Some Names for Robert Lowell

Karl Miller

  • Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton
    Faber, 527 pp, £12.50, May 1983, ISBN 0 571 13045 3

Robert Lowell is not difficult to represent as the mad poet and justified sinner of the Romantic heritage. He is the dual personality who breaks the rules, kicks over the traces: he did this in the course of a series of manic highs which came and went from maturity, if not before, until the end of his life in 1977 at the age of 60. He goes up and he comes down. He was a man, as he said himself, of ‘tumbles and leaps’, a man of extremes, of moods and moments, and of the moment, of nerves, fresh starts and escapes, whose illness and convulsive life gained access to, if they were not inseparable from, an art nerved to resist them. He was a bear, a bull, a threat to those who knew him. ‘A born joiner,’ said his second wife, but more of a born leaver, a disjoiner and divorcer. He was a maker of poems but also their unmaker and negator, falling into a habit of revision which became a compulsion: so that the scholarship of his verse bears an element of anguish, which sends its shadow before it into the 21st century.

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[*] In an American study by Vereen Bell, Robert Lowell: Nihilist as Hero (Harvard University Press, 251 pp., £14, March, 0 674 77585 6), the poet’s inner life is pictured at one point in quasi-religious terms, in terms of a spiritual purity which lies open to contamination. ‘In Lowell’s poetry, as a rule, the inner life cannot displace the external, and the external in fact introjects so deeply that it infects the very language that might be used to displace it. The effect of the pressure of history is to narrow the gap for Lowell between art and life and therefore to foreclose any chance of redemption through mere sensibility.’ Vereen Bell acknowledges that ‘Helen Vendler’s contribution to this work and to my spirits has been immeasurable’: the work is hard to read, and it delivers a series of adverse judgments which must indeed have been experienced as bleak. It speaks of the ‘chronic and eventually systematic pessimism’ of the poetry. ‘The nihilistic fatigue of “Waking Early Sunday Morning” is unmitigated.’ The nihilistic hero is clearly not one to be envied or emulated. But it seems that Lowell has the merit of having disbelieved himself: his poetry is redeemed by a residual ‘idealism’.

[†] James Hogg: Selected Stories and Sketches, edited by Douglas Mack, Scottish Academic Press, 211 pp., £8.50, 12 January, 0 7073 0322 2. These pieces come from around the second decade of the 19th century, and the edition is based on the texts of their first publication in magazines. They include a minor work which commends itself to the historian of duality – the ‘Strange Letter of a Lunatic’, in which Hogg went back, some six years later, to the burning ground occupied by the Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Vol. 5 No. 9 · 19 May 1983 » Karl Miller » Some Names for Robert Lowell (print version)
Pages 7-10 | 7780 words