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The Achievement of Robert Lowell (2005)

Willard Spiegelman

in Imaginative Transcripts: Selected Literary Essays

This chapter looks at the achievement of Robert Lowell as a poet. It discusses Lowell's rebellions against proper Brahmin Boston and other representatives of authority and his popularization of the ... More

This chapter looks at the achievement of Robert Lowell as a poet. It discusses Lowell's rebellions against proper Brahmin Boston and other representatives of authority and his popularization of the term confessional poetry. It explains that during his career Lowell looked within and without, devising multiple designs for his articulations and that his style and subjects never stopped changing. Lowell's history and his participation in history received equivalent attention, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes sequentially.Less

“Naked without My Line-Ends”: Robert Lowell in His Letters (2006)

Willard Spiegelman

in Imaginative Transcripts: Selected Literary Essays

This chapter examines the letters and correspondence of American poet Robert Lowell. It suggests that though Lowell was not very comfortable with the medium of letter writing, the tone of his letters ... More

This chapter examines the letters and correspondence of American poet Robert Lowell. It suggests that though Lowell was not very comfortable with the medium of letter writing, the tone of his letters was always at least assured and more often assertive with an undertone of competitiveness. The bulk of his letters reveal the heart of a man and the two things that occupied all of his energies: his sense of self and his work, separate but interchangeable.Less

Iris on Safari: A Personal Record

John Bayley

in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher

This chapter presents a short memoir of Iris Murdoch as lecturer and traveller—and her relations, among other things, to God, to power (and Elias Canetti), and to what Philippa Foot has called ... More

This chapter presents a short memoir of Iris Murdoch as lecturer and traveller—and her relations, among other things, to God, to power (and Elias Canetti), and to what Philippa Foot has called “Natural Goodness”.Less

Biographical Form Five Poets

Peter Campion

in Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry

This chapter begins with a discussion of Robert Lowell's public and aesthetic vision as it relates to the use of the forms of biography in poetry. This is followed by sections that discuss four poets ... More

This chapter begins with a discussion of Robert Lowell's public and aesthetic vision as it relates to the use of the forms of biography in poetry. This is followed by sections that discuss four poets from the following generations (David Antin, John Koethe, James McMichael, and Louise Glück), under the aegis of the same concept of "biographical form."Less

The Poet and the Tyrant

in Shades of Authority: The Poetry of Lowell, Hill and Heaney

This chapter explores the poetry of Robert Lowell, specifically his interest in tyrannical personality traits. It suggests that his imaginative engagement with the thoughts and deeds of tyrannical ... More

This chapter explores the poetry of Robert Lowell, specifically his interest in tyrannical personality traits. It suggests that his imaginative engagement with the thoughts and deeds of tyrannical personalities evinces a kind of appalled admiration, complicated at times by a degree of sympathy for their self-destructive tendencies. This is bound up with Lowell's attempts to make sense of the ‘tyrant delusions’ and megalomaniac fantasies to which he himself was susceptible at times of acute mental disturbance. The analysis includes works such as ‘Commander Lowell’, ‘My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow’, and ‘Stalin’.Less

Reading Objects: Robert Lowell

Dan Chiasson

in One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America

The work of Robert Lowell is marked by its pronounced use of autobiographical facts and by a profound, counterpointed skepticism about the poetic use of such facts. His career reads like an ... More

The work of Robert Lowell is marked by its pronounced use of autobiographical facts and by a profound, counterpointed skepticism about the poetic use of such facts. His career reads like an alternating conjuring, and subsequent repudiation, of the personal life. Lowell's use of autobiographical facts sparked an immediate scandal; among his contemporaries it was felt that excessive factuality violated the decorum of lyric poetry, a standard that modernism, with its emphasis on poetic impersonality, had reinforced. Later in Lowell's career, his critics' indictment of his excessive facticity seems to have been partly internalized—indeed his sublimely remorseful last poem, “Epilogue,” states the case against facticity most eloquently. This chapter examines how Lowell makes autobiography often literally hard to see. It focuses on three of his works: “Father's Bedroom,” “Blizzard in Cambridge,” and “For the Union Dead.”Less

Commanding Voices

in Shades of Authority: The Poetry of Lowell, Hill and Heaney

This chapter explores the influence of other poets' works on Seamus Heaney's poetry. Heaney's engagement with the shades of others has enabled him to test and develop his own poetic authority. ... More

