Robert Lowell. Collected Poems.

Garrett, Daniel

Robert Lowell Collected Poems. Frank Bidart, David Gewanter, eds. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2003. xvii + 1,186 pages $45. ISBN 0-374-12617-8

IN HIS POEM "History," Robert Lowell (1917-77) wrote: "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." The sometimes tormented poet also wrote in "The Republic" that "There's a madness that is woe, / and there is a wisdom that is madness." I first began to read a lot of Lowell a few years ago, and I admired his wide thematic range and his contemplative language, which embraced nature, social life, history, and literature with nuance and wit, and I found the intensity of his commitments compelling. Lowell became part of a personal pantheon that includes Ai, Anna Akhmatova, Yehuda Amichai, W. H. Auden, Constantine Cavafy, Emily Dickinson, Robert Duncan, T. S. Eliot, David Ferry, Langston Hughes, June Jordan, John Koethe, Denise Levertov, Audre Lorde, Octavio Paz, Adrienne Rich, Rainer Rilke, Walt Whitman, and C. K. Williams. However, personal memory is not the same as posterity; posterity is what a culture, not a single man, remembers. Lowell had been important and influential, but also controversial, for how his work used his life and emotional vulnerability as a reference point, a controversy rooted in concern for both craft and propriety. We sometimes prefer attitudes to emotions, especially in men. To speak, to act--almost at any cost--can seem better than to say or do nothing to people who believe themselves to have inherited passivity and silence, as many in the 1940s and 1950s did, but then when all of society begins to speak its secrets of conflict, pain, need, and sex, as happened in the 1960s and after, order and reticence become more appealing to people of discernment. The recent publication of Lowell's monumental Collected Poems, edited with extensive annotations by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, allows readers to reconsider (and probably dismiss) reservations about Lowell.

In a July 2003 article in the Atlantic Monthly, Frank Bidart quoted Lowell as saying, "I don't care what you write about me after I'm dead, as long as it's serious," and Lowell's collected poems have been published to serious attention. "In his poems and prose tributes, many of them to other writers, Lowell got more out of the mid-century American scene--literary, cultural, political-than anyone else," wrote William H. Pritchard in the New York Times. Describing Lowell's poem "Skunk Hour" in her review in the Los Angeles Times, Caroline Fraser wrote: "Rich with references, classical and popular--St. John of the Cross's 'Dark Night of the Soul,' Marlowe's Faustus, Milton's Satan, the blues song "Careless Love'--the poem revisits ancient themes with American idiom and imagery." Fraser, while noting Lowell's formidable New England family background and marital problems, looks carefully at several of his other poems, the kind of attention every poet wants. The summer 2003 issue of the Boston Review carried James Longenbach's review, which emphasized Lowell's embrace of diverse perspectives and constant rewriting, his tendency to remake his work and himself. "Lowell had the great misfortune of having created the taste by which he was judged," Longenbach wrote, but his Collected Poems "liberates the poetry from the poet we think we know."

It is hard to resist a poetry that is about seasons, holidays, neighborhoods, marriage, generational inheritances, great leaders and historical figures (Hannibal, Antony and Cleopatra, Peter the Great, Napoleon), war, mythic stories (Greek, Roman, and also biblical), Paris, Rome, Buenos Aires, legendary singers, Native Americans, Emerson, Thoreau, Beethoven, Rembrandt, Central Park, animals and insects, death and grief, alcohol, love, and references writers and thinkers as diverse as George Santayana, Hannah Arendt, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Hart Crane, Mary McCarthy, William Carlos Williams, and Delmore Schwartz, among other subjects. For me, the strongest, most engaging work collected here can be found in Life Studies, For the Union Dead, and Day by Day.

Lowell does not offer the tragedy of Akhmatova, the dark wit of Amichai, the scholarly bent of Auden, the lively common touch of Hughes, or the spiritual transcendence of Rilke. Lowell's intelligence--evaluative, truthful--meant that his work accepted no easy sentimentality. Too, his attention to detail subverted heaviness of thought, and his many subjects intrigued readers of all kinds. Comparisons are inevitable and usually imprecise, as they suppress knowledge of the uniqueness of a person or thing in order to look at attributes that are similar though unequal. Now that Lowell's Collected Poems is here, there is a lifetime of work to live with, and to live with in different moods, with different questions.

Daniel Garrett

Queens, New York