Madness and scandal, outlived by art

IN the words of his friend Frank Bidart, Robert Lowell was “not quite civilized,” not because Lowell was occasionally outrageous or intermittently out of his mind, although he was. He once camped, uninvited, for months on the lawn of his mentor, Allen Tate; he broke the nose of his first wife, Jean Stafford, once by accident, once on purpose; he altered and published the personal letters of his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, in his lacerating poems about his third, Lady Caroline Blackwood. Lowell was “not quite civilized,” Bidart says, because he was “unfashionably -- even, at times, ruthlessly -- serious.” He once told Bidart: “When I’m dead, I don’t care what you write about me; all I ask is that it be serious.”

Lowell died in 1977, so there has been a rather extraordinary delay -- a quarter of a century -- in publishing his “Collected Poems,” remarkable considering that Lowell was nothing less than the most renowned, most lauded, most influential poet of his day, the last to command the public stage, featured on the cover of Time and called, by one critic, “the greatest poet writing in English.” Indeed, Lowell’s celebrity was so exalted that he still inspires envy: The poet Donald Hall recently went so far as to suggest in the Boston Globe that Lowell’s reputation has dwindled, saying, “You don’t hear his name much.”

But the delay -- having allowed the melodramatic dust of the life to settle -- has resulted in an edition as unfashionably, ruthlessly serious as the poet himself, one he doubtless would have appreciated. Edited by Bidart and David Gewanter, it features an unusually elaborate scholarly apparatus for a collected work: notes, chronology, bibliography, even a glossary. While I am not persuaded it was necessary to unearth every magazine version of virtually every poem on the chance it might yield material for those notes -- an eccentrically Lowellian, revisionary task that Bidart attempts to justify in the introduction, which doubtless added years to the project -- its riches will be a treasure for any curious, involved reader eager to penetrate Lowell’s allusive poems.

Regardless of the current state of the poet’s reputation or how often his name is bandied about by lesser lights, the magnitude of Lowell’s achievement -- an achievement won against horrific odds -- can now come fully and magnificently into view. “We only live between / before we are and what we were,” Lowell once wrote, but his work in this “Collected Poems” stands secure, timeless, outside the relatively brief span that was his bedeviled life.

That life, the subject of an excellent biography by Ian Hamilton and a mediocre one by Paul Mariani, should be approached with caution: The narrator of the poems is an ever-evolving voice, not a literal autobiographer, but the life is nonetheless a crucial starting point. Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was born in Boston in 1917 -- scion of Winslows and Lowells, Boston’s oldest, most illustrious clans -- and the only child of a weak-willed, mumbling naval officer, Robert Lowell III, and his cold, overbearing wife, Charlotte Winslow Lowell. A truculent boy, nicknamed by classmates “Cal” -- short for Caliban and Caligula -- famously expelled from the Boston Public Garden for fighting, the young Lowell transferred his aggressions to intellectual pursuits, organizing a punishing summer curriculum -- Homer, Shakespeare, Spenser, the Bible -- for himself and his teenage friends, Frank Parker (whose frontispiece illustrations for Lowell’s books are reproduced in this edition) and Blair Clark, who would eventually run Eugene McCarthy’s campaign for president in 1968.

Grown up, Lowell looked like a “matinee idol,” according to his friend John Berryman. In photographs he resembles a young Tom Hanks: tall, lanky, with a quirky, off-kilter grin, his pale skin set off by curly dark hair. After a year at Harvard and a near-break with his family -- he had abruptly become engaged to be married at 19 and socked his father over a perceived insult to his fiancee -- the young poet, “full of Miltonic, vaguely piratical ambitions,” set out for the South (having lost interest in the fiancee) and Tate, one of the Southern agrarian Fugitive poets. He had not been invited to stay the summer, and when Tate told him the house was full -- joking that if he wanted to stay he’d have to pitch a tent on the lawn -- he went to Sears, bought a tent and set up camp in the yard. He then transferred to Kenyon College, where he majored in classics, studying with John Crowe Ransom and becoming a close friend of student-poet Randall Jarrell.

