A Self-Examined Life

Robert Lowell: 1917-1977

"Ah the swift vanishing of my older/ generation," Robert Lowell lamented in a sonnet not long ago, "the deaths, suicide, madness/ of Roethke, Berryman, Jarrell and Lowell." There was a justifiable pride in this facetious reference to himself, for while his contemporaries died early, Lowell seemed to thrive on middle age. He too had been humbled by madness--an experience he documented in Life Studies (1959)--but had survived to become America's most distinguished contemporary poet. When Lowell died last week of a heart attack in a New York City taxi at the age of 60, he was enjoying the acclaim that greeted his last book, Day by Day.

Apart from Lord Weary's Castle, a collection of tortuous, difficult poems that won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1947, Lowell's books were devoted to a ceaseless self-scrutiny. The glimpses of his private world could be harrowing. "I hear/ my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,/ as if my hand were at its throat," he confessed in Skunk Hour, a famous testament to his dark inner life. It was an outwardly tempestuous life as well. He was a Roman Catholic convert in his 20s--he later renounced the church --and a conscientious objector who served five months in prison for draft resistance during World War II. In his later years, he suffered from manic-depression and was often in mental institutions. He had three wives, all writers: Novelist Jean Stafford, Critic Elizabeth Hardwick and English Novelist Lady Caroline Blackwood. The Byronic drama of his marriages made its way into Lowell's poetry, where he quoted his wives' letters and reproaches, chronicled his infidelities and begged forgiveness. But he portrayed his worldly sorrows with a fervor transcending mere confession. There are, for example, these lacerating lines from "Man and Wife":

you were in your twenties, and I,

once hand on glass

and heart in mouth,

outdrank the Rahvs in the heat

of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet--

too boiled and shy and poker-faced to make a pass,

while the shrill verve

of your invective scorched the traditional South.

Now twelve years later, you turn your back.

Sleepless, you hold

your pillow to your hollows like a child;

your old-fashioned tirade--

loving, rapid, merciless--

breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.

Tall and stooped, at once courtly and disheveled, Lowell presided with a grim conscience over American intellectual life and willingly intervened in politics, appearing in demonstrations against the Viet Nam War and campaigning for Eugene McCarthy. Norman Mailer, in The Armies of the Night, recalled him during the march on the Pentagon in 1967, "virile and patrician," with "a Cromwellian light in his eye."

Such natural dignity befitted Lowell's New England background. His ancestors included Great-Granduncle James Russell Lowell, Cousin Amy Lowell and relatives on his mother's side who date back to the Mayflower. More combative than his genteel forebears, Lowell was fascinated by power. He often chose for his theme the doomed great in history: Racine's Phaedra, Mary Stuart and Cleopatra, and Alexander, "double-marching to gain the limits of the globe." Classmates at his prep school, St. Marks, called him Cal, after the despotic Roman emperor Caligula, because he was so imperious. The name stuck all his life. But a critic who described him as "an Old Testament prophet in ungodly times" was perhaps closer to the truth.

Lyndon Johnson would have agreed. When he invited Lowell to the White House in 1965, the poet wired a stern refusal, explaining that he regarded "our present foreign policy with the greatest dismay and distrust." Among old friends or in class at Harvard, where he taught for many years, he was a vivid, eloquent presence. He could hold forth for hours on any subject, his hands brushing back his unkempt white mane. And his poetry revealed the same confiding voice that animated his conversation. The controlled metrics of Lord Weary's Castle and The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951) show the influence of Lowell's mentors, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. In Imitations (1961), freely licensed translations of European poets, and in The Old Glory, a trilogy of plays based on stories by Melville and Hawthorne, Lowell employed a more conventional rhetoric than in the poems about his private experience. But it was in Life Studies, For the Union Dead (1964) and the sprawling sonnets that occupied three books that he displayed the unique temperament monitoring its own vicissitudes that enriched our poetry.

Toward the end of his life, generously laden with honors and awards, he found himself surrounded, like the wine baron in one of his last poems, by uncritical admirers. But he could still regard his immense reputation with humor and grace. "I used to want to live/ to avoid your elegy," he wrote of the late John Berryman; and he did live, if not as long as his friends or the world would have wanted, at least long enough to write his own:

The line must terminate.

Yet my heart rises, I know I've gladdened a lifetime

knotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope;

the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten,

nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.

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