Volume 16 ~ Spring 2004 ~ ISSN 1543-6063

TRES REVIEW

Robert Lowell’s Beautiful Nihilism
by Jack Anders 

Lowell is an interesting case because he enjoyed massive critical success and institutional validation during his life. He also came out of a relatively privileged and well-monied background and took full advantage of that. Because of his family’s name, wealth and connections he was able to receive an excellent education. Also, when he began the movement into more explicitly autobiographical poems in Life Studies, he lavished the reader with details of his family’s spicy, gilt-edged and scandalous history, fully exploiting the high social status and profile of his pedigree and ancestors. He also was protected when he had his periodic manic breakdowns, since he had the family money and connections to get him into good hospitals and sanatoriums, and get him back into school after his crack-ups. He also had insanely fanatical and dedicated personal will and drive to be a poet, and with his manic-depressive spiraling he had access to affective zones of mental instability conducive to the craft of the lyric. According to his friends, enemies, lovers and acquaintances, he had impressive personal and physical looks and charisma, which no doubt goes far to explain his status as a popular poet. He had the tools needed in American society to instigate a feedback loop with the media and academic institutional powers-that-be so as to give rise to demand for public readings, and turn him into a public figure and player in the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late 60s; he became a friend of presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy and traveled with his primary campaign.

He is a very interesting poet because even though he was publicly successful and never had to really deal with severe isolation or poverty, he nonetheless was powerfully subversive in his language and in that respect compares favorably with marginalized and underground poets of the time.

Lowell's Collected Poems show us what a hard-working obsessive writer he was. The collection is nearly 1,200 pages long. And yet there is something almost monotonously continuous from poem to poem throughout the entire book, in terms of tone.

Robert Lowell’s poems are like a wheel. On the rising and ascendant side of the wheel is his intricate and very physical verbal music, tied into an imagistic sense similar to his good friend Elizabeth Bishop’s. On the falling and voiding side are his themes and meanings, the “what does it mean” of his poems, always dropping down into the negative and the depressed. Yet over on the other side, you can see the musical imagery of his poems lifting them back up.  So maybe you take a ride on another poem.

He is the opposite of a poet like William Stafford. Stafford’s poems have a quiet, calm, rising mystical content, a thematic inflection borrowed in large part from the Native Americans. That is the rising part of his wheel. The stepping-down, lowering, falling, declining side, for him, is in his poetry’s minimal music, its simpleness and modesty of image, dropping off finally, at the last verge of the being of one of his poems, into the banality of the totally common voice. That banal apoetic commonness of voice is the pool underneath the waterwheel of his poems.

By contrast, Lowell’s poems always spark and crackle with rich, compacted, elitist metaphorical music and texture of imagistic reference. Where Lowell’s poems start to circle back down, to give back off onto the apoetic, is in their meanings. He believes in nothing. He is a nihilist. There is a black pool of water under the turning wheel of his poems, full of despair and sprinkled with white dust of lithium.

My favorite book by Lowell is his last book, Day By Day. He wrote this book in the 1970s right before he died, and it is an interesting book formally because it comes after a long phase in which he wrote squat, one-stanza, square-shaped, 14 line “sonnets.” These were not really sonnets in the sense of obeying the rhyme schemes allowable to a classical sonnet, or its iambic pentameter rhythmic counting.  Instead, Lowell’s “sonnets” were these sort of squashed-together thick chunks of poetry, doled out one after another, each chopped off after 14 lines. He wrote and rewrote his sonnets obsessively for years, throughout the 1960s. The subject matter of the sonnets ranges far and wide, going from Lowell marching in a Vietnam War protest, to Lowell ruminating about his new lover Caroline Blackwood, to Lowell ruminating about his old lover Elizabeth Hardwick, to poems about his kids, his friends, episodes of world history, famous dictators like Stalin, literary figures like Coleridge or William Carlos Williams, contemporaries such as Randall Jarrell and Delmore Schwartz. But the squeezed-together one-stanza thick formal feeling of the sonnets kills them. They have single images and lines of great interest but very rarely will a whole sonnet hold together and feel OK as a poem.  The sonnets lack white space, breathing room.  He originally published collections of his sonnets in volumes he called “Notebook” and one of the tortured antinomies of these poems is that on the one hand, it was as if he wanted an offhand, casual, notebook feel to his writing -- a form into which he could pour anything and everything -- but on the other hand, the form he ostensibly chose about the least offhanded form in poetry -- the sonnet.  If you compare Lowell’s sonnets to Ted Berrigan’s sonnets, which were historically contemporaneous, you will see that Berrigan’s sonnets work better, because Berrigan is more funny and irreverent and really messes around with the sonnet form. Lowell, who was writing at the same time but was a generation older, and who was an academic square compared to Berrigan the hippie, was too humorless and too formalist to really play with and deconstruct the form as Berrigan did.