After graduation, he married aspiring novelist Stafford, converted to Roman Catholicism and threw himself into another scourging program of study and spiritual self-improvement. According to Ian Hamilton, “Lowell imposed a stern domestic regimen: mass in the morning, benediction in the evening, two rosaries a day. Reading matter was vetted for its ‘seriousness’ -- ‘no newspapers, no novels except Dostoevsky, Proust, James and Tolstoy.’ ” As if this systematic self-abnegation were not enough, in 1943, Lowell -- having previously attempted to enlist in the Navy and the Army -- sent a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt and “the heads of the Washington Press bureaus,” declaring himself a conscientious objector and the war “a betrayal of my country.” “Member of Famed Family Balks at Military Service,” read one headline. Sentenced to a year and a day in the Federal Correctional Center at Danbury, Conn., and paroled after a few months, Lowell later described himself as “a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.” making a “manic statement,” although his first breakdown was still several years in the future.

Lowell’s Catholic zealotry lent structure and coherence -- and a vigorous dash of bombast -- to his early work about sin, damnation and salvation. Published in 1944 in a limited edition titled “Land of Unlikeness” (reproduced in an appendix here) and then, in 1946, with many revisions and additions, as “Lord Weary’s Castle,” these early poems -- with their weird amalgamation of Catholic theology, Puritan history and family mythology -- are wildly stirring. Flying in the face of the free verse espoused by early 20th century masters -- hammered out in rhyme and iambic pentameter -- the poems are built like brick houses out of solid Anglo-Saxon diction and New England names: “The Drunken Fisherman,” “At the Indian Killer’s Grave” and, most famously, “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” in which Lowell weaves a Miltonic, elegiac narrative out of the drowning at sea of one of his Winslow relatives, Warren Winslow, who assumes Christ-like stature, rising from the underworld to harrow humanity:

A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket, --

The sea was still breaking violently and night

Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,

When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light

Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,

He grappled at the net....

The thrilling rhetorical skill of its author -- the pleasure he took in brandishing these lancing, enjambed lines like a harpoon -- is unmistakable:

You could cut the brackish winds with a knife

Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time

When the Lord God formed man from the sea’s slime

And breathed into his face the breath of life,

And blue-lung’d combers lumbered to the kill.

The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.

Reviewers marveled over “Lord Weary’s Castle,” and in 1947 Lowell won the Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was 30. Everything seemed possible.

Shortly thereafter, he and Stafford were divorced. He left the Catholic Church and accepted an invitation to serve as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, then another to spend time at Yaddo, the writers colony near Saratoga Springs, N.Y. It was at Yaddo, in 1949, that he began to suffer the first of the manic episodes that would define the rest of his life and irrevocably alter his work.

That first breakdown -- and the many that would follow cyclically throughout his life -- consisted of a period of manic activity (much roaming, drinking, hysterical talking and little sleep, for himself and the friends who were trying to cope with him), followed by depression. Lowell later recalled his experience just before he was placed in a straitjacket in Bloomington, Ind., in the spring of 1949: “The night before I was locked up I ran about the streets ... crying out against devils and homosexuals. I believed I could stop cars and paralyze their forces by merely standing in the middle of the highway with my arms outspread.... To have known the glory, violence and banality of such an experience is corrupting.” Lowell once described these manic phases as attacks of “pathological enthusiasm.”

