The Second Chance

POETS

(See Cover)

In a scene that draws forever the line between the poet and the square, Hamlet, prince and poet, converses with the busy bureaucrat Polonius:

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?

Polonius: Tis like a camel, indeed.

Hamlet: Or like a whale.

Polonius: Very like a whale.

Poets, their heads being in the clouds, are those who see whales and camels where others see only a chance of rain. That is why poets will always be more important than meteorologists. Poetry is a great imponderable, since it describes and changes the climate of the mind. It is a touchstone by which the spiritual condition of man may be tested.

In that respect, the testing is proceeding at a pace never before felt in the history of American literature. Two generations ago, many poets were at work in the U.S.--probably a greater number of major poets than at present --but their world seemed narrower. The literary quarterlies spent more space and passion discussing poetry, but their audience was limited. Slowly, poetry moved out of the parlors of overstuffed gentility into the academy. Now it is moving out of the academy--out of college lit courses and esoteric coteries--back to where it was when minstrels sang their verses in the marketplace. It exists once again in an ambiance of instant feeling. Poets are declaiming their works before large, theater-size audiences in the cities and on the campuses. Government grants, foundation funds and universities with chairs for poets-in-residence are all conspiring to strengthen or at least amplify their voices in the world at large. Their poetry books trip ever more briskly off the presses, and their phonograph recordings feed a flourishing market.

"There's poetry all over the place," says Robert Lowell. "The world is swimming with it. I think more people write it, and there are more ways to write it. It's almost pointless--there's no money in it--but a lot of them become teachers, and a lot of them write quite good poems and read to a lot of people. Poets are a more accepted part of society, and I don't know if it's bad for us or not, but it's pleasanter. I don't suppose even now parents are very glad when their children become poets, but it's not such a desperate undertaking. Still, being good isn't any easier."

Robert Lowell, 50, is better than good. As far as such a judgment can ever be made of a working, living artist, he is, by rare critical consensus, the best American poet of his generation.

What They Seek. As Critic Edmund Wilson puts it, Lowell has achieved a poetic career on the old 19th century scale. Of the score or so of American poets who now stir the campuses, he is easily the most admired. Not that the suspicious young readily take to heroes, literary or otherwise, or are very clear about what they seek in poetry. Says Mount Holyoke Poet and History Professor Peter Viereck: students "crave the ever more shocking and ever more new. They are looking more for emotional release than purely artistic merit." Verse for edification or moral uplift; he adds, "is totally dead. A poem like Tennyson's Merlin and the Gleam would be the laughingstock of a coffeehouse today."

Says Albert Gelpi, assistant professor of poetry at Harvard: students like poetry "because it seems to crystallize experience more deeply. One boy left school after reading Hart Crane, and I began to wonder what sort of power I am unleashing to them. They are willing to accept a variety of poetry as long as they get the sense that the poet respects the complexities of the world. They reject oversimplifications."

Prose commands their minds, but poetry envelops their senses. They are aware of hard, sharp words that can clobber the emotions, that communicate one-to-one, man-to-man. Says Lowell: "The strength of the novel is that it tells a story and has real people. But so many novels have been written that when you pick one up you feel you've read it before. The problem with poetry is that it doesn't necessarily have the connection with life and can be rather obscure. But poetry has the wonderful short thrust. By the time you get to the end of a poem, there's a whole interpretation of life in 70 lines or less. It's hard to get that in a novel, hard to get the heightening, hard to leave things out. And amid the complex, dull horrors of the 1960s, poetry is a loophole. It's a second chance of some sort: things that the age turns thumbs down on you can get out in poetry."

From Pound to the Beats. In the 20th century so far, the devotees of the "second chance" have constituted a remarkable poetic pantheon. The Zeus of that lofty company is himself still alive, though he has long since had his say. Erza Pound, 81, now living in Italy, fathered modern English poetry, freed it from excessive strictures of meter, rhetoric and prosody. One of his earliest converts was T. S. Eliot, who sensed the dilemma of modern, urban and areligious man, and whose dry, ironic style and endless rhythmic ways of weaving contemporary sounds are echoed in virtually every poet's work today.