The editing of the sonnets in Lowell’s Collected Poems is one of the little controversies surrouding this new book, because the editor (another old friend of Lowell’s), Frank Bidart, was forced to pick and choose among the various versions of the sonnets that Lowell published during his lifetime, as Bidart assembled the Collected Poems. The Collected Poems is a very thick book, and basically if Bidart had tried to include all the various versions of the sonnets as Lowell had published them, Bidart would have had to split the Collected Poems into two volumes. During the 1960s, first Lowell published some sonnets as Notebook, then as a different Notebook, then as a book called History, then another book called The Dolphin . . . there was a lot of re-use and overlap among these books.  (His book Notebook 1967-68 was enlarged for a second printing the year it was published, then enlarged again as Notebook (1970) and later reorganized as History (1973)).  To make matters worse, when Lowell re-used a sonnet in two different books, he’d make changes, raising the question of which version do you choose – or do you put in both? In fact, elsewhere in Collected Poems you will come across up to three or four versions of certain poems, and these can be very fascinating to read, as they show just how meticulous and radical Lowell was as a reviser of his own poems.

Lowell suffered from mental illness for all his life, and he was also a very willful, stubborn, aristocratic person who brought a lot of his troubles on himself.  He drank and smoked all the time, philandered and stressed himself out, and this did not help his body resist the periodic onslaughts of his mental illness, which was a form of manic-depression. Lowell was a tall, athletic guy, and when he got manic he would get violent and would push and shove friends around and get in fights. He was once said to have dangled his conservative Southern mentor Allen Tate out of a window during a manic phase. He also broke his first wife Jean Stafford’s nose twice – once during a brawl, and the second time when he crashed the car they were driving in. Through all of this he was relatively protected in socioeconomic terms by the wealth and prestige of his family, the Lowells of Boston – they disliked his interest in poetry but looked after him and made sure he got access to the best hospitals when he went crazy and the best schools when he got sane again. He was considered handsome, smart and charismatic, and he made his way socially and professionally in the culture of American English Departments that was just then, in the late 40s and through the 1950s, starting to flourish.

There is a letter from Elizabeth Bishop to Lowell in which she complains that because of his illustrious family background of Bostonian monied nobility, when he writes about his ancestors it always seems resonant and important, whereas when she tries to write about her own family background it just doesn’t have the same cachet.  I think there is some truth to Bishop’s observation, although Lowell’s editor Frank Bidart disputes it in an interview, saying

You know, Elizabeth Bishop, who is a great poet and perhaps the friend that Lowell most loved, is quite wrong on this issue. She implies in a famous letter to him that all he needs to do is "put down the names"—of his famous ancestors and relatives—and the poem has a kind of authority. But that's just not true. Naming family members who have names with historical resonance is simply one of the parameters Lowell faced in trying to write a poem—as much an aesthetic problem as an aesthetic opportunity. The fact is there are lots and lots of people named Lowell in the world who do not make good poems.

In any event, the grandiosity of Lowell’s family past matched well with the grandiose aspect of his manic-depressive intervals. During the manic phase he would start doing stuff like ranting on about Hitler or Napoleon or comparing himself with Jesus. He was fascinated with power and fame and the amorality and evil of power and you can see that in the subject matter of his poems; for instance consider some of the titles of his sonnets: “Attila, Hitler;” “Alexander;” “Mohammed;” “Rembrandt;” “Napoleon;” “Abraham Lincoln;” “Stalin.” He played the game of fame and power.  It meant something to him. It was part of the reason why his poems were successful. Indeed that statement is a tautology. Fame and power is always the reason why poems are successful. By “successful” I mean, claiming and obtaining mindspace in the readers, the figure of the poet branding itself across the socioeconomic of literary history and community just surely as Ford in cars or Coke in soft drinks. Robert Lowell was as big a name in his time (1950s-1970s) as Robert Frost or T.S. Eliot before him. Fame is colossally empty because fame is historical and history is subject to the flux principle of Heraclitus:  everything that is, historically, will be replaced, completely, by new historical events:  whoever has fame will be absolutely replaced by someone new.  Literary critics like Harold Bloom try to defuse the advance of history and the total flux inherent in it by gathering together groups and lists of favorite heavy-hitter poets to make up the Pantheon, the Greats, the One Hundred Best. But this is a temporary holding action. It is artificial and an illusion. There are both too many and too few Greats to ever make up a list of Greats. The lesson of history is that just as all roses must perish, so too must all quintessence of roses. The essential rose must also vanish. The painting of a rose must also go.  There is no way to save anything.  Anything that is, will eventually go to void.  All eventually gets swept away, dissolved, replaced. This is the Wheel. This is how it works. Sappho was the best poetess of Greece. There are two or so complete poems of hers left, plus a bunch of fragments. The one hundred best poets of Mayan have vanished. Someday Shakespeare will vanish. Already his so-called perpetual words creep off into slow illegibility like an old photo going yellowy-gray; his English ever so slowly creeps off and recedes from being readable, into becoming something that must be translated, like Beowulf before him. In Shakespeare’s time, Chaucer was Shakespeare. Today, Chaucer must be read with aid of a dictionary.  Today’s Middle English becomes tomorrow’s Old English. 

From Lowell’s early book Lord Weary’s Castle, we can see his distinctive ability with verbal music and imagery. Consider this phrase:

. . . the Hotel

De Ville, where braced pig-iron dragons grip

the blizzard to their rigor mortis.

