achievement—its contour, if you want. Lowell originally wrote the poem "For the Union Dead" for the Boston Arts Festival in 1960 where he first read it in public. He accuses himself of “saying too little, then too much” in the first poem, and reveals in the last: I have sat and listened to too many One feels Lowell being pulled here by the gravitational force of Heart’s Needle (which he read in manuscript) and “Howl,” two “breakthroughs” that preceded his own. The boiling yellow-jacket in her sack Lowell opens this odd tribute with a benign nod to Coleridge, then summarily strips the good, gray poet of the protective cloak of his populace: “Robert Frost at midnight, the audience gone / to vapor, the great act laid on the shelf in mothballs.” Lowell’s own stammered confession to his elder, “Sometimes I’m so happy I can’t stand myself” (in reference to his manic fits of “enthusiasm”) is quickly outdone by Frost’s own wicked confession, “When I am too full of joy, I think / how little good my health did anyone near me.”, Several other poems in the sequence offer us illustrations of Lowell’s signature self-deprecation. but having perfected what He had to do, They are multi-vocal, juggling quotation and questions constantly, but they do not hide behind the camouflage of bitter rhetoric. Eliot’s prediction that we should soon see a return to formal and even intricate metres and stanzas was coming true, before he made it, in the verse of Robert Lowell.” Tate describes Lowell’s “intellectual” style as “compounded of brilliant puns and shifts of tone; and the willed effect is strengthened by the formal stanzas, to which the language is forced to conform.” In 1961, a few years after the publication of Life Studies, Lowell sang a very different tune, offering his own fairy tale excuse for the shift in his aesthetics, his poetic departure from Tate-Ransom, Inc. From our position now, it becomes clear that Lowell was also perpetuating, if not re-inventing, the curious notion that poets must self-destruct formally in order to rise from their own ashes on the singed wings of free verse. In a sonnet like “To Speak of Woe That is in Marriage,” as in so many of his sonnets, such tensions are all the more obvious, since the form funnels all discursive contingencies toward conclusion with even greater speed. This writer’s fate was to persist in letting out that line as far as it can go, employing until the last those tools at his disposal. and the Republic summons Ike, They are notebooks indeed: at times pedantic, at others hermetic, too often cruel and self-serving (even if their operative mode is to be read as self-effacing). he stalls above me like an elephant. Simultaneously repellent and enticing, Lowell’s sonnets comprise something essential to his oeuvre because in their spotty successes and frequent failures, in their labor to grasp at something oceanic and fatal, they underlay all he made, if not overtly legible, not invisible at least. not avoiding injury to myself- Robert Lowell 1917-1977 "Fall 1961" Back and forth, back and forth goes the tock, tock, tock of the orange, bland, ambassadorial face of the moon on the grandfather clock. It's an interesting image, but not, perhaps, Lowell's. The essence of Lowell’s style is built upon the tension between his casual, ruminative, almost impersonal tone and the bedrock of his entrancing declarations, as in “Skunk Hour”: One dark night, Our wheels no longer move. the mausoleum in her heart. Although Robert Lowell was born in 1917, Kay Redfield Jamison opens her new biography of the poet seventy-two years before his birth, in 1845, with a Lowell being committed to … stood off shrouded in his loneliness. the old actor cannot read his friends, ), so expertly finished it appears almost lacquered in its final form, yet disheveled and colloquial enough to suspend our disbelief, as the best of Lowell’s poems always do. This is a problem Lowell himself saw at the end of his career, recorded in his famous “Epilogue,” where he confesses “…sometimes everything I write / with the threadbare art of my eye / seems a snapshot, / lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, / heightened from life, / yet paralyzed by fact.” He pronounces similar sentiments in the prose of “After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays on Me,” remarking that in his late “unrhymed blank verse sonnets…. small as wasps fuming in their ash-leaf ball. John Lowell II (I6584), 1743-1802); see the poetic memoir "91 Revere Street"; Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. He studied at Harvard University and Kenyon College. If we could feel and softly touch their being, He also uses various