Prose (59 page)

(call the piece “Grandmother's Glass Eye”???)

spontaneity occurs in a good
attack,
a rapid line,
tight
rhythm—

Brazilian Poetry: I am reading B.P. I began naturally with the living poets & I intended to work backwards into Brazilian and Portuguese poetry. I've found many good things, but I feel that I don't know the language well enough, or the body of poets. To say anything about it at present would be an impertinence.

late 1950s–early 1960s

Some Notes on Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell, born in 1917, is the Prodigal Son of the “Pilgrim Fathers,” the Concord Transcendentalists, and the nineteenth-century industrialists. He is considered by nearly all of the good critics, American or English, as the greatest poet of the generation following that of Pound, Cummings, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, etc. In the years 1940–1950, his work was for Americans a surprise almost as great as that, some years later and in a totally different way, of Dylan Thomas for the English.

T. S. Eliot predicted that, with the battle won for “free verse” and demotic language in poetry, there would be a return to formal meter and stanza, even “intricated,” and to strict rhyme. The poems of Robert Lowell seem to have come to fulfill that prophecy, and sooner than was expected. His first book,
Land of Unlikeness,
was published in 1944, in an edition limited to 150 copies. His first trade book was
Lord Weary's Castle,
1946, which made him famous and for which he received, among other honors, the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Some years later there appeared
The Mills of the Kavanaughs,
and more recently
Life Studies.
Since the publication of
Life Studies,
Lowell has devoted some of his time to translation; in 1961, we had his translation of Racine's
Phaedra.
A book of shorter translations, from Baudelaire, Rilke, Montale, Pasternak, etc., appeared recently under the title
Imitations.
Lowell deliberately chose this word to describe his technique in translation; the poems are far from being literal translations; they constitute, in reality, new poems, in the already famous Lowell style. And as such they are praised by those who admire that style and criticized by those who prefer the more common form of word-for-word translation.

Lowell is of course a famous New England name. There is a city called Lowell that evolved around the Lowell mills of cotton textiles in the early nineteenth century. Robert Lowell is related to the famous nineteenth-century poet James Russell Lowell (who for many years was Ambassador to England) and also to the celebrated poet of “free verse,” Amy Lowell. He was born and raised in Boston, with the privileges but also the burdens accompanying that powerful local name. As expected, he went to Harvard, but he couldn't adapt, and two years later transferred to Kenyon College, in Ohio, where he had as his “mentor” the southern Agrarian poet and “New Critic,” John Crowe Ransom.

At the beginning of the war, Lowell made a first attempt to enlist in the navy (his father had been a naval officer), but he was rejected for reasons of health. During the course of the war, however, he changed his mind about things and, when he was finally drafted for military service, he refused to serve. The United States had hundreds of conscientious objectors working in hospitals and special camps, but since Lowell had failed to register as a “pacifist,” he was sent to jail as a common criminal. Before that, he had already shocked his family and the city of his birth, by turning against New England Calvinism, even to the point of becoming a convert to Catholicism. I believe that at this time—like Eliot, Auden and others—he is a practicing Anglican. His poetry is profoundly religious and rich in biblical and ecclesiastical images, primarily so in his first two books. His religious interpretation of the world is in the tradition of his New England “ancestors”: the Mathers, Jonathan Edwards, Thoreau (who also went to jail), Hawthorne, etc. and the Brook Farm group.

It cannot be denied that, to the uninitiated reader, his poetry is difficult. Yet (in contrast, I think, to some of the more popular poems of Dylan Thomas), Lowell's poetry, always totally honest with the reader, is invariably written in perfectly logical syntax and meaning. One's initial difficulty, at times, lies in knowing what the poem's subject actually is. Many of his poems are dramatic, spoken by different characters; on this score, he has been frequently compared to Browning. But, once one knows the scene and the character, the poem itself, despite its being subtle, involved, and full of linguistic associations—an astonishing mixture of demotic and formal language—is always lucid.