(The Exile’s Return)

The music is thick, rich, with its repetitions and variations off of a hard “g” and soft “i.” The thick verbal music has a felt effect of virtually fusing the words, and the images they carry, together -- almost a stained-glass feeling. Notice how the reference to the “Hotel De Ville” conveys a slightly aristocratic feeling, and how the content, or the thematic or underlying emotional feeling even in this brief passage is rather negative – wintry.  There is integrity to Lowell’s text in the sense that viewed at a macro or micro level, we detect the same basic texture – a holographic unity, if you will.

In another early poem, we see the themes of nihilism and personalism manifest:

All discussions

End in the mud-flat detritus of death.

My heart, beat faster, faster.

. . .

Black Mud, a name to conjure with: O mud

For watermelons gutted to the crust . . .  

(Colloquy in Black Rock) 

Compare this tonality to Walt Whitman and you get a sense of Lowell’s negativity. There is not a single one of Lowell’s poems where he really seems happy. Yet when we look at photos of Lowell he often is smiling. It is as if, among the characteristic daily retinue of moods that made up his personality, it was only at the negative moods that he entered poetry. This is peculiar, yet it is very often the case among poets, for poetry is the scholar’s art, in which thought is the content, and thought is knowledge, and knowledge is sorrow. But when we look at a poet like Whitman we see an underlying tonality which seems to never really be sad, in the same way that Lowell seems to never really be happy. Even when Whitman is discussing a prostitute or death and rot or firsthand experiences sitting at the bedsides of dying soldiers in his Civil War poems, there seems to be an underlying sun, as it were, just as with Lowell there’s always an underlying moon.

The similarity between Lowell and Whitman is that with both poets, the physical viscerality of their imagery, the physicality of their word-music, is undeniable. It is fascinating to compare Lowell to various other major poets because you start to get a sense of the extreme narrowness and limitation of any poet’s style. Happy love poem? Anywhere but Lowell. Morbid sad poem? Anywhere but Cummings. Personal confessional poem? Anywhere but Ashbery. Surrealist witty poem? Anywhere but Jeffers.  Every single one of Lowell’s poems has some sort of scary negative run-in with death in it.

A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket –

The sea was still breaking violently and night

Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,

When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light

Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,

He grappled at the net

With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs:

The corpse was bloodless, a blotch of reds and whites,

Its open, staring eyes . . .  

(The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket)

The verbal richness and thickness of music is undeniable. The images are described in crazy detail, overwrought, mannerist. The eye is fascinated by the dead thing. One thinks of the blue corpse grappling at the back of Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa” painting: it was said that he went and examined actual corpses as he researched for his painting. Likewise, there is a sense of fanatic devotion to the impacted thickness of verbal texture, pressed-together richness of imagery, in Lowell’s poetic text: it is never light or airy. It is the opposite, say, of the light airy somewhat abstract quality of Shelley’s lyrics, or of Rilke’s poems in French.

Lowell is honest to his sense of dissatisfaction and emptiness. He is able to praise and invoke the good things in life, for example the “sun of freedom” in the following excerpt, but not as someone who comes from the sun or dwells in it like Whitman or Rumi: Lowell invokes it as something that is separate from him:

We watch the logs fall. Fire once gone,

we’re done for: we escape the sun,

rising and setting, a red coal,

until it cinders like the soul.

Great ash and sun of freedom, give

us this day the warmth to live,    

and face the household fire. We turn

our backs, and feel the whiskey burn.

(Near the Ocean)

As is well known, Lowell taught and inspired fellow American confessional poets John Berryman, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Berryman grew up with Lowell and their relationship was as brothers in the art, although for a long time, until the public success of the Dream Songs, Berryman felt himself to dwell in Lowell’s shadow. Sexton and Plath were from the next generation, importing confessional devices Lowell had experimented with in his groundbreaking book Life Studies and adopting them over into the (at least at that time, the 60s) more psychically difficult and perilous terrain of a woman’s self. Lowell survived till age 60, when he died of a heart attack in the back of a cab on September 12, 1977 as he rode to see his old wife Elizabeth Hardwick while clutching in his hands a painted portrait of his new wife Caroline Blackwood; he looked his age, and his mental and physical health was worn down by years of really bad manic-depressive episodes, coupled with lots of booze and smokes (said to be four packs a day).

As we all know, Sexton and Plath committed suicide. For Lowell, for his experiments with personal and autobiographical stylings in poems to be called “confessional” made sense for at least a couple reasons: He was early on a hardcore Roman Catholic; and for him, writing about oneself was writing about pain and guilt. But as Frank O’Hara implicitly noted by the funny tenor of his essay, On Personism, not all self-exploration in poetry has to be dark and deadly. Indeed, think of Whitman: Song of Myself.  Whitman and O’Hara show us that a personal poem does not have to be painful and guilty.  The self is as various as the world, and it is not necessarily the case that poetic exploration of the self must be descent into a cave. It has a lot to do with personal style and the idiosyncrasy of individual personality. Billy Collins writes personal poems, but he could not write a believably capital m Morbid poem if he tried, any better than Billy Crystal could pull off a tragic role in a movie.