While recovering from this first episode, he married Hardwick, the journalist and critic who would become, by all accounts, the stabilizing force in his life and the person who repeatedly arranged for his care during illness. Over the next few years, Lowell would recover and teach, in 1951 publishing “The Mills of the Kavanaughs,” a volume in the traditional manner of his first major work; it contains the beautiful “Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid,” a less blustering, more heartfelt poem than any he had yet written. By the late 1950s, both of Lowell’s parents had died, he had had a child with Hardwick and he had suffered two more breakdowns. Engaged in therapy, he was working on the autobiographical prose and poems that would become “Life Studies,” published in 1959, a volume so groundbreaking it would be compared to Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”

Leaving aside the great early modernists, it is worth remembering how abstract and aridly academic much American poetry was before “Life Studies,” full of phony apostrophes (“And learn O voyager to walk”) and sentimental doggerel (“The sunlight on the garden / Hardens and grows cold, / We cannot cage the minute / Within its nets of gold”) in the manner of Archibald MacLeish and Louis MacNeice. Poets simply were not writing about their experience, or if they were, they were masking the details -- as Eliot did in his work -- in a private mythology. “Life Studies,” which won the National Book Award, swept aside such conventions. Lowell’s new poems were saturated with life’s disorder: His patrician family and powerful Freudian childhood attachments (“In the mornings I cuddled like a paramour / in my Grandfather’s bed”); his contempt for his father (“ ‘Anchors aweigh,’ Daddy boomed in his bathtub”); sojourns in prison (“Memories of West Street and Lepke”) and in “the house for the ‘mentally ill’ ” (“Waking in the Blue”); and -- shocking in the 1950s -- sexual politics, in the dramatic monologue “ ‘To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage’ ”: “Each night now I tie / ten dollars and his car key to my thigh .... / Gored by the climacteric of his want, / he stalls above me like an elephant.”

The poems were so new, so disturbing in their subject matter and their break from Lowell’s previous style that Tate -- in perhaps the most fruitless poetic argument since Emerson tried to persuade Whitman to edit the sex out of “Leaves of Grass” -- urged his former acolyte to abandon them: “[A]ll the poems about your family, including the one about you and Elizabeth, are definitely bad. I do not think you ought to publish them.... They have no public or literary interest.”

But as Bidart notes in his useful afterword, “On ‘Confessional’ Poetry,” the poems of “Life Studies” are anything but raw confession; indeed, they include fictional details, alterations and omissions, and they exhibit the same intense craft and eerie eye for detail of the earlier poems. In employing his personal history, Lowell accomplishes a kind of counterintuitive miracle: As his voice becomes more personal -- more confessional in the purest sense (Bidart calls it “candor ... not covert self-promotion or complaint”) -- it becomes more universal, more applicable to every reader’s experience, as in “Skunk Hour”:

A car radio bleats,

“Love, O careless Love....” I hear

my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,

as if my hand were at its throat ....

I myself am hell;

nobody’s here --

only skunks, that search

in the moonlight for a bite to eat.

Rich with references, classical and popular -- St. John of the Cross’ “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. The lines could not be simpler, yet they teem with alliterative rhythm and true and off-rhyme. The tone -- rueful, plangent yet unapologetic -- is like no other in our poetry:

I stand on top

of our back steps and breathe the rich air --

a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the

garbage pail.

She jabs her wedge-head in a cup

of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,

and will not scare.

“Most people take the skunks as cheerful,” Lowell wrote in explication, “[but] they are horrible blind energy, at the same time

In “For the Union Dead” (1964), Lowell put his personal meditations to public use. Its title poem -- an examination of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Boston monument memorializing Col. Robert Gould Shaw, the white officer who led the country’s first black regiment into battle in the Civil War, dying with his men -- is among the fiercest, finest political poems ever written. It moves from the poet’s recollections of the “old South Boston Aquarium” -- now “boarded” -- where he once yearned “to burst the bubbles / drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish”; to the wreck of the Boston Common, undermined by “yellow dinosaur steamshovels” excavating parking garages; to the monument at the top of the Common, facing the gilded dome of the Massachusetts State House:

Two months after marching through Boston,

half the regiment was dead;

at the dedication,

William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes

breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone

in the city’s throat.