Of Eliot's generation, Robert Frost seemed a throwback; yet, while he adhered to established forms, he commanded a deceptively simple vision of man's vanities, his heart and his land. More experimental, and less accessible, were William Carlos Williams, a true avant-garde poet and master of the spare, stripped-down image, and Wallace Stevens, a pointillist of light, color and all intangible things. Marianne Moore, now 79, constructs unique mosaics from conversations, newspaper clippings and even scientific tracts.

W. H. Auden and Allen Tate were both, in Auden's word, "colonizers" of the terrain that Pound and Eliot discovered. Theodore Roethke was already a major poet when he died in 1963 at 55. The late Dylan Thomas, with his crosscountry sweep of public performances, helped carry poetry into the floodlit arena. So did the beats. Of them, only Allen Ginsberg retains any influence, perhaps less for his poems than for his relentlessly acted role as the bewhiskered prophet of four-letter words, homosexuality, pot, and general din. Still, in their better moments, the beats, now fitfully imitated by the hippies, gave poetry a startling air of spontaneity.

Against this background stands Robert Traill Spence Lowell. Echoes of many of his predecessors and colleagues can be found here and there in his work, although he lacks the resigned elegance and orthodox Christianity of Eliot, the homespun philosophy of Frost, the intellectual subtlety of Stevens, the wit of Auden, the wild (and currently unfashionable) lyricism of Thomas. He has created a body of work distinctly his own, and most of it stands at the heart of a genre that has been called "confessional" poetry.

His latest book of verse, Near the Ocean, published this year, seals a productive decade that brings his output to 130 poems and 69 "imitations" from the classics collected in Life Studies, For the Union Dead, Lord Weary's Castle, The Mills of the Kavanaughs and Land of Unlikeness. He has also written three short plays collectively titled The Old Glory, and a translation of Racine's Phaedra (recently staged in Philadelphia). His new prose play Prometheus Bound, produced this month at the Yale School of Drama, is not so much drama as an oratorio streaked with images of visceral intensity, as exemplified in the paintings of his friend, Artist Sidney Nolan (see color pages). The play is a loose adaptation of the Greek tragedy by Aeschylus, but Lowell has typically given it a punishing contemporaneity. A parable of human pride and torment, it becomes all the more poignant with the realization that Lowell himself is a man riven by deep conflicts.

Indeed, the bulk of his best poetry is seared with a fiery desperation, fed by rage and self-laceration. The world's ills become his own, and his own the world's: / hear

My ill-spirit

Sob in each blood cell.

As if my hand were at its throat . . .

I myself am hell.

Lowell's friend, Poet Elizabeth Bishop, says that confessional poetry "is really something new in the world. There have been diaries that were frank--and generally intended to be read after the poet's death. Now the idea is that we live in a horrible and terrifying world, and the worst moments of horrible and terrifying lives are an allegory of the world." Speaking of some of Lowell's confessional imitators, she adds: "The tendency is to overdo the morbidity. You just wish they'd keep some of these things to themselves."

Man Who Has Everything. There is very little that Lowell keeps to himself. He writes freely about how, over-pressed with anxieties, he periodically checks himself into a mental institution for a few weeks. In Waking in the Blue, he evokes a morning in the hospital, reminding himself that he is a "screwball" among patients whose "bravado ossified young":

My heart grows tense

As though a harpoon were sparring for the kill. . .

We are all oldtimers,

Each of us holds a locked razor.

Marbling this blood-tinged fragility is an incomparable richness and density of classic imagery. Lowell draws habitually from the inexhaustible theater of the Bible and loots many mythologies for his art--as well as modern life. He recalls seeing the condemned murderer Louis Lepke:

Flabby, bald, lobotomized,

he drifted in sheepish calm,

where no agonizing reappraisal

jarred his concentration on the electric chair-He shudders at the new Boston, the motorized city:

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,

giant finned cars nose forward like fish;

a savage servility

slides by on grease.