In an interview, Lowell’s editor Frank Bidart indicated some of the problems with the term confessional.

             Q:        Your book puts some distance between Lowell and the idea of "confessional poetry." Lowell has always been considered a central figure in confessional poetry. What, for you, is inadequate about the term?

            There are so many things wrong with the term "confessional" that it's hard to know where to begin. The central thing wrong with it is that it doesn't acknowledge that poems are shaped works of art, a series of choices—a fiction. It implies that the poem is a kind of helpless outpouring, and proceeds from guilt towards expiation—

             Q:        And that the poem is rather beside the point—

            That the art is beside the point. That was never true of Lowell. First of all the poems are fictions that present at times invented material, or material taken from other peoples' lives. They're constructs. They're constructs in the service of telling the truth, but they do what art has always done—that is, lie to tell the truth. Lowell kept stretching the ways that a poem can be made.

. . . .

Q:        What was Lowell's own response to being called "confessional"?

            He hated the term. He always rebelled against it. It's a term that puts you in a little box, dismisses you. It implies, "I can see around this person's particular enterprise." There are traditionally very honorific meanings to the term, as in Augustine's Confessions—the rehearsal of the crucial events in the making of one's soul. But that's not what people mean when they talk about confessional poetry.

Lowell's seriousness, his appetite to ingest, to swallow the world, constantly forced him to re-imagine ways of making a poem. He'd invent one way, very powerfully, and then, as in Life Studies, totally re-imagine it. His work continued to change. Near the Ocean is another re-imagination, as are the sonnets, as is Day by Day. Very few poets are capable of again and again inventing how to make a poem from the bottom up. He's a little like Stravinsky—part of the interest in the career is seeing the changes, the logic in the changes, so that one feels implicated in the journey that this maker is on, as he moves through different possibilities for his art.

As Lowell went along, he became a master of the black-humored aphorism. It is easy to isolate aphoristic snippets from his poems with the same elegance and compressed force of a one-liner from Pascal, Weil or Nietzsche:

Surely the lives of the old

Are briefer than the young.

(Soft Wood).

A nihilist wants to live in the world as it is,

and yet gaze the everlasting hills to rubble.

(The Nihilist as Hero).

All autumn, the chafe and jar

of nuclear war;

we have talked our extinction to death.

(Fall 1961).

I cannot resilver the smudged plate.

(Hawthorne).

For a good voice hearing is a torture.

(Beethoven).

What is history? What you cannot touch.

(Mexico).

Girls will not frighten the frost from the grave.

(For John Berryman).  

This ability to convey a wise content in a short aphoristic statement links poetry and philosophy and ties into the tradition of what writers such as Stephen Mitchell, Stephen Dunn and Robert Bly call “wisdom poetry” – poetry in which the strictly musical-verbal quality of the text might be a little less important, while the content, the meaning of the text, increases in importance.  But note that with Lowell, the wisdom-meaning-content is always negative, always a downer.  That is a limitation of his poems.

Lowell did not have the luxury of a poet like Emily Dickinson or Han Shan who lived irrevocably cut off from the marketplace of poetic fame and glory. He was forced, or forced himself, to adopt the role of being a “smiling public man” like Yeats before him. He was as interested as his friend John Berryman in questions of literary celebrity, precedence and importance. He worried about his place in history. He experienced the vacuity and boredom of the interior of fame, such as many Hollywood stars and other artists have reported back to us. He had no mystical thing to cling to, in relative anonymity, like William Blake.  He was not as pure, as radical in socioeconomic positioning, as Dickinson, Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Han Shan.  I think this fact -- that Lowell was forced to, or forced himself to, play a public, poet-professional role in the heavily scarred, corrupted and Nixonized American society of the late 50s-60s-70s -- helps to account for a lot of the nihilism and despair we find in his poems.  Nor could he escape like Ginsberg into the beat/hippie vector.  His roots were too establishment and he was too old, too much of a prior generation, to really cross over into new hippie/eastern aesthetics and modalities like figures such as Joanne Kyger or Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen or Dianne di Prima. He was an establishment insider; he wore a suit. In the division of poets of the time into the “raw” (hippie, beatnik) and the “cooked” (academic), he was clearly of the cooked school.  In his form, too, he never moves all the way away from a certain non-free-verse formalism. He spent his teens and early twenties under the tutelage of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and the fugitive and agrarian groups of poets who advocated an orderly formalism of approach. Allen Tate in particular was shocked when Lowell began to get rid of fixed rhyme and meter, and thought Lowell betrayed his talent. In fact, you can see traces of rhyme and meter throughout all of Lowell’s poems; and they always have a musical/imagistic density to them that marks them apart from ordinary speech. In his poems, he is always a little bit formal, always a little bit wearing a suit.  You never see informalities like “&” or “thru” in his poems.