He lingers over Shaw’s image -- his “angry wrenlike vigilance,” his “peculiar power to choose life and die” -- and pauses on Boylston Street, at a photograph of “Hiroshima boiling / over a Mosler Safe, the ‘Rock of Ages’ / that survived the blast.” The bully banned from the Public Garden for fighting has become a pacifist, and the self-righteous Catholic dogmatist has matured into the voice of America’s moral ruin:

When I crouch to my television set,

the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like

balloons.

Colonel Shaw

is riding on his bubble,

he waits

for the blessed break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,

giant finned cars nose forward like fish;

a savage servility

slides by on grease.

As images of fish, bubbles and balloons progress through the poem, humanity seems to regress to the reptilian and its “dark downward and vegetating kingdom.” If every American president, every anchorman fawning over “the greatest generation,” every pundit touting patriotism read this poem every day, the world might be a different place. If Lyndon Johnson had read it, he might have saved himself the trouble of inviting Lowell to a White House Festival of the Arts in 1965. According to Hamilton’s account, Lowell accepted the invitation but, after considering his opposition to the war in Vietnam, declined, and declined publicly, sending a copy of his letter to LBJ -- in which he suggested that “we are in danger of imperceptibly becoming an explosive and suddenly chauvinistic nation” -- to the New York Times, where it made front page news, becoming a cause celebre.

Lowell’s political concerns carried over into his next volume, “Near the Ocean” (1967), and the poem “Waking Early Sunday Morning,” which has not suffered any diminution in relevance:

Pity the planet, all joy gone

from this sweet volcanic cone;

peace to our children when they fall

in small war on the heels of small

war -- until the end of time

to police the earth, a ghost

orbiting forever lost

in our monotonous sublime.

Lowell had become a public figure, perhaps the last poet-as-statesman, after Robert Frost, in American life. He marched on the Pentagon in October 1967, an event immortalized in Norman Mailer’s “The Armies of the Night”: “Robert Lowell gave off at times the unwilling haunted saintliness of a man who was repaying the moral debts of ten generations of ancestors.” In February 1968, he called for a “national day of mourning” to commemorate those killed in the war on both sides, those “we have sent out of life.” And during the early days of the 1968 campaign, he accompanied McCarthy, whose handlers were dismayed to see that their candidate enjoyed joking and drinking with the poet more than running for president.

But throughout these extraordinary years, he continued to suffer disruptive, exhausting attacks of his old “enthusiasm.” During manic periods, he would routinely declare his devotion to women he’d just met, who had no knowledge of his mental history. On a trip to South America, he became so psychotic that he had to be hustled into a straitjacket by six men and flown home; he developed a fixation on Jacqueline Kennedy, with whom he had an acquaintance; and he made spectacular public scenes at the Metropolitan Opera, one friend recalling: “[T]here’s a scene in ‘Don Carlos’ where a chap is shot.... So there’s this shot and dead silence, and Cal said in a loud clear voice, ‘Oswald!’ ” In 1967 he was prescribed the new drug lithium, which seemed to help for a time but would ultimately fail him.

Inspired by Berryman’s “The Dream Songs,” Lowell embarked on what remains his most controversial work, a seemingly endless series of sonnets into which he emptied the details of his daily life and thought -- meditations on friends, lovers, poets, poetry, politics -- loosely grouped together under titles such as “Harriet” (his daughter with Hardwick) or “Writers.” The poems were originally published in 1969 as “Notebook 1967-68,” subsequently revised and reissued as “Notebook.”

In 1970, Lowell, who had gone to Oxford as a visiting fellow -- still married to Hardwick, his wife of more than 20 years -- began a relationship with the married Irish writer Blackwood. In 1971 she bore Lowell a son; in 1972, Lowell and Hardwick were divorced and Lowell married Blackwood. As if this sequence of events were not enough of a scandal, in 1973 Lowell published three books simultaneously: “History,” which consisted of revised versions of the sonnets of “Notebook,” along with 80 new ones; “For Lizzie and Harriet,” more revised sonnets about Hardwick, his daughter and the end of his second marriage; and “The Dolphin,” sonnets in which Lowell presents a partly fictionalized narrative about leaving Hardwick, his love for Blackwood and the birth of his son. “The Dolphin,” which won Lowell’s second Pulitzer, contains quotations from Hardwick’s letters, some edited or altered, and his apparent callousness ignited a firestorm of controversy.