In Near the Ocean, the first few pages bring together Goliath, God, Joan Baez, Cotton Mather, Jesus Christ, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Monteverdi, Trollope, civil rights clergy, Homer, his own New England roots, Calvin, and even the President of the U.S.--seen in the White House swimming pool

girdled by his establishment

this Sunday morning, free to chaff

his own thoughts with his bear-cuffed staff,

swimming nude, unbuttoned sick

of his ghost-written rhetoric.

And when he writes in an adaptation of Juvenal, "What do you hope from your white pubic hairs," it is not just another attempt to render Latin into English verse, but to say something sharp and contemporary about how the current U.S. cult of youth and happiness, through sex, bears down heavily on older men.

Love & Grace. How has Lowell made so many disparate things recognizably his own? It is a riddle and a mystery. Something important and complex happens in the poetry of this complicated man, whose art can also be readily understood not because it is merely simple but because it is the single outcome of many conflicting forces. His poetry leaps with disconcerting metamorphoses at every turn of speech. The bullets that "a stringy policeman" counts become rosary beads. The swan-shaped boats on the ornamental ponds of the Boston Public Garden become mythological birds taking his grandfather, Arthur Winslow, beyond Charles River to the Acheron where the wide waters and their voyager are one.

Stones crop out all over, and one feels not only the weight of them but also their sublapidary meaning. In Lowell's vision, Moses' tablets of the law become "the stones we cannot bear or break." The great slab of rock upon which Prometheus is chained by Jupiter for his technological hubris in bringing fire from heaven is the center stage of Lowell's version of Aeschylus. Much of Lowell's poetry is indeed stony. It is hard with the condemnation of his age and his society. Just as his confessionals are far beyond personal confession, his condemnations are far beyond "protest." His most immediate concerns with war or injustice are never merely topical but involved with the greatest and most permanent themes--life, death, love and grace. His anger is hot, but it is never unshaded by compassion. His disgust with the times is great, but it is never unqualified by a sense of the past. He knows that evil as well as good is in specific men, but also that it is in all men; that it is today, but also that it was yesterday.

Dialogue. A great deal of this knowledge is connected with his sense of family history. A gibe heard when he published Life Studies was not entirely unjust: "He writes as if Christ was crucified on the Lowell family tree."

He chose not to wear his ancestry as a social decoration but to accept it as a present doom and to argue with the Pilgrim Fathers as if they were living men. His poems call the Puritan spirit of New England to sharp account and make his ancestral portraits step from their frames and answer to Lowell. Thus his dialogue becomes an argument about his own nature, in terms of the Calvinist obsessions with sin, damnation, God and Satan. Lowell does not possess his ancestors; they possess him.

One of them was Mary Chilton, the first woman to step off the Mayflower. Another branch of the family produced Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell. Great-Great-Uncle James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) was a Harvard professor of belles-lettres and modern languages, an abolitionist, Ambassador to Spain and the Court of St. James's, author of The Bigelow Papers, and of course poet and perfervid hymn writer ("By the light of burning martyrs, Jesus' bleeding feet I track"). From yet another family branch came Amy Lowell (1874-1925), who wrote passable "imagist" verse, smoked cigars, and drove a claret-colored limousine. "To my family," says Robert Lowell, "James was the Ambassador to England, not a writer. Amy seemed a bit peculiar to them. She was never a welcome subject in our household."

Badgered. Robert comes from the Russell-Spence branch of the family, whose most notable member, Great-Great-Grandmother Harriet Traill Spence, seems to have had her kinky side--although no one is quite certain what it was. Family Chronicler Ferris Greenslet writes that the Spences possessed "a certain mystical dreaminess that sometimes obscured the need for immediate action in the small, imperative affairs of daily living." In family privacy, this trait was dignified with a genteel euphemism: it was called "the Spence negligence."