As an aside, there is an anecdote told by Ginsberg which helps show us one of the nicest things about Lowell, which was his earnest receptivity to poetry by many other poets coming from many different styles.  We can see that open-minded earnestness in Lowell’s Collected Prose, which includes some positive and thoughtful reviews and notes he wrote on other poets.  The Ginsberg anecdote is that Ginsberg was reported to have said that Lowell had gone to see him read “Kaddish” at Harvard in 1958.  In the middle of the reading Lowell left.  For years Ginsberg considered it a put-down. Then in 1977 he and Lowell were scheduled to do a reading together. Ginsberg had lunch with Lowell and told him about how he thought Lowell had put him down so many years ago.  Lowell told Ginsberg that he had been sitting with some academics and had been so overwhelmed by Ginsberg’s reading of “Kaddish” that Lowell started to tear up and therefore left so the other academics could not see that he was actually crying. 

During his life, his most influential book was Life Studies.  For the time (the Eisenhower 50s), it was a radical risk of a book, exposing as it did plainly autobiographical poems that reflected his own chaotic mental illness, broken marriage and religious doubt.  The poems’ power comes from the tension between their disorderly messy personal content, and their very well-ordered, crafted and controlled form.  This is the key paradox that animates the poems.  Lowell completed his manuscript for Life Studies in 1958. By this time, he had entered his early 40s.  He had been a practicing poet and scholar since his teenage years, but he had spent a long time working through his influences and coming to terms with his mood swings.  From John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate he had learned to write in a traditional controlled formalist style, somewhat impersonal, pushing autobiography to the side.  However, when Lowell came to write the poems in Life Studies, he had become obsessed with using his own life story and family history as subject matter.  With his mood swings, he had already experienced more drama than most people.  He’d suffered from mental illness and had been hospitalized for manic attacks many times.  His mental illness had caused problems in his family life. His first marriage to Jean Stafford collapsed. They both drank and he had at least one affair.  His second marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick was troubled. Also, his mental illness led him to times of religious extreme behavior.  He would tell others that he was an ardent Roman Catholic and shout and pray when he was going manic.  Lowell’s description of a self-destructive personal life was not just a pose. In his personal life he was bullying, destructive, overbearing, disheveled.  He knocked down his own father once, broke his first wife’s nose, and womanized.  In 1954, his second wife Elizabeth Hardwick described how he’d had four collapses in 4 1/2 years.  (See Beaver, Harold, Despondency and Madness, in Parnassus: Poetry in Review.  Fall/Winter 1984, Vol. 12, No. 1: 123; and Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography. Vintage Books, New York, NY).

Lowell’s poems in Life Studies reveal this tortured personal life and "confess" dark personal secrets. Yet the poems also show enormous poetic control – different from what one might expect from a drunk, manic-depressive womanizer. That is the paradox that gives such energy to his poems: while the life story he portrays is chaos and madness, the voice is controlled and crafted. His poem "Man and Wife" shows this paradox:

Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed;

the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;

in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,

abandoned, almost Dionysian.

At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,

blossoms on our magnolia ignite

the morning with their murderous five days' white.

All night I've held your hand,

as if you had

a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad

its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye

and dragged me home alive… Oh my Petite,

clearest of all God's creatures,

still all air and nerve:

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.

Man and Wife deals with a theme of personal trauma typical of the Life Studies series. The content of the poem reflects drunkenness ("outdrank" and "boiled"), a troubled marriage ("your old-fashioned tirade"), mental illness ("the kingdom of the mad"), and medication for mental illness ("Miltown" which was a tranquilizer). Yet contrasted with disorder is the order of the form. The poem reflects that he was very well read in classical poetry. The first four lines are in iambic pentameter rhyming couplets, and there is a classical allusion in "Dionysian." Also, the poem is very compressed and full of imagery and details. This reflects that Lowell was a dedicated formalist who revised so many times his original drafts rarely resembled the more finished versions. Early drafts of "Man and Wife" looks much different from the published poem. In the poem, Lowell’s music and line breaks are top notch. His imagery is clear, but leaping. This poem begins with the speaker intoxicated on tranquilizers -- he just arrived home from McLean Hospital and he’s lying in bed with his wife who is not all too enthusiastic about the situation. Thus, Lowell crafts his speaker as being in an intimate situation and openly displaying it to the reader. Lowell uses this privacy device in his poetry to gain his reader’s confidence. His speaker is vulnerable, but intelligent. He becomes a heartbreaking character. The poem is an antithetical form of the traditional aubade. The setting colored through the filter of a tranquilized and distorted speaker. The compression of language can be seen in the opening lines. The sun is described as an Indian savage who "dyes red" the speaker and his wife upon its rising. Conventional sunrises connote birth, but this dawn has tainted tones that are heightened by the connotations of "war" and the pun on "dye," intensifying the coming death of the couple’s relationship. In the third line of the poem the speaker describes the bed-posts as shining, which is ironic because it is the only inert object receiving the sun’s life-giving qualities. The phrase, "in broad daylight," seems a little dead compared to the rest of the language in the poem’s opening and maybe a tad redundant and cliché, but the imagery revives provocatively with "almost Dionysian," suggesting a tonal complexity of smothered eroticism. The speaker refers to his wife facing "the kingdom of the mad," which is how Lowell described his periodic visits to McLean Hospital. In summary, the poem unites chaotic content and formal control.

