In a dying republic

The editors’ introduction to this volume of essays on Robert Lowell sets out its purposeful stall early. There is a need, more than a century on from his birth, they say, for “a few markers properly placed” to guide contemporary readers towards a better understanding of his once prominent work. He was “steeped in historical consciousness”, but that history – the Cold War, Vietnam, Watergate, etc – is “increasingly known only to specialists”. While they may be somewhat underselling the collective memory, it is without doubt that Lowell’s former status as a politicized disrupter, a challenger of technical and literary orthodoxies and a radical within, is remote from the calcified, privileged Brahmin anachronism he, in a somewhat diminished afterlife, has come to represent.

The essays here are grouped thematically around, roughly, Lowell’s places, politics, influences, life and reputation. Throughout, the various angles on his work and (unexpectedly, usefully) his interest in other art forms such as painting and photography bring new colour and depth to bear on his writing. They also help to unpick a few oversimplified binaries that have come to impinge on his work’s reception – particularly in our current moment, with its tendency to foreground biographical context. One of the editors, Grzegorz Kość, notes that the sort of topographical awareness displayed in Lowell’s work is “not exceptional among Bostonians”, before going on to lay out the social context of his grand family’s slide down the prestige ladder via their locations on Beacon Hill – “the higher the ascent up the street … the older the house” – and eventual move west into Back Bay. This was in the face of an “advance of the lesser castes” throughout Lowell’s lifetime, to the Brahmins’ resented cost. The unpacking of Boston’s “intricate zoning” and each area’s “different level of dignity” helps to offer insight into Lowell’s obsessive attention to which rim of respectability he was, at any one time, perching on, and the oscillation between “grief and acceptance” with which he took this fundamental change in his ancestral status is in some ways a mirror of the twin poles in his generally elegiac, disillusioned work.

A sense of Lowell’s wider disillusionment is touched on in Joseph Kuhn’s occasionally heavy- going but nonetheless helpful piece on the American South. Lowell adopted the South fervently, as he did the tutelage of Allen Tate and the Southern Agrarians. As Kuhn points out, this was as much an attempt to find an antidote to the “universalised nature” Lowell observed in New England, a place he had come to see as “rotten to the root”, as it was a genuine embracing of Tate and co’s “Catholic supernaturalism”. New York, at least in Jeffrey Gray’s telling, was where Lowell was at his sanest, happiest and most creative, but, as in Boston, he faced an enduring fear of encroachment from the less well-heeled; Gray gives a sense of Lowell, as per a poem in History (1973), figuring himself as one of “the Romanoffs with much to lose”. Conflict, whether in the wrangles for control of a city’s chicest neighbourhood or on a more global scale, is a key concept in these essays, and much is made of Lowell as public figure, and of the vision of America as a dying republic that pervaded his Rome-laden, highly wrought early work. This chimed with a historical moment rich in material for a poet intent on speaking truth to the powerful, usually on equal terms.

Military interventions and their importance to Lowell’s idea of the self in society are especially well considered in Walt Hunter’s essay on war, which the poet saw as “a personal challenge to his family’s long legacy in crafting American power”. Hunter also explores how Lowell made war “an intensely private crucible for his poetic development and psychological struggles … testing the capacity of poetic forms to represent the brutality of human history”. While maintaining an immovable affinity for those in charge, Alex Runchman writes, Lowell also acknowledged his attraction to a Carlylean Great Man narrative, tempered by an awareness of the Emersonian self as possible only in relation to others. There was both “attraction to power … and seeking to temper it”.

War, as Hunter notes, “makes visible the continuities between historical eras”, and the idea of continuity recurs across these essays, not least as regards Lowell’s poetic “eras” and the much less delineated gulf between books, or periods, than has sometimes been suggested in judgements on his work as a whole. Joan Romano Shifflett, who writes about the influence of Robert Penn Warren and Randall Jarrell, is particularly sharp on the shape of Lowell’s career, flagging up that, rather than a dramatic rupturing between the early and the late periods, what we actually see is Lowell “returning to form after candour”. Her chapter is also enlightening on the influence of Robert Frost – much more important than the overly credited William Carlos Williams – and on Lowell’s path towards this influence via Warren’s lectures. Shifflett makes an intriguing case, too, for marks left by Warren’s and Jarrell’s prose on Lowell’s cooler style in Life Studies (1959). Other highlights include John Talbot’s discussion of Lowell’s debts to Propertius and Meg Tyler’s essay on the “Plaints”, which offers some fine close reading and a subtle discussion of, among other things, the importance of Catholicism to the sonnet and Lowell’s deflation of extraordinary subjects.

Thomas Austenfeld’s essay on religion attends to the wrong thinking involved in too neatly separating religious Lowell and lapsed Lowell into discrete portions. Austenfeld introduces useful nuance into ideas around Lowell’s belief systems and the distinction between faith and religion, favourably quoting Albert Gelpi’s dictum that “only a prophet can deliver a jeremiad – not an ironist”. Lowell’s co-option of material – whether other people’s voices or their private letters, not least those of his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick – is also discussed, especially in Lucy Collins’s piece on marriage, which argues well that the question of “whether authenticity makes privacy impossible” hangs over Lowell’s sonnet phase. The matter of his plundering is addressed head-on in Hannah Baker Saltmarsh’s understandably barbed chapter on appropriation. Here she attempts to “vindicate Hardwick from the choke hold of the letter-poems” and to shine a light on the pervasiveness of “master narratives” more generally, especially “in the wake of #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter and #ownstories”.

Saltmarsh isn’t the only one aiming to redress Lowell along modern lines. Nikki Skillman, in a chapter on whiteness, discusses how Lowell “hardened and politicised” his own privilege in his adaptation of Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”, while (to return to the family’s decline and his lifelong awareness of various forms of encroachment) linking “white power and violence with psychic circumstances – helplessness, insecurity, vanity, claustrophobia”. Steven Gould Axelrod is incisive on Lowell’s influence on contemporary poetry, particularly through his “photographic realism”, which serves as a counterpoint to introspection and has become a model of sorts for poets such as Henri Cole, Sharon Olds, Frank Bidart and Robert Hayden. There are also less successful attempts to “update” Lowell: a piece on language and post- language poets’ links to his work is rendered in its own form of academic post-language: “the antinomianism of the event of the poem disrupts the very idea of a ‘coherence beyond’”. Doesn’t it just.

On the whole Robert Lowell in Context offers a beneficial balance of informed distinction and reassessment. These essays refuse to flatten their subject or dismiss him as an outmoded ivory avatar, while simultaneously highlighting the ways in which precisely this aspect – his centrality and access to the American world of arts and culture – gave him a rich, evolving means of commentating on the state of the republic in his lifetime. The occasional attempt to give his concerns resonance for our own time can feel, in this light, like special pleading. The case for it is proved here, but didn’t need to be.

Declan Ryan’s first collection of poems is Crisis Actor, 2023

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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