In a melancholy memoir, 91 Revere Street, Lowell tells of life with Father and Mother in Boston. Father was Commander Lowell (Annapolis 1906), a dim, mumbling man who left the Navy for a series of sad civilian jobs, ending as a brokerage customers' man "with himself the only customer." The real commander was Mother, a Winslow, who nagged her husband into resigning from the Navy and badgered him out of the deeds to his own house. In Life Studies, Lowell recalls contemptuously:

"Anchors aweigh," Daddy

in his bathtub, "Anchors aweigh," when Lever Brothers offered to pay him double what the Navy paid, I nagged for his dress sword with gold braid, and cringed because Mother, new caps on all her teeth, was born anew at forty. With seamanlike celerity, Father left the Navy, and deeded Mother his property.

Celestial Robes. Lowell came early to his vocation. He was a fifth-form schoolboy at St. Marks, the prestigious Episcopal prep school in Southborough, Mass., when he received his calling. Awkward, myopic, shy, dull in class except in history, he shambled about the sham Tudor buildings. His friends called him "Cal," after Caligula, because he was so uncouth; he liked that, and today is still known as Cal. His nature became clear to classmates after he started reading commentaries on the Iliad and Dante's Inferno. As his roommate, Artist Frank Parker, recalls: "The point was that you could put yourself into heaven or hell by your own choice.

You could make your own destiny. That became Cal's text."

To test this theory, Lowell threw his powerful but ill-coordinated body into football. The theory was sound: he won his letter as tackle. "It was more will power than love of the game," says Parker. "It was his way of exercising the moral imperative." But would the theory be valid for poetry?

Lowell plodded doggedly into an epic on the Crusades. His first published poem, Madonna, was pretty bad, even for a school magazine: Celestial were her robes; Her hands were made divine; But the Virgin's face was silvery bright Like the holy light! Which from God's throne Is said to shine.

But he was lucky to have as one of his teachers Poet Richard Eberhart. "At the beginning of his senior year," Eberhart recalls, "Lowell brought me a book of 30 poems--the first fruits of his labors--shyly placing it on my desk when I was not there. I cherish this unpublished book to this day. It showed the young poet heavily influenced by Latin models, but true strokes of imagination came through."

By the time he left St. Marks for Harvard in 1935, Lowell had written in an essay on the Iliad: "Its magnitude and depth make it almost as hard to understand as life." So soon, Lowell had put art and life on a parity. At Harvard, he lolled in his room, surrounded by prints of Leonardo and Rembrandt, listening to Beethoven on his phonograph. He wrote poems full of violence and foreboding, black roses, a "plague" that "breathed the decay of centuries." No one then at Harvard was interested, so Lowell took his verses to Robert Frost, who was living near by. Frost read the first page of the Crusades opus. "You have no compression," he said, and then read aloud a short poem by William Collins, How Sleep the Brave. "That's not a great poem, but it's not too long." Lowell recalls that Frost was "very kindly about it."

Lowell chafed at Harvard and the stifling pedantry of its literature courses, and he seethed against the tensions of his home. The first of his crises was mounting. It came with his announcement, later rescinded, that he was quitting college to elope with a girl to Europe. Father and son quarreled. The violence that churned in Lowell's poetry burst out, and he knocked his father to the floor. As Commander Lowell saw it, his crazed son would have to be packed off to an asylum, but family friends convinced him that his poet son needed not so much the company of keepers as that of other poets--specifically, those living in Tennessee.

Heady Summer. Tennessee in the '30s was the center of a poetic renaissance. Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, fathers of the "New Criticism," had done much to impose form and coherence on the gaseous and self-indulgent free-verse fashion of the time. Thus Lowell at 20 found himself at a reform school--poetic reform. When he arrived "ardent and eccentric" at the

Tates' house in Monteagle, near Chattanooga, he was told there was no room. "You would have to camp on the lawn," said Mrs. Tate, who was already busy with a novel, her family, three guests and the cooking. Lowell bought a pup tent at Sears, Roebuck, pitched it on the lawn, moved in, and slept there for two months.

It was a heady summer. Lowell recalls: "It seemed to be one of those periods when the lid was being blown . . . when a power came into the arts which we perhaps haven't had since." After that, the poet's eye was in a fine frenzy rolling; he was now to find a focus in the forms of tradition.