The same paradox occurs in his poem Skunk Hour.  The poem is dedicated to Elizabeth Bishop, who was famous for her careful craft. The opening stanzas of the poem show detailed imagery and a mix of rhyme and free verse. These stanzas describe a coastal landscape that is somewhat negative. There are references to an heiress in her "dotage" (senility); to houses that are "eyesores;" to how the "season’s ill;" to how a shop owner feels that "there is no money in his work." By the time the reader reaches the key stanzas that describe the speaker’s own chaotic life situation, thus, the poem has carefully used craft to give the reader a sense of an uneasy landscape. In the stanza in which Lowell makes his most blatant confession of chaos – "my mind’s not right" – he uses a rhyme scheme that governs every line:

One dark night

my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;

I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down

they lay together hull to hull

where the graveyard shelves on the town....

My mind's not right.

The rhyme scheme for this stanza is a/b/c/b/c/a. By combining the expression of personal depression and disorder with tight poetic form, Lowell maximizes the power of his poem. Thus, we can see that Lowell’s poetry is indeed "confessional" since it confesses tormented personal experiences -- however, close reading shows that his poetry is more difficult and paradoxical than one might expect.  His poems chart a personal life that is falling apart – yet the poems themselves are remarkably crafted. Perhaps Lowell found in poetry a way to organize himself and redeem his life experience to compensate for his problems with organizing his life outside of poetry.

One can make the argument that someone who is too emotionally balanced, stable, moderate and calm will never write a poem. Or at least, will never write a certain kind of poem. Consider Wordsworth’s formulation as the poem coming about as a result of a powerful emotion recollected in tranquility. Or consider Larkin’s description of the process of poetic composition as beginning “when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it.” (quoted at pp. 198-99, Stephen Dobyns, Best Words, Best Order). Certainly with Lowell one gets a sense that the emotional distortions, or emotional rises-and-falls, associated with his affective (mood) disorder, are deeply related to why he writes poems. I have tried to indicate the sense of the thick intensity of Lowell’s word-music; I believe that sense of his text might relate to the intensity of his manic attacks. Randall Jarrell described the sense of his text in a similar manner:

The coiling violence of the rhetoric, the harsh and stubborn intensity that accompanies all its verbs and verbals, the clustered stresses learned from accentual verse, come from a man contracting every muscle, grinding his teeth together till his shut eyes ache.

(Jarrell, Poetry & The Age, p. 193). 

The key here is that there is richness and life in the physical structuring of the words in the poem, in the handling of the words and word-sounds just as a painter handles dollops of color -- without regard to what the words mean -- in other words, despite the persistent monotone negativity of Lowell’s meaning, theme, content, there is a curiously counterbalancing active energy at the level of word-craft, word-music. Again from Jarrell:

The degree of intensity of his poems is equaled by their degree of organization. Inside its elaborate stanzas the poem is put together like a mosaic: the shifts of movement, the varied pauses, the alternation in the length of sentences, and the counterpoint between lines and sentences are the outer form of a subject matter that has been given a dramatic, dialectical internal organization; and it is hard to exaggerate the strength and life, the constant richness and surprise of metaphor and sound and motion, of the language itself.

(Jarrell, p. 195). 

Consider, for example, the progression of this late poem by Lowell, from its uncharacteristically upbeat opening to its completely characteristic depressing end:

It’s amazing

the day is still here

like lightning on an open field,

terra firma and transient

swimming  in variation,

fresh as when man first broke

like the crocus all over the earth.

From a train, we saw cows

strung out on a hill

at differing heights,

one sex, one herd,

replicas in hierarchy –

the sun had turned

them noonday bright.

They were child’s daubs in a book

I read before I could read.

They fly by like a train window:

flash-in-the-pan moments

of the Great Day,

the dies illa,

when we lived momently

together forever

in love with our nature –

as if in the end,

in the marriage with nothingness,

we could ever escape

being absolutely safe.  

(The Day)

The poem shows all the structural forces identified by Jarrell. There are fresh little surprises occurring line by line, strong interspersed metaphors, and a gradual build-up of an organizing situation (a passing view from a train) which itself is a metaphor for an overall depressive theme (the transience of life). It is these verbal and structural virtues of Lowell’s poems -- the cunning of Lowell as craftsman – that hold our interest long after the monotonous sublime of his negative dialectics loses its force.