In the strange title of his second book,
Lord Weary's Castle,
there is already embedded in part an explanation of Lowell's poetry. It comes from the old ballad about a poor stonemason named “Lambkin” who built a castle for one Lord Weary, but who was deprived of his just payment. In this legend Lowell sees a parable for the modern world—the “castle”—the crushing superstructure of our civilization. Randall Jarrell, in
Poetry and the Age,
describes
Lord Weary's Castle
: “The poems understand the world as a sort of conflict of opposites. In this struggle one opposite is that cake of custom in which all of us lie embedded … the inertia of the stubborn self … the obstinate persistence in evil that is damnation … imperialism, militarism, capitalism, Calvinism … the ‘proper Bostonians,' the rich.… But struggling within this … is everything that is free or open, that … willingness that is itself salvation … the Grace that has replaced the Law, of the perfect liberator whom the poet calls Christ.”

The poems in this book and in
The Mills of the Kavanaughs
are almost all in rigorous stanzaic form with the frequent enjambment that has become Lowell's characteristic mark. This technique gives these poems of profound religious belief and anguish, which were written during the war, their affect of urgency, panic almost.

In
Life Studies,
published in 1959, the heavy-beat rhythms and trumpet sounds are modified, modulated. The lines still rhyme, but irregularly so, and their extension depends more on phrasing that is natural or breath-like than on strophic forms. These poems are almost always elegiac and autobiographical, on everything that is his, family, father and mother, wife (he is married to Elizabeth Hardwick, the renowned literary critic and novelist) and only child. Lowell's language is as grand, as moving, as brutal, at times, as formerly—but the poems are full of “humor,” of compassion, and of a simple affection for persons and places.

I have heard Brazilians affirm that the American writer Dreiser, for example, is a better writer than Henry James! And I believe that the same type of Brazilian reader might well make the same mistake about Lowell's poems by deciding that Robert Frost or Carl Sandburg or even our rather pathetic “beat poets” come closer to the idea than he does to what should be the true “American” poet. To those readers I can only say this: the idea they have of American literature (and, incidentally, of America itself) is wrong. Our great, though difficult, artist-craftsmen—including, among others, James and Lowell—are the finest representatives of American literature.

Simply because the course of the language of poetry in English diverged so much from the same course in the Latin languages, Lowell will probably appear to the Brazilians to be more exotic stylistically than he really is. The battle to write poetry that is “at least as well written as prose,” as Pound used to say, and in spoken language, had almost been won by 1920. It must be difficult for Brazilian readers to realize that in this domain (I refer only to demotic language versus “poetic” language), English poetry is many decades ahead of poetry in the Latin languages. Lowell represents a sharp change in direction, even, if you wish, a turning backwards. Like Dryden, he once again made poetry hard, difficult, soaring, and masculine. In reality, the arts, it is clear, cannot be compared, but, by means that are very different from those employed by our “action painters,” Lowell expresses, with the same energy and beauty, the problems that any citizen of the United States who is over forty, has already faced and continues to face: the Depression, the War (or Wars), the Affluent Society, the ethics of foreign relations, the Bomb.

I am certain that the reader who manages to understand even a small portion of Robert Lowell's poems—and they have no snares—will come to a better understanding, in the same measure, of the contemporary American land from which he comes.

1962

A Sentimental Tribute

When it means a book, I love the word Reader; it has only pleasant associations for me. I learned to read out of a reader, a small brown book still in my possession, rather worn and dirty, with some of the pictures colored in in crayon and my name appearing a good many times, in embryonic handwriting. My reader, like this selection of Miss Moore's writings, is a mixture of prose and poetry. I seem to know it by heart, and I know some of Miss Moore's poems by heart. The likenesses end there. No, not at all: a few of Aesop's Fables appear in both books and both give “The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg” (except that in Miss Moore's translation of La Fontaine's version of the story, the goose is a hen). I find the presence of this small, pure, literary stream or rivulet both touching and miraculous: rising somewhere in the sixth century before Christ, running through millenniums of Ancient History and Middle Ages, flowing faster to refresh the jaded court of Louis XIV, sending off, here and there, little branches as far as country-school “primers,”—and then reappearing, “to sparkle out among the fern” in the work of our most sophisticated, most childlike, and dearest poet. “For men may come and men may go, / But I go on for ever.”

