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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
A Modernist at heart, writing in the wake of the polyglot tradition firmly established in the first half of the twentieth century by Joyce's operatic Babels and Pound's symphonic Cantos, Robert Lowell was a poet who spoke in many voices, a master of linguistic personae. Switching with baffling ease from the “otherworldly” Puritanic gloom shrouding his recreation of his New England ancestors, to the very worldly evocation of his own personal life, he was a writer with a keen ear for layering various types of discourse within the span of one poem. What is more, as was the case with Joyce or Pound, his mastery of tone and voice enabled him to let his readers overhear what I am tempted to call a “cultural polyphony” sounding in each of his texts, in the fleeting utterance of one single word — or better still, as I hope to demonstrate, in the discreet note of one syllable, one letter.
1 Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 245Google Scholar. hereafter abbreviated in the text to SP.
2 “They're altogether otherworldly now,/those adults champing for their ritual Friday spin/to pharmacist and five-and-ten in Brockton.” SP, 74Google Scholar.
3 See the poem quoted in epigraph, “Sleepless.”
4 Note that the metapoetic function of the line “to check the parking meter violations” is reinforced by the possible pun on “meter,” the line being precisely a regular iambic pentameter set against the irregular beat of “Is he killing time? Out on the street….”
5 Pound's appropriation of Propertius is his long poem Homage to Sextius Propertius (1917), extracts reprinted in Pound, E., Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1957), 78–95Google Scholar. Lowell's imitations of other writers (see his Imitations, 1962) recall Pound's theories of “translation,” as they are put to work in “The Seafarer,” for instance, a poem freely adapted from the Anglo-Saxon.
6 It will become apparent that I will stretch the meaning of the word “voice” to limits that could be criticized: I simply could not find a better term, this impossibility being seemingly inherent, by the way, in the very definition of the term “voice.” See Glück, Louise's piece entitled “Voices” for an interesting summary of the question, The American Poetry Review, (05/06 1993), 19Google Scholar. In any case, the vocal dimension of Lowell's poetry should not be underestimated. In a 1971 interview with Ian Hamilton for instance, he insisted upon the role of poetry readings, and declared that “Life Studies is heightened conversation, not a concert.” Lowell, Robert, Collected Prose, ed. Giroux, Robert (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 284Google Scholar. Hereafter abbreviated in the text to CP.
7 The fact that it is so rewarding to use a dictionary to check the various meanings of a word when one reads Lowell confirms this point. It quite clearly reveals that Lowell attempts to have his reader diachronically perceive each utterance of a word, linking the personal usage of words to the historical dimension of language as a whole.
8 It is worth noting that Lowell wrote one poem which is an overt tribute to Keats's poem, even though it is a subversive tribute: “The Neo-Classical Urn” (SP, 125–6).
9 Meschonnic, Henri, Critique du rythme (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1982), 143Google Scholar. (“Rhythm is meterless, but not because it goes against the grain of meter by shaking it off or forgetting it. What has been measured has always been something else. Rhythm has to do with another kind of rationality. It is not slovenliness trying to overcome exactness. It has to do with another type of exactness — that of meaning, which cannot be measured.”)
10 Ibid., 217. (“specific semantics that must be distinguished from lexical meaning, and which I call significance — i.e., the values of one discourse only.”)
11 Williamson, Alan, Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 62Google Scholar.
12 Pearson, Gabriel, “Robert Lowell's Middle Years,” in Boyers, R., ed.,Contemporary Poetry in America: Essays and Interviews (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 54Google Scholar. No doubt that Lowell learned to practice such a “spiritual exercise” from the Eliot, T. S. of “Prufrock” or The Waste Land…Google Scholar.
13 Ibid., 57.
14 The Waste Land, III, 292–305, in Eliot, T. S., Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1974), 74Google Scholar.
15 Lowell uses another Marvellian form in Near the Ocean (SP, 139–55) the octosyllabic eight-line stanzas of the British poet's “Upon Appleton House”. In this case again, the fluidity with which Lowell works in this double formal constraint (2 × 8) is quite fascinating.
16 “L'Intertexte inconnu,” Littérature, 41, (févr. 1981), 4Google Scholar. (“all the texts one can bring into connection with the text one is reading; all the texts one can conjure up in one's memory while reading a given passage. The intertext is therefore an infinite corpus.”)
17 This is in keeping with Lowell's contention in the interview with Seidel that “With that form it is difficult not to have echoes of Marvel.”
18 Matterson, Seven, Lowell and Berryman: The Art of Losing (London: Macmillan Press, 1988), 67–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 Berryman, John, “Despondency and Madness”, reprinted in Robert Lowell: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Parkinson, T. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall/Twentieth-Century Views, 1968), 129Google Scholar, author's emphasis.
20 Letter to John Berryman, quoted in Matterson, 14.
21 Milton, John, The Complete Poems, introd. and notes G. Campbell (London: Dent, 1980), 216–17Google Scholar.
22 William Gass's remark on Samuel Beckett could well be applied to this passage: “We shall find there, inside that seed, nothing but his featureless cell, nothing but voice, nothing but darkness and talk.” Gass, W., Habitations of the Word (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 208Google Scholar.
23 Quoted in Hamilton, Ian, Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1983), 233Google Scholar.
24 The letter E is the last letter present in the name LOWELL, and the poet deals with it in the abundant play on letters in another text, “Eye and Tooth” (SP, 108–9).
25 Lowell was a student at Harvard, of course, and his ancestor Lawrence Lowell — brother to the poetess Amy Lowell — was a president of Harvard at the turn of the twentieth century.
26 Many thanks to Marc Chénetier for calling my attention to this possible pun.
27 Another such realization is Lowell's evocation of his grandfather in “Grandparents” (SP, 74–5), when dubious tears well up in the poet's eyes at the emotional climax of the text: “Grandpa! Have me, hold me, cherish me!/Tears smut my fingers” (lines 31–32).
28 In Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry, ed. Axelrod, Stephen and Deese, Helen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 93Google Scholar.
29 Compagnon, Antoine, La Seconde main (Paris: Le Seuil, 1980), passimGoogle Scholar.