Before the book was published, Elizabeth Bishop tried to persuade Lowell to forgo such material: “You have changed her letters. That is ‘infinite mischief,’ I think.... [A]rt just isn’t worth that much.” Adrienne Rich, once a close friend, publicly rebuked him, describing “The Dolphin” in a review as:

... a poor excuse for a cruel and shallow book.... The inclusion of the letter poems stands as one of the most vindictive and mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry, one for which I can think of no precedent: and the same unproportioned ego that was capable of this act is damagingly at work in all three of Lowell’s books.

There is undoubtedly truth to such characterizations, but scandals die quicker than art. For space reasons, the “Collected Poems” excludes “Notebook” (although two sequences from the earlier book are included for comparison) in favor of the three later, better-written, better-organized volumes. Seen as a whole, those three represent an ambitious attempt to transform the lyric into a catchall genre that could collect the daily debris of life, much as Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness tracks the evanescent quality of human consciousness. As Lowell wrote in an “afterthought” in “Notebook,” “Accident threw up subjects, and the plot swallowed them -- famished for human chances.”

Of course, when lyric is harnessed to do the heavy lifting of epic -- think of Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” which has moments of surpassing beauty amid stretches of plodding dullness, or Pound’s “Cantos,” which rise to brilliance after much ranting -- it can collapse under the strain. In places, the tone seems weary and flat, alternating between repetitive observation and hectic questioning. Some sonnets (“Mother, 1972,” for instance) revisit, less memorably, material covered in “Life Studies.”

But there are also exceptional passages: In “History’s” “The Nihilist as Hero,” “In the Back Stacks” and “Reading Myself,” Lowell sees his own “confessional” dilemma as lucidly as anyone ever has: “I want words meat-hooked from the living steer, / but a cold flame of tinfoil licks the metal log, / beautiful unchanging fire of childhood / betraying a monotony of vision.” And this:

No honeycomb is built without a bee

adding circle to circle, cell to cell,

the wax and honey of a mausoleum --

this round dome proves its maker is alive;

the corpse of the insect lives embalmed in honey,

prays that its perishable work live long

enough for the sweet-tooth bear to desecrate --

this open book ... my open coffin.

How many volumes of poetry contain lines so surpassingly, sweetly unforgettable? Even “Dolphin,” the poem that concludes Lowell’s most controversial book, condemned by Rich as cruel and shallow, seem more self-incriminating than sparing:

I have sat and listened to too many

words of the collaborating muse,

and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,

not avoiding injury to others,

not avoiding injury to myself --

to ask compassion ... this book, half fiction,

an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting --

my eyes have seen what my hand did.

By all accounts, Lowell’s and Blackwood’s was a chaotic relationship, since Blackwood was an alcoholic who was herself prone to breakdowns. The last years of Lowell’s life were plagued by outbreaks of mental illness and turmoil. In 1976 his “Selected Poems” appeared, and the following year, his last book, “Day by Day.” On Sept. 12, 1977, Lowell flew from England to New York, returning to Hardwick. He died, of heart failure, in the taxi on the way from the airport to her apartment. He was 60.

In “Day by Day” he left the sonnet behind, returning to looser forms, alternating between epigrammatic terseness and his old genius for observation. The last poem in his last published volume is “Epilogue,” one of the greatest poems ever written about art, the need to make it, the failures it entails, the solace it confers:

... 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.

All’s misalliance.

Yet why not say what happened?

Pray for the grace of accuracy

Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination

stealing like the tide across a map

to his girl solid with yearning.

We are poor passing facts,

warned by that to give

each figure in the photograph

his living name.

Robert Lowell’s “Collected Poems” is that “living name.”