Miss Moore has proved her fondness for La Fontaine; probably she and Aesop would have got along well, too. All three derive much profit and pleasure from the folk-ways of birds and animals; they have little of the professional writer about them (I don't know much about Aesop but I doubt that he had); their imaginations are strongly original but decorous and uninsistent, and they do relish a good moral. I am speaking here of the translator-and-essayist-Miss Moore; the poet-Miss Moore has all the same characteristics but is an infinitely more complicated personality, mysterious but frank, generous but strict, intimidating but lovable. Probably everyone who knows anything at all about American poetry has some sort of mental picture of Miss Moore; probably thousands have seen her. We have been lucky that in her later years she has been so generous and courageous about travelling all over the country to give readings and lectures. She has become almost a familiar figure, and this is one of the happier wonders of the literary age. I first met Miss Moore by appointment, in 1934, in the New York Public Library. I had actually picked out a tall, eagle-nosed, be-turbaned lady, distinguished-looking but proud and forbidding, as a possible Miss Moore, when to my great relief the real one spoke up. One can't imagine a college student of literature making such a mistake these days.

A reader, says the dictionary, is to teach one how to read. It seems doubtful that anyone needs or wants to be taught to read Miss Moore at this date. However, in case any readers (in the “dear reader” sense) are unfamiliar with her work and this book is their introduction to it, I shall make a few suggestions as to how to read it. First, read the Foreword carefully. Then skip to the back and read the Interview with the Paris Review. Then concentrate for a long time—a week or so—on the twenty-three marvelous earlier poems. After that I think I'd read the prose pieces in chronological order (the dates are given at the back of the book); and by then one should be advanced enough to study the La Fontaine translations, or to take a holiday with the Carnegie Hall and Yul Brynner poems.

The Foreword is full of wonderful things, and it explains a lot, too, for those who want explanations. The best way to take it (and to take all of Miss Moore's writing, poetry and prose) is as she herself takes the statements of ex-President Eisenhower (see page xvi)—
at her word.
“More than once after a reading,” she says, “I have been asked with circumspectly hesitant delicacy, ‘Your … poem,
Marriage
; would you care to … make a statement about it?'
Gladly.
” (My italics.) It is the word
gladly
that is typical of Miss Moore: the obliging promptitude, the willingness to respond to all normal interest and requests, the democratic refusal to consider herself a privileged being, a White Goddess, to drape herself in chiffon and assume a deep, dark voice. Her sense of the age, her real sense of style (in clothes, I should add, as well as words), have kept her reassuringly 19th-century, yet, at the age of seventy-four, still the most modern of moderns.

“Appoggiaturas,” she says, “—a charmed subject. A study of trills can be absorbing to the exclusion of everything else.” One hesitates. Is that going too far? But then one remembers that
gladly.
She believes that what the poet and scientist have in common is their willingness “to waste effort.” Let us be poets over and above the call of duty. Give more than is required; throw in trills and appoggiaturas for the joy of it. Both in writing her own poetry and in judging that of others, her guiding principles are seen to have been passion, accuracy, and pleasure. Under each of these headings, of course, one could set down sub-headings, sometimes contradictory ones. For example: how does Miss Moore reconcile pleasure with the fatigue and drudgery that must go into writing? I once saw in her apartment two bushel baskets, the kind apples come in, full of rejected versions of a rather short review. I thought it was one of her very best reviews, but it is not in this collection. Does that mean that after two bushel-baskets-full of work it did not come up to her standards?