A Grand Life : Long before his death, Robert Lowell’s stature as American poetry’s most visible link to the “great tradition” of the past made him seem Olympian : LOST PURITAN: A Life of Robert Lowell, <i> By Paul Mariani (W.W</i> . <i> Norton: $27.50; 528 pp., with photographs)</i>

Paul Mariani’s “Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell,” is a just and readable portrait of the man he views as “the poet-historian of our time,” if not the last of our “influential public poets, poets in the tradition of Emerson, Frost, and Eliot.” Grand statements, to be sure, but Robert Lowell’s life and career were nothing less than grand, for long before his death in 1977, his stature as American poetry’s most visible link to the “great tradition” of the past made him seem Olympian.

Awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his first book, “Lord Weary’s Castle,” single-handedly changing the face of American poetry with the “confessional” poems of “Life Studies” in 1959, twice causing a national stir with public statements made against the war policies of Presidents Roosevelt and Johnson, a survivor of epic battles with his own manic-depression, and finally the world weary exile after his move to England in 1970; Lowell was not only the most successful poet of his generation, he was also its most dominating.

Yet what’s most peculiar is how, almost the instant he was lowered into his native New England soil to join the Winslows, Starks and Lowells that had painted his blood a distinct shade of blue from the start, Lowell’s place and role inAmerican letters essentially disappeared. Unlike the mythos that soon transformed Sylvia Plath’s life into a Fortune 500 industry, or the quaint woodsy appeal that’s still minting the coin of Frost’s national reputation, Lowell’s monumental nobility in life was soon answered, by student and critic alike, with the kind of respectful, but quizzical glance one grants to a public statue at dusk.

Thus, despite Ian Hamilton’s very fine 1982 biography, Mariani sees a need “to set the record straight” in “Lost Puritan,” as well as to lay siege to the decline in Lowell’s reputation by giving to him, “as he gave to others, a semblance of his proper name.” Exactly what Mariani means by this, however, is harder to pin down. His very thorough biography does not surpass the major groundwork already completed by Hamilton, nor does it come up with a particularly revealing “key” that suddenly unlocks the “twisted mainspring” of Lowell’s deeply troubled life and times. True, there are many additional touches supplied by Mariani’s access to Lowell’s letters to and from George Santayana, Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich, to name a few, but overall “Lost Puritan” leaves us with a highly enjoyable, but flawed rendering of the poet and his art.

How it is flawed, however, is interesting, for it ties into the strange, undeserved neglect that has befallen Lowell’s work. On the one hand, Mariani astutely allows Lowell’s voice to ring true throughout by quoting amply from letters and manuscripts. Given Lowell’s genius for capturing “‘the pain and jolt of seeing things as they are”’ in both poetry and prose, this lends a lively air to “Lost Puritan,” one that captures a headier, less polemical generation than our own. “ ‘To write we seem to have to go at it with such single-minded intensity that we are always on the point of drowning,’ ” Lowell says in a letter to Theodore Roethke. Yet despite the bruising rounds of parties, break-ups, gossip and mauling egos, people seemed to have liked each other more back then and to have been more forgiving. “There must be a kind of glory to it all that people coming later will wonder at,” Lowell says in the same letter and to his credit, Mariani captures just this.

Thus, it’s refreshing that “Lost Puritan” neither trades its futures on the market for scandal, nor judges its subject as anything less than human. Lowell’s searing bouts with madness are here, as well as his intensity and acerbic tongue. So, too, the wreckage of his marriages with Jean Stafford and Elizabeth Hardwick (though less of his last with Caroline Blackwood), as well as the constant drinking, the tawdry affairs and the elixir of ambition and guilt that drove Lowell to create a poetry that even he came to recognize was “more saturated in me than I myself.”

Yet oddly enough, what’s missing from Mariani’s biography is both a genuine feel for the poems themselves and a sound reading of Lowell’s art. “Lost Puritan” is of course peppered with quotes from Lowell’s poems, but rarely does Mariani take the time for the interpretive work that could help bring them to life. His mention of “The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket,” the long poem that brought Lowell first fame, consists only of quotes from its first and last stanzas before Mariani moves on within a page to tell us about Lowell and Stafford moving into a house soon made replete with Lowell’s “blue socks and poem manuscripts all over the floors.”

This in itself is jarring and does little to counter the “decline” that Mariani sets out to battle against. More disturbing, however, is that “Lost Puritan” does forward a reading of Lowell’s art, but one that falls into the trap of taking Lowell’s “confessional” musings as fact. This commences as early as Mariani’s rather odd “Prologue,” where he borrows liberally from autobiographical fragments Lowell wrote during a major breakdown in the 1950s, constructing a voice that appears to be coming from inside Lowell’s head. Even when Mariani later takes on the biographer’s studied distance, he continues to quote from Lowell’s writings as if they are always and everywhere renderings of what actually happened, despite his own warning and acknowledgment in a footnote about his “collating and choosing from . . . multiple variants.”

Lowell warned in an “Afterthought” to his volume of poems, “Notebook 1967-68,” “This is not my diary, my confession.” Mariani, however, gives the appearance of taking Lowell’s work as such when he quotes lines from “Beyond the Alps” (“I watched our Paris pullman lunge/mooning across the fallow Alpine snow . . .”) as if to illustrate Lowell’s view out a train window while in the thick of a brutal manic attack. The effect is as bizarre as thinking of Van Gogh standing before his easel, a brush in one hand, the freshly severed ear in another.

Helen Vendler writes in “Part of Nature, Part of Us” that, in a class at Harvard, Lowell once insisted that a poem “is an event, not the record of an event.” That Lowell’s poetry has too often been read as a myopic, self-involved recording of the continuous “event” that was his life may be why his great achievement has been so grossly overlooked. Instead, what needs to be better appreciated is not only the way that Lowell knew that his work “changed the game,” but the power and craft that make his poems the live, protean acts of being touched by the white heat of revelation that they are to this day. As one of Lowell’s friends notes, his supple gift was “to turn experience into thought, then into metaphor, and then to react with feeling toward the metaphor he had created,” itself a kind of brilliant high-wire act of the mind and heart that Paul Mariani’s “Lost Puritan” allows to remain lost amid his equitable portrait of this sad and lovely man.