He returned to Cambridge to muddle through a bit more and, although it seemed impious to his parents for a Lowell to reject Harvard, he was allowed to transfer to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where Ransom and Randall Jarrell now taught. They were to make the Kenyon Review into a dominant force in American poetry and criticism for the next three decades. "I am the sort of poet I am because of them," Lowell acknowledges simply.

The heavy burden of learning and the rigorous formal demands of the New Criticism of Ransom and Tate dammed up the first freshet of his verse. His poems were blocked with a deliberate opaque quality, as if he feared that clarity were a sign of mediocrity. Still, he seemed stimulated by restraint. He emerged from Kenyon summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa and class valedictorian. He also emerged a Roman Catholic convert and a husband.

Just before graduation, he married Jean Stafford. Two years his senior, she was intense, beautiful, a gifted writer of fiction (she later wrote Boston Adventure, The Mountain Lion) and an assistant professor at Stevens College in Columbia, Mo. And so, with his marriage, his graduation and his conversion, he at last stood outside the long shadow of Beacon Hill. He would deal with its traditional claims upon him only in his own terms: in poetry. And he would write New England's epitaph rather than a Frostian celebration.

Then began a life pattern that would soon become familiar in U.S. cultural pursuits--in which hundreds of the gifted, the talented or the merely qualified would live from grant to mouth, or move, like modern Lollard friars, from college to college, claiming hospitality by right of authorship. The Lowells drifted to Louisiana State University, and then back to Kenyon. Lowell's poetry was excruciatingly difficult and ambiguous; as he said later, "it really wasn't poetry."

With his wife, he moved to Manhattan's Greenwich Village, where he labored briefly for the Catholic publishing house of Sheed & Ward. This period gave him the metropolitan imagery necessary to a contemporary poet: he needed less an eye for the four seasons of Walden Pond than for the five boroughs of New York City. He was to write: Now the midwinter grind is on me, New York drills through my nerves,/ as I walk/ the chewed-up streets. And, in a cataclysmic line: When Cain beat out his brother Abel's brains/ the Maker laid great cities in his soul.

The C.O. It was a bad time for poets generally. There was a war on. In 1942, Lowell tried to serve first in the Army and then the Navy, only to be turned down by both as physically unfit (eyesight alone would have disqualified him). As the war went on, he changed his mind, or the war changed its character. When the draft called, he refused to report and wrote a letter to the President to explain why. He wrote not as a dissident citizen to the all-powerful President of the U.S. but haughtily as a Boston Lowell to a Hudson Valley Roosevelt: "You will understand how painful such a decision is for an American whose family traditions, like your own, have always found their fulfillment in maintaining, through responsible participation in both civil and military services, our country's freedom and honor."

F.D.R. understood. The judge understood. Lowell was sentenced to a year and a day but served only five months, part of it in Manhattan's West Street jail. He later wrote of his experience with jocular ferocity: I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O., and made my manic statement, telling off the state and president, and then sat waiting sentence in the bull pen beside a Negro boy with curlicues of marijuana in his hair.

Poor Ghost. Lowell's poetry explains better than any presidential letter the violence of his revulsion against the war, especially the bombing of cities, crucial to his conscientious objection: Raise us, Mother, we fell down Here hugger mugger in the jellied fire: Our sacred earth in our day was a curse. Many of his antiwar poems were written at Damariscotta Mills, Me., where he and his wife had gone as soon as he was released from jail. Collected in Lord Weary's Castle, his second volume, they won him, at 29, the Pulitzer Prize.

But they won him no peace of mind. In a rage with the world, Lowell found no balm in his religion, and he renounced Catholicism. Nor was marriage a solace; it was another theater for his inner dissension. He and his wife wrote in separate rooms of a big old farmhouse. Years later, he remembered: How quivering and fierce we were. There snowbound together/ Simmering like wasps/ In our tent of books!/ Poor ghost, old love, speak/ With your old voice/ Of flaming insight/ That kept us awake all night. In one bed and apart . . . They were divorced in 1948.

