{"id":8425,"date":"2017-09-13T16:01:33","date_gmt":"2017-09-13T15:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8425"},"modified":"2017-09-13T16:01:54","modified_gmt":"2017-09-13T15:01:54","slug":"robert-lowell-new-selected-poems-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8425","title":{"rendered":"Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems<\/em>, reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"
Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems<\/em>, ed. Katie Peterson (Faber, \u00a314.99).<\/h5>\n

If you came to poetry in the sixties and seventies, you came to Robert Lowell. His volume, Life Studies<\/em>, seemed to dominate the perspective on poetry, in the way that The Whitsun Weddings<\/em>, Crow<\/em> or Ariel<\/em> did, in their own way. One way in which that book seemed to dominate poetry was in the sheer presence of the writer; the voice which seemed to pound out of the pages, even from the prose memoir, \u201861 Revere St\u2019. However, as Katie Peterson asks in her introduction, \u2018Is it too easy to say that Lowell\u2019s star has fallen a bit?\u2019 In the time since Lowell\u2019s death aged only 60, in 1977, it is the star of Lowell\u2019s friend, Elizabeth Bishop, which has risen inexorably, seeming almost to take Lowell\u2019s place in the pantheon. Bishop, to whom Lowell proposed marriage, although he knew her to be lesbian, is a far quieter writer. And Bishop\u2019s skills of exactitude and meditation, with her allegiance to that other exact, meditative writer, George Herbert, seem, somehow more attuned to contemporary needs.<\/p>\n

As opposed to Bishop\u2019s wincing privacy, Lowell was a public poet from the very beginning, turning his hand early to a gnarled political writing, drawing obliquely on the brahmin traditions of his birth. Lowell had dropped out of Harvard to study classics with John Crowe Ransom. Early his career, Lowell wanted to follow Ransom\u2019s example of every word having two or three meanings depending on the word\u2019s derivation from Latin or Greek. Such an example threw up strange narratives such as \u2018Between the Porch and the Altar\u2019, which Peterson includes in this New Selected<\/em>. But the technical control he learned from Ransom and from Allen Tate allowed him to create masterpieces even from the beginning, such as the magnificent \u2018The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket\u2019, in which Lowell spins out a kind of verse Moby Dick, which meditates on the death of a cousin at sea, but also on the nature of man\u2019s relationship to death; Lowell was a Catholic convert at the time.<\/p>\n

In the early fifties, Lowell underwent a different kind of conversion. He got wind of what the Beats were doing with \u2018public\u2019 poetry, making it more accessible on the ear at readings; the Beats having been influenced, to some extent, by having heard Dylan Thomas touring America and enthralling audiences with his own voice. At this point, Lowell\u2019s verse became more open, less costive. The result was the aforementioned Life Studies<\/em>. The book begins with \u2018Beyond the Alps\u2019 which announced that Lowell had given up on the ultramontane grip of the Catholic church. Peterson, herself, comments that \u2018even\u2019 this poem with its allusions to Greek mythology and Catholic theology was off-putting. But, by putting himself at the centre of the poem\u2019s text world, Lowell was moving into the \u2018confessional\u2019 mode, by which he became known. As the book advances, the confessions become rawer and the address to the reader more unsparing. The prose memoir \u201891 Revere street\u2019 comes very early in Life Studies. And by writing up the discontent of his parent\u2019s marriage in prose, not only was Lowell doing something almost \u2018experimental\u2019 in a volume of poetry, but he was starting a trend of memoir, which carries on till today.<\/p>\n

Later in the book are the poems which came to make his name; his memories of his time as a conscientious objector in the second world war, but, and more importantly, his poems about his own breakdowns and mania, and exposing poems about his marriage. Peterson makes the point that, for her, Lowell is the great poet of the passage of time over a day; a great poet of the quotidian. Which is, up to a point, true. However, as Peterson acknowledges, Lowell\u2019s days are spectacularly privileged. \u2018Memories of West Street and Lepke\u2019 describes Lowell\u2019s incarceration in New York\u2019s West Street jail as a result of his stance in the second world war, and the various \u2018characters\u2019 he met there. But it begins, \u2018Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming\/ in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning.\u2019; would that we all had \u2018days\u2019 like that! It is certainly true that Lowell was too knowing a writer not to know the effect that beginning would have on the reader. And the poems about his breakdowns are piercing and difficult even in our therapeutically oriented era. <\/p>\n

Peterson has good selections from the wonderful volume For the Union Dead<\/em> which followed Life Studies<\/em> and also from the versions of the books Notebooks<\/em> and History<\/em>. These latter were the most controversial of Lowell\u2019s career as, in fourteen line blank verse \u2018sonnets\u2019, he picked over his marriage to the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick. These poems lost him the friendship of Adrienne Rich, and almost lost him the friendship of Elizabeth Bishop too. And, to put it bluntly, there are too many of them and even though they range from poems about the marriage to poems \u2018about\u2019 Beethoven and Coleridge, there\u2019s too similar a dynamic in them to make them worth pouring over. Peterson does the reader a greater service here than Jonathan Raban\u2019s selection of Lowell\u2019s poems from 1974. Raban\u2019s selection was the only previous selection other than Lowell\u2019s own which dated from 1965. Raban was too slavish to the middle period Lowell; unsurprising, perhaps, since Raban\u2019s book came out in that period. But Raban followed too easily Lowell\u2019s tendency at that period to \u2018Audenize\u2019, i.e., wilfully rearrange his work to fit into later categories. Thus Raban printed the \u2018Our Lady of Walsingham\u2019 episode separately from its original location in the \u2018Quaker Graveyard\u2019. <\/p>\n

And Peterson includes a very good selection from Lowell\u2019s final, glorious Day by Day<\/em>, in which Lowell\u2019s sense of the quotidian is mixed with his premonition of his death. In this book, the poet is unsparing of himself, but there is also an edge of forgiveness about these poems which makes them more approachable, and his technical control meets a warmth and humour so the poems reach out more.<\/p>\n

Peterson\u2019s selection is to be warmly recommended. Whether Lowell\u2019s star has sunk far beyond the horizon remains to be seen, but Peterson has given the reader coming to Lowell for the first time, a much needed, and comprehensive introduction to one of the defining figures of post-war poetry in English. <\/p>\n

Ian Pople<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems, ed. Katie Peterson (Faber, \u00a314.99). If you came to poetry in the sixties and seventies, you came to Robert Lowell. His volume, Life Studies, seemed to dominate the perspective on poetry, in the way that The Whitsun Weddings, Crow or Ariel did, in their own way. One way in which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nRobert Lowell, New Selected Poems, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8425\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems, ed. 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