This chapter explores the influence of other poets' works on Seamus Heaney's poetry. Heaney's engagement with the shades of others has enabled him to test and develop his own poetic authority. However, he also recognizes that he must banish these shades, for the authority he seeks is ultimately to be achieved by securing creative freedom. The chapter examines Heaney's negotiations Robert Lowell and Geoffrey Hill, which have been revealingly complex and ambivalent, marked by both affirmation and wary circumspection. Envy, identification, alienation, unconscious absorption, and conscious emulation are all in evidence.Less

Are Translations Interpretations? Gadamer, Lowell, and Some Contemporary Poem‐Translations

Matthew Reynolds

in The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer & Petrarch to Homer & Logue

‘Every translation is an interpretation’ is a cliché of modern criticism: I take it as the first of my metaphors of translation. Its meaning is uncertain because ‘interpretation’ is itself such a ... More

‘Every translation is an interpretation’ is a cliché of modern criticism: I take it as the first of my metaphors of translation. Its meaning is uncertain because ‘interpretation’ is itself such a hazy word. Nevertheless, for literary translators the idea creates a difficulty because an ‘interpretation’ is always assumed to be less complex than what it is an interpretation of: if translation is interpretation it will be hard for a translation to be as literary as its source. I explore this perplexity through the work of Robert Lowell, Peter Robinson, and Jamie McKendrick, showing how they all espouse the push to interpret (so as to be translating) and turn away from it (so as to be writing poetry). I distinguish between a kind of ‘turning away’ which does violence to the source, and a kind which justifies itself as continuing the source's own imaginative activity.Less

The Burden of Power

in Shades of Authority: The Poetry of Lowell, Hill and Heaney

This chapter explores the poetry of Robert Lowell. It argues that the praise heaped on Lowell's work presents him as a major poet of his own time but a minor figure of ours. Lowell's diminishing ... More

This chapter explores the poetry of Robert Lowell. It argues that the praise heaped on Lowell's work presents him as a major poet of his own time but a minor figure of ours. Lowell's diminishing stature among contemporary readers could be attributed to the shift in expectations and tastes of poetry readers away from the kind of poetry that Lowell is seen to represent, and the collapse of a belief in, or appetite for, the poet as cultural spokesperson — and this, for better or worse, is a salient aspect of Lowell's public image. The analysis includes the poems ‘The March’ and ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’, his collections, and his many other works adapted from literary forebears.Less

Violence and Idealism

in Shades of Authority: The Poetry of Lowell, Hill and Heaney

This chapter explores the poetry of Robert Lowell. It discusses how his verse exposes family members, fellow writers, and historical and contemporary figures to unsparing and often unflattering ... More

This chapter explores the poetry of Robert Lowell. It discusses how his verse exposes family members, fellow writers, and historical and contemporary figures to unsparing and often unflattering scrutiny. However, Lowell himself bears the brunt of such harsh measures more frequently and more severely — the destructive impulse at work in the verse is always also a self-destructive one. His poetry's social or political vision also refuses any neat distinction between destructive and reparative potential. The analysis includes works such as ‘Leader of the Left’, ‘Marcus Cato 95–46 B.C.’, and ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’.Less

Questions of Anticommunism: Hemispheric Lyric in the 1960s

Harris Feinsod

in The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures

This chapter reveals exchanges among Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, and Heberto Padilla. Bishop’s relation to the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) inflects her Brazil poems, ... More

This chapter reveals exchanges among Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, and Heberto Padilla. Bishop’s relation to the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) inflects her Brazil poems, described here not as self-conscious critiques of travel literature but as negotiations of liberal ideas about international class politics and poverty, revealed in elaborate sound patterns. Transfiguring middle-generation formalism, Walcott lyricized his increasingly vexed relation to the hemispheric tours he attended with support from the CCF. Actively influenced by Lowell’s psycho-political stance, Padilla’s critiques of revolutionary Cuba aggravated a crisis of cultural permissiveness in the state bureaucracy known as “the Padilla Affair” after the poet was imprisoned and forced to recite a coerced confession as a condition of his release. Lyric sequences by Bishop, Lowell, Walcott, and Padilla sought new strategies of hemispheric cultural diplomacy by enacting crises of confessional lyric formalism as an aesthetic ideology in service to anticommunist policy.Less