The critic Sven Birkerts has an interesting spin on Lowell and the other tortured doomed poets of his generation including Plath (suicide), Sexton (suicide), Berryman (suicide), Jarrell (probable suicide), Schwartz (alcoholic) and Roethke (alcoholic). “These poets were the last outriders of a spent ideology – Romanticism” says Birkerts. (The Electric Life, p. 173). “This is where their heroic aura comes from.” I can see some sense in this assertion when we examine their biographies (the very fact that they all had bios written about them is part of the phenomenon) and look at how these poets were tied into academic and publishing politics and the whole fame game. Fame, in american society, is related to enshrinement of the individual and the self. Yet the self is the very thing most mercilessly destroyed by time. Isn’t that a reason why mystics from all traditions speak of renouncing the self, or dissolving into a self that goes beyond one particular person? Isn’t “selflessness” a theme that runs throughout the mystic traditions? Yet if you look at the industry of fame in America, it is based on glorification and enshrinement of individual selves as icons, rather like gold-plated Egyptian pharaohs. There is definitely a self-absorption, perhaps a selfishness, that runs through Lowell’s poems. This informs the critique of Birkerts and also of Dobyns, who writes:

Poets such as John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell were . . . influenced by this sense of the poet as hero. That they suffered and wrote fine poems is not to argue the theory. The main reason this sense of self damages the poet is that it violates the poet’s relationship with audience. Instead of the poet and audience being in the same boat, the attitude of the poet as hero creates a situation where the poet is in a special boat. it keeps the poet from being the reader’s representative and lessens the poem’s chance to create a sense of community. It also puts little emphasis on empathy – we, as readers, become receivers, witnesses, onlookers. We don’t join, we accept and stand in awe. Although there are different degrees of this position, even in the best poems of Lowell and Berryman we may feel that the poets want the attention on themselves and their troubles.

(Dobyns, p. 205) 

One way to think about it is that the dramatic and tragic interest of conflict and of the individual self in places of peril, for the confessional poets, is transferred away from the fictional, and over into the actual day to day lives of the poets. Whereas, in a writer such as Sophocles, or Shakespeare, the drama and tragedy do not concern the author’s own self and life, but rather, are transposed over onto fictional characters. When Shakespeare writes King Lear, we do not read it as being autobiographical. However, with Lowell, it all does seem to come back to one specific self, his – which means that there is a sense in which he has put himself into a place of more danger or peril than someone like Shakespeare or Sophocles put themselves. It is arguably as if one crucial fictive interval has been lost in the artistic process. One imaginative interval has been sacrificed. When a novelist like Thomas Pynchon writes about a character named Slothrop whose hard-ons presage V-2 attacks on London during World War II, we do not get the sense that the author, Pynchon, is writing about something that literally happened to him. He, as artist, is speaking via an imaginative filter, or a mask – and he does not lose dramatic force or artistic interest by doing so, because the essence of art is all about imagination, masks. But for writers like Lowell or Plath, the drama is always personal and the character is always the writer’s own self. I wonder if this is something endemic to all lyric poetry throughout the ages, or rather, just one alternative mode of poetry, which one may move away from. My guess is that it is and it isn’t -- or rather, that using the autobiographical self as subject matter is simply one way of writing that has always constituted only one way of making poems. If we wanted to, we could say that Sappho was a confessional back in 500 B.C. And poets as recent as John Ashbery or Rae Armantrout write lyric poems without seeming to glorify or lacerate their own self. Perhaps one reason why Lowell and the other confessionals dominated the poetry media landscape during their time was because american pop culture has always had a fascination with the glorified/lacerated self as fame-entity. In any event, it is important to keep in mind that the confessional method is only one way to do it.

When you read Elizabeth Bishop’s letters to Lowell in her One Art (Collected Letters), you see Lowell in an entirely different light. You see him much more as a person:

I’ve read through the book again and really, it is very fine. The older poems are good in the old way and the new poems are good in a new way, and altogether they are (the new ones) solid, real, intensely interesting, honest – and very interesting metrically. I think you should feel very proud of the whole effort – and at the same time all the new ones have a strangely modest tone that I like, too – because they are all about yourself and yet do not sound conceited!

(Letter of 10/30/58, p. 364).  

Notwithstanding the humanization of Lowell as a vulnerable individual that we glimpse when we see him through Bishop’s eyes, the fact remains that

Robert Lowell was fascinated by power and deliberately cultivated a sort of brassy ennobled fame-aura for himself, a cult of celebrity, acolytes.  The sense of power helps to reduce the heartbroken sense in life. However the heartbroken sense seems real and the power sense seems fake. By that I mean that the semblances, seemings, appearances, images of power all have something ludicrous about them. They are extension of a purported infinite into a zone, here, which is only finite. The comment “only finite” is negative. It only occurs as a negative reaction, or corrective, to or against the linguistic assertion of power. If you take away the power you take away the negative reaction to it too. Yet Lowell could not do that. He did not believe in Tao, or God, or the Way. He was essentially a nihilist – like Larkin: a giant negative reaction against power. Yet what else could there be but power? Wasn’t it Nietzsche himself who said the will to power was foremost? These kinds of questions afflicted Lowell and his contemporary over in England, Philip Larkin.

Lowell’s obsession with power led him to master a style of public, historically and politically charged poetry that complemented the more intimate personal statements of his confessional verse.  Consider the outward, historically charged manner of his poem For the Union Dead:   

The old South Boston Aquarium stands

in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.

The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.

The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;

my hand tingled

to burst the bubbles,

drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still

for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom

of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,

I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,

yellow dinosaur steam shovels were grunting

as they cropped up tons of mush and grass

to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking lots luxuriate like civic

sand piles in the heart of Boston.