allusions to Puritan elements like “pilgrims” and “the blood of Cain” to allude to a religious meaning that may be hard to decipher for some. In some ways Lowell does pick up where Eliot left off, shoring fragments against ruins, piecing such fragments together fourteen lines at a time. Robert Lowell light night children father house child. the one thing necessary that most husbands 2. Not surprisingly, such a looseness of composition occasionally illuminates for us the more sordid angles of Lowell’s imagination. All autumn, the chafe and jar of nuclear war; we have talked our extinction to death. “How happy we’ll be together,” Robert Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Hardwick in July, 1949, weeks before their marriage. The line must terminate. (“Flight to New York”). In sundry moods, ‘twas pastime to be bound In spite of these occasional intrusions of Lowell’s present, most of the sonnets of History, when taken together, compose a necropolis-zoo in which the exotic dead are caged and pacing with only the most rudimentary signs to guide the hapless visitor from century to century. of felon-stripe cut short above the knee Rhyme scheme: aaXbbccXdd Stanza lengths (in strings): 10, Closest metre: iambic pentameter Сlosest rhyme: couplets Сlosest stanza type: sonnet Guessed form: heroic couplets Metre: 1101110111 1111000101 01000101010 10100011001 1101010101 11010011101 0100110111 11010111010 1101010101 0101001001 Amount of stanzas: 1 Average number of symbols per stanza: 446 Average … It is impossible to resist looking, for example, to the beautifully awful portrait of modern love that is “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” much of which was spliced from an early draft of “Man and Wife” (which itself once had the more ironic working title “Holy Matrimony”). January 2004: Robert Lowell Special Issue, Passing Facts: Reviewing Lowell’s Reviewers. There is an almost physical pleasure in the pattern and a satisfactory joy in its baroque variations. This poem has not been translated into any other language yet. To state the obvious, sonnets are squat, lyric vessels that will not bear too much narrative and will stand for even less abstraction and multi-syllabic verbiage; they are a “moment’s monument” Dante Gabriel Rossetti reminded us, yet the reward for such a fever against time is the potential for permanence few other forms can muster, a fact that certainly attracted Lowell’s grander impulses. This same compulsion fuels all three volumes of Lowell’s sonnets and his obsessive attachment to the form bespeaks something necessary to him on the physical level of composition. the animals and objects, must be here There are so many successes too, the profits of his messy persistence, profits of the accidents of process, poems that strike us as Robert Lowell’s, as permanent. Lowell’s political vision is decidedly Roman, here and elsewhere, and so it is appropriate that much of the poem’s lamentation is deflected on to an earlier warrior-king: Cyclonic zero of the word, 3, 79, 269-70; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, pp. Cold Harbor’s blue immortals, Grant! In fact, the same tension that makes individual sonnets often less than satisfactory makes re-reading them together a surprising thrill: the play of endless, spontaneous digression, the visceral flashes of concrete miscellany, and Lowell’s muscled demotic always cutting against the grain of the form’s gravestone solidity. There’s a pale romance to the watchmaker God Lowell's mastery of varying tones and settings produces some surprising contrasts. The examination of backyard critters that follows reveals more about the Lowell home, we quickly realize, than the poet’s layman naturalism: If we knock on their homes, they wince uptight with fear, This is slightly disingenuous, or willfully misleading, since his sonnets were hardly military and rarely cramped at all, but perhaps he needed to believe once again in a formal reawakening. Nature lives off the life that comes to hand- There’s a perplexing ambiguity to her actions, of course: is this masochistic enticement, desperate longing, or some kind of futile escape plan? Each night now I tie Brilliant, convincing handling of pentameter. farting about all morning past their young; Your email address will not be published. I first encountered this poem as a frontspiece to Robert Stone's novel, 'A Hall of Mirrors.' The sonnet is perfect for this kind of battle, since sonnets are limited to such a degree by their brevity that they offer the appearance of conclusion, but never the finality of real closure. Life begins to happen. 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