The Breath of a Poem: Confessional Print/Performance circa 1959

Christopher Grobe

in Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV

Today, we may know confessional poetry as a set of texts that are printed in books, but in its time it was also a performance genre. This chapter demonstrates how the performance of poems—in the ... More

Today, we may know confessional poetry as a set of texts that are printed in books, but in its time it was also a performance genre. This chapter demonstrates how the performance of poems—in the privacy of the poet’s study, at public poetry readings, and in the studios of recorded literature companies—shaped this genre, determined its tactics, and influenced its style. An extended comparison of Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg shows that breath was a key medium for confessional poets, and a study of Anne Sexton’s career—both on the page and at the podium—shows how she “breathed back” dead poems in live performance. Throughout, this chapter focuses on the feelings of embarrassment confessional poetry raised, and the uses to which poets could put such feelings. It also highlights contemporary trends in “performance” and their impact on confessional poets—e.g., Anne Sexton’s debt to the acting theories of Konstantin Stanislavsky and to Method acting as theorized by American director Lee Strasberg.Less

“My brother got killed in the war”: Internecine Intertextuality

Richard Thomas

in Citizens of Discord: Rome and Its Civil Wars

This chapter is concerned with intertextual aspects of civil war literature and with the way such intertexts complicate and intensify the aesthetic response to the suffering and loss associated with ... More

This chapter is concerned with intertextual aspects of civil war literature and with the way such intertexts complicate and intensify the aesthetic response to the suffering and loss associated with civil discord, examining a disparate group of songs and poems that share a universalizing strategy for representing contemporary civil wars: works reflecting civil war in seventeenth‐century England, nineteenth‐century America, and twentieth‐century Spain. Authors considered include John Denham, Bob Dylan, Abraham Cowley, Andrew Marvell, Herman Melville, William Cullen Bryant, Richard Henry Stoddard, Robert Lowell, Federico García Lorca, Geoffrey Parsons, and Miklós Radnóti. This strategy is particularly salutary given the need for a literary response to reach readers on (or sympathetic to) both sides; otherwise it risks being propaganda.Less

What is Lost?

in Poetry & Translation: The Art of the Impossible

This chapter examines the validity of American poet Robert Frost's aphorism that poetry is what gets lost or left out in poem translation. It discusses the view that the effects of form, structure ... More

This chapter examines the validity of American poet Robert Frost's aphorism that poetry is what gets lost or left out in poem translation. It discusses the view that the effects of form, structure and meaning in the original poem cannot reconstituted in the translated poem using the materials of another set of interrelations from a different culture and suggests that the poetic quality of the translation would be something created entirely in the terms of the translating poet's skills as a composer of verse in the receiver language. This chapter also considers the views of Robert Lowell on poetry translation and his critic Vladimir Nabokov who claims that poetry translation is morally wrong and a cruel disrespect for the readers.Less

Fire Balloons: The Letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop

Paul Muldoon

in Letter Writing Among Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop

This chapter offers a close reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Armadillo’ and Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’ in the light of the recently published letters between the two poets, as well as Bishop’s ... More

This chapter offers a close reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Armadillo’ and Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’ in the light of the recently published letters between the two poets, as well as Bishop’s correspondence with The New Yorker. It looks at letters as ‘the other life that [a poem] might have had’ and a poem as ‘the other life that [letters’ might have had’, concluding that the relationship between Lowell and Bishop was often less benign than we’ve led ourselves to believe.Less

Just Talk: Writing, Media, and Confessional Monologue in the 1980s

Christopher Grobe

in Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV

This chapter focuses on the solo career of Spalding Gray, who helped popularize confessional monologue in the American theater. Received at first as someone who “talks for a living,” Spalding Gray ... More

This chapter focuses on the solo career of Spalding Gray, who helped popularize confessional monologue in the American theater. Received at first as someone who “talks for a living,” Spalding Gray was rebranded after his death as, in fact, a writer. This simple binary—talk vs. writing—does a disservice to Gray’s monologues, or, as he sometimes called them, his “talking novels.” Placing Gray in his context—as a member of the multimedia experimental theater ensemble the Wooster Group, as an artist poised between theater and performance art, and as a man frankly puzzled by the relationship between theatrical performance and literary authorship—this chapter argues that the tension between writing and talking (and not a choice between the two) defines confessional monologue as a form. Special attention is paid to the way Gray’s monologues have been published, as well as to Gray’s debt to the confessional poet Robert Lowell.Less