Back to Roots. In the summer of 1949, Lowell married again. The bride, another writer, was Kentuckian Elizabeth Hardwick, who is now an editor of the New York Review of Books. That year he taught at Iowa State University. They spent most of the next three years in Europe, where Lowell plunged into a temporary gambling fling at Monte Carlo. After his mother's death in 1954, he took his wife to Boston and, with his inheritance, bought a big, comfortable town house in Back Bay. "The idea," says a friend, "was to recapture some roots. It was their first attempt to be the Boston Lowells."

For a while it worked. Their daughter Harriet was born. They held expansive dinner parties at which intellectual nourishment was served with the same elegance that accompanied the finger bowls. Critics Edmund Wilson and Philip Rahv dined there, and so did Poets William Carlos Williams, Richard Eberhart and William Snodgrass, Lowell's most gifted student. "Lowell liked the successful poets with more than just a literary interest," recalls a friend. "They were reproductive, they had lasted the course--they were heroes of letters."

For five years, Lowell taught at Boston University. In 1959, he published Life Studies, which included 91 Revere Street and some of his best poetry. In Skunk Hour, which evokes a summer's decay, he watches the animals search in the moonlight for food:

They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top

of our back steps and breathe the rich air-a mother skunk with her kitten swills the garbage pail.

She jabs her wedge-head in a cup

of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,

and will not scare.

Even in those productive days Lowell suffered a terrible physical strain. "He was struggling with two dynamos," says a friend, "one leading him to some kind of creative work, the other tearing him apart." The origin of what Lowell himself called his "break downs" is attributed by some friends to the "incredible tensions" that existed between Lowell's parents. Says one: "I don't see how he survived that family. He has written about it, but the reality is worse than he has written."

And when he wrote, the result often surfaced not only in recollections of childhood (/, bristling and manic,/ skulked in the attic) but in raging descriptions of his tormented later years. In Life Studies, he portrays a wife, murmuring about her husband, who

". . . drops his home disputes,

and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,

free-lancing out along the razor's edge . . .

What makes him tick? 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."

In the same collection, he could be familial and tender: Gone now the baby's nurse/a lioness who ruled the roost/ and made the Mother cry. Yet even in his more resigned moments, he really seemed to distrust tranquillity: Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.

He was, and apparently remains, haunted by totemistic objects. One is the mirror, symbol of self-knowledge, in which Lowell has seen himself as a newt and a turtle. The other is the razor, symbol of the knowledge of life that comes through the contemplation of death. The puritan-lapsed-Catholic may have arrived at the true existentialist position--confronting the possibility of suicide man learns the nature and possibilities of his life.

A Private Man. Soon after the publication of Life Studies, Lowell and his wife returned to New York City. There his reputation flowered, nourished by each successive collection of poems, including For the Union Dead, and by the ardor of the intellectual Establishment of the Eastern academies, who by general agreement considered him something of a grandee.

Two years ago, Lowell received a call from the White House asking whether he would accept an invitation to a festival for the arts. He said yes. Then, recalls his wife, "when he got the official invitation, he decided he didn't feel at all connected to the White House and that what the White House was doing didn't have much connection with the arts." Whereupon Lowell, reflecting the general disaffection of intellectuals with L.B.J., sent the President a telegram declining the invitation. "We are in danger of becoming an explosive and suddenly chauvinistic nation," he wrote. "Every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public celebration without making public commitments." Lowell was pleased by the "hundreds of letters" of congratulations that ensued, but he was not prepared for a sudden rush of demands for his support from dissident groups. He has refused virtually all of them, for essentially he is an intensely private man.

Real Work. Nowadays, between weekly trips to Harvard, where he teaches poetry, Lowell spends most of his time working at home in Manhattan. He and his wife own a West Side duplex apartment filled with books; the high living room walls are fitted with a traveling ladder. He writes in a studio, lying on a bed, composing his lines on a small pad. "It's such a miracle if you get lines that are halfway right," he once explained. "You think three times before you put a word down, and ten times about taking it out." When he has finished his rough draft, he begins fashioning rhymes. Later comes the "real work," which is "to make it something much better than the original out of the difficulties of the meter." He adds:

"If you don't know a good deal about what you're saying, you're an idiot. But if you know too well what you're doing, you are a pedant."

