Poetry: A quarter of a century has passed since Robert Powell died and it may be asked why his Collected has been so long in coming. With the re-entry of the public realm into poetry, and a fresh intersection of the personal and the political, the timeliness of this lifework cannot be overestimated, writes Harry Clifton.
When Robert Lowell died in I977, of a heart attack at a taxi crossing in New York, the American century had just entered its first decline, with the Vietnam debacle. Thirty years before, the publication of his first major collection, Lord Weary's Castle, at the end of the second World War, had marked the onset of its greatest hegemony. Then, as now, an army of shy, gum-chewing mid-westerners had entered the burnt-out citadels of history, with a message of new freedom.
When the unseasoned liberators roll
Into the market square, ground arms before
The Rathaus; but already lily-stands
Burgeon the risen Rhineland, and a rough
Cathedral lifts its eye. Pleasant enough,
Voi ch'entrate, and your life is in your hands.
'The Exile's Return', from which these lines are taken, is the opening poem in that mighty first volume and in the Collected as a whole. Although not one of its finest, it stakes out territory to be explored in the coming decades: America and Europe, readings and translations of the old world by the new and, above all, the lonely inheritance, by the "unseasoned liberators", of the top end of the human food-chain, with its attendant spiritual vertigo, leading only a dozen years later to 'Skunk Hour', that document of private instability and loneliness at the heart of so much power and wealth.
One dark night
My Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
They lay together, hull to hull,
Where the graveyard shelves on the town . . .
My mind's not right.
Lowell, born in 1917, grew up the troubled only child of mismatched parents in Boston, Massachusetts and began writing in the shadow of Eliot and the later Yeats. From Yeats came the grand manner, from Eliot, via Allen Tate, the religious ordering of experience and the strict formal metrics. Add to that the second World War, the whaling mythology of Herman Melville and the hell-and-damnation absolutism of the New England divines, and something post-Biblical, pre-Apocalyptic rose from the depths of those first marmoreal poems.
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.
Like many American writers, Lowell "did Europe" after the war, before returning to a teaching post in Iowa. But Eisenhower's "tranquillised Fifties", with its embassy poets like Richard Wilbur on the one hand, and its Beats like Allen Ginsberg on the other, was not to be his decade.
Mental instability, marriage and family crises drove him to the private search for a new idiom. Allen Tate was replaced as poetic mentor by the more intimiste Elizabeth Bishop. The grand manner went on the shelf. And the Lord God, so to speak, migrated from somewhere out there, on the foggy banks and whaling-grounds, to somewhere in here, in the realm of psychiatric wards and the damaged self.
The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
Rouses from the mare's nest of his drowsy head
Propped on The Meaning of Meaning. He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
Makes my agonised blue window bleaker.
These new poems in a new manner, published as Life Studies in 1959, alienated Allen Tate, who thought them chopped-up autobiographical prose, and entranced Elizabeth Bishop, for whom the mere naming of his family members gave Lowell representative American status. Whatever the truth or otherwise of that - and it was to give him licence for dangerous self-indulgence later on - there is no doubt that the poet had earned the right for his two subsequent volumes For the Union Dead (1964) and Near the Ocean (1967) to be seen as a private life mirroring, in a representative way, the tensions of the new decade of social protest and psychic evolution, against a backdrop of Cold War politics and proxy war.
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.
For many, the three meditations in the latter book, 'Waking Early Sunday Morning', 'Fourth of July in Maine' and 'Near the Ocean', form the centrepiece of Lowell's work - his condensed reality, as it were, and the moment when the public and private self had achieved maximum credibility, with the pleasure element still intact.
However, by the time of their publication the poet had moved on, to involvement in the 1968 McCarthy election campaign and to a new poetic mode, the blank verse sonnet that was to dominate the next six years, and leave many of his admirers, including Elizabeth Bishop, crying foul.
There were clues to the new manner. On being asked about Bob Dylan, Lowell replied, "He has lines, but I doubt if he has written whole poems", a remark that could apply to History, For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin, his own books of the early 1970s. Also, in an afterword to his work, he wrote: "It is easier to write good poems than inspired lines." It could be said that after 1967 the period of the good poems had been replaced by the period of inspired lines.
Poets die adolescents, their beat
embalms them . . .
Drones die of stud, the saint by staying pure . . .
In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet . . .
Such floating lines could be strung together, and frequently were, into loose unrhymed sonnets. The attempt seems to have been to refract an American moment through the prism of a liberal- agnostic psyche. The objectors, though, had begun to muster: Adrienne Rich on Lowell's "bullshit eloquence", Elizabeth Bishop on the violation of private correspondence, and poet Czeslaw Milosz, for whom Lowell's "mandatory liberalism and mental breakdown" constituted "a picture of a poet typical in our day. A bit too typical for my taste".
There was to be one final shift of style, almost a non-style, a naked broken free verse, notating mood and situation, collected, the year before his death, as Day by Day. Again, the clue comes earlier, in a prefatory note to his Imitations (1960) of European poets. "I was less concerned with subject," he wrote, "than in finding a tone of voice."
It is almost the whole story of his own work over 30 years; the falling away of formal artifice, the lingering on of a pure voice whose authenticity is measured not by what it says, but by its tonality, its recognisability as Robert Lowell speaking, even as he fades, like a late Rembrandt, into ageless darkness.
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.
A quarter of a century has passed since the poet's death. It may be asked why his Collected has been so long in coming. Yet the age that followed, an age of exquisite minor poetry, domesticated, apolitical, electing the miniaturist Elizabeth Bishop to the head of its pantheon, was not propitious.
Now, however, with the re-entry of the public realm into poetry, and a fresh intersection of the personal and the political, the timeliness of this lifework cannot be overestimated. The only question is which Lowell emerges from it to address our own age. The 1960s liberal, his glasses slipping as he links arms on an anti-war march to the Pentagon? Or the thundering American fundamentalist of earlier years?
Harry Clifton's God in France: A Paris Sequence 1994-1998 is due from Metre Editions
Collected Poems. By Robert Lowell, Faber and Faber, 1186pp, £40