He is fond of reading the works of other poets, sometimes in class, often to friends at home. Occasionally, he makes the circuit scene to read his own work. His voice carries a faintly Southern-accented sound, his 6-ft. frame hulks over the microphone, and his sad blue eyes needle onto the printed page through thick black-rimmed glasses as he intones his poems. He receives as his fee anywhere from $250 to $1,000 or more. At Manhattan's Town Hall recently, he introduced Soviet Poet Andrei Voznesensky to the audience and let loose with a curious political remark--his first such public utterance since his telegram to L.B.J. "This is indiscreet," he said, "but both our countries, I think, have really terrible governments. But we do the best we can with them, and they better do the best they can with each other or the world will cease to be here." Some people in the hall applauded; others gasped. Voznesensky, asked later for comment, merely turned away without a word.

For relaxation, Lowell and his wife still maintain a busy schedule of dinner and cocktail parties, usually with other poets. When summer comes, they pile their Falcon station wagon with books and head for the tiny summer resort at Castine in Maine. There Lowell keeps a small house, left to him by Cousin Harriet Winslow, who, recalls a local citizen, was "a very prim old lady who wore white gloves to the Post Office."

In Castine or in New York City, whether he is stoking his fireplace or his thoughts, Lowell dwells on poetry and, through it, the world. In Waking Early Sunday Morning, he concludes

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.

His views on the future of American poetry are somewhat brighter, but are not too optimistic. "It's a very dark crystal," he says. "I don't know what poetry needs now. Something's happening now, but it's hard to tell what it is. Half of it is very difficult, and half of it is very quiet." He guesses that perhaps "there has been too much confessional poetry."

Lowell is surrounded and occasionally followed by a number of excellent poets, some of them brilliant. John Berryman, 52, often ranked with him, is an original, jazzy, elliptical lyricist. Richard Wilbur, 46, an elegant disciple of Eliot's, writes cerebral, well-constructed verse. Charles Olson, 56, founder of the Black Mountain School, has fostered the grand vision of "projective verse"--free, direct, written to be spoken. James Dickey, 44, is Lowell's polar opposite--facile, exuberant, bearing joy and affirmation. Louis Simpson, 44, and Robert Creeley, 41, are promising lyric poets. Elizabeth Bishop, 56, one of America's leading woman poets, is the epitome of the cool, detached, low-key observer. And W. D. Snodgrass, 41, who has written some confessional poetry but is not by any means an imitator, strikes critics as one of the most gifted of the newer generation.

Dry Stick. As for Lowell himself, greater things can surely be expected, considering his high conception of the scope and power of art. That conception is best expressed in the words he found for Prometheus, as the embodiment of man's creative faculties, which are reflections of the divine. / taught men the rising and the setting of the stars. From the stars, I taught them numbers. I taught women to count their children, and men to number their murders. I gave them the alphabet. Before I made men talk and write with words, knowledge dropped like a dry stick into the fire of their memories, fed that fading blaze an instant, then died without leaving an ash behind.

Lowell remains a religious man and maintains that his later poems, in which explicit Christian symbols rarely occur, are more truly religious than those of his Catholic period, which were encrusted with liturgical ornament.

With all his poet's pride, he remains humble and aware that the end of man, even of poetic man, is not poetry but the simple obligation to be good. He has constantly said, "It is harder to be a good man than a good poet." The statement comes with double force from a poet who has undergone such an intense struggle to acquire his art and from a man whose own nature is in frequent schism with itself. Thus far, his art has found no words for this. His fellow poet Auden might speak for him in lines written on another New England poet-tragedian, Herman Melville:

Goodness existed: that was the new knowledge

His terror had to blow itself quite out

To let him see it.

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