A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin-colored girders

braces the tingling Statehouse, shaking

over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw

and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry

on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,

propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,

half the regiment was dead;

at the dedication,

William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

The monument sticks like a fishbone

in the city's throat.

Its colonel is as lean

as a compass needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,

a greyhound's gentle tautness;

he seems to wince at pleasure

and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds. He rejoices in man's lovely,

peculiar power to choose life and die—

when he leads his black soldiers to death,

he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small-town New England greens,

the old white churches hold their air

of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags

quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier

grow slimmer and younger each year—

wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets,

and muse through their sideburns.

Shaw's father wanted no monument

except the ditch,

where his son's body was thrown

and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.

There are no statues for the last war here;

on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph

showed Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, "the Rock of Ages,"

that survived the blast. Space is nearer.

When I crouch to my television set,

the drained faces of Negro school children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw

is riding on his bubble,

he waits

for the blessed break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,

giant finned cars nose forward like fish;

a savage servility

slides by on grease.  

Power corrupts: we all know that statement. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” By corruption we mean a decay of the image. Corruption is death is decay is loss is dying, is the Zen wheel balance of things, the revolving mandala, the European medieval Wheel of Fortune with the prince on top and the pauper at the bottom. The base. The slave is at the base. The heartbroken one is nearer the essential.

“The base is full of broken things, like the bones of the foot.” These words came to me in a dream. Did words come to Lowell in dreams? I wonder. He was awfully intentional.

Elizabeth Bishop liked Lowell. So we know from that he was not all bad. Indeed, he was an incredible master, but with a blasted aspect to his landscapes. He was haunted by death. Death is the final deconstructor of power. We all die the same. Death is the leveler. I was going to say “death is the great leveler” but there is no need to call it “great.” The more vociferously one must posit terms of death, the more endemic power is to your mind. The more I am able to renounce, or just slip out from under, terms of power (like a little fish slipping through the screen-holes of a fishing net), likewise the more than terms, descriptors of death disappear. The terms are opposites. They need each other to survive. In the genesis of word-etymologies, in the evolutionary symbiosis of words, they are strictly codependent. Prince at the top, pauper at the bottom.

When I read Lowell’s later poems, I wonder if his experience of American popularity and fame as a poet worsened his nihilism.  I believe that it did.  Any attainment becomes a demythologization of what desire stood for.  The basic flatness, solitude, and unverified or unvalidated nature of individual consciousness is reinforced by any attainment that occurs.  While you had not yet attained what you hoped for, the hoped-for thing stood off, blued in the distance, misty, with room in it for infiltrations of otherness.  But when you attain that which you hoped for and realize that your basic existential situation is just the same as it was before, that is when you start to realize that infinity swirls right under your skin-surface of psyche – all you are is layers of appearances – not just the layers of your skin, and nerves, and bones, but the intermixtures of your moods, hopes, thoughts and emotions – your very self is a cluster of appearances, layers, of no actual depth.

Consider the tragic emptiness of this late poem of his, self-elegizing in its title, Epilogue:

Those blessed structures, plot and

rhyme–

why are they no help to me now

I want to make

something imagined, not recalled?

I hear the noise of my own voice:

The painter's vision is not a lens,

it trembles to caress the light.

But sometimes everything I write

with the threadbare art of my eye

seems a snapshot,

lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,

heightened from life,

yet paralyzed by fact.

All's misalliance.

Yet why not say what happened?

Pray for the grace of accuracy

Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination

stealing like the tide across a map

to his girl solid with yearning.

We are poor passing facts,

warned by that to give

each figure in the photograph

his living name.

This poem comes from his last and to me his best book, Day by Day (1977).  In this book, Lowell abandoned the sonnet form he had obsessed himself with for years, and returned to unrhymed, laconic free verse. His subject matter once again was personal, as opposed to the public events and famous people in History.  Harvard professor Helen Vendler, a friend of his in his last years, described his style as having arrived at the domestic, in all its dailiness and anguish, using language now more casual and intimate than before, carried along by a restrained realism. 

As noted, Lowell suffered from a clear case of manic depression/bipolar during his life. He exhibited classic symptoms, including wild mood swings, delusional manic phases, and addiction to drugs and alcohol as an attempt to self-medicate.  He had full-fledged, stark raving manic episodes; he was regularly hospitalized during his attacks.  

Lowell’s mental illness reflects a larger trend among poets and writers.  One study by Nancy C. Andreason, a psychiatrist at the University of Iowa, specifically sought to evaluate the link between bipolar disorder and writers. For 15 years she collected data on a group of 30 writers; by the time she published her article, 43% of the writers were diagnosed with manic depression, as opposed to 10% of the control group. Two of the 30 writers in the sample group had committed suicide.

We know from modern medical science that a link between mental illness/mood disorder and poetry exists. Was this also the case in the past?  It seems so.  We see evidence of it in numerous historical writers. Robert Burns described anhedonia (the inability to experience pleasure from normal life experiences) when he wrote, "Day follows night, and night comes after day, only to curse him with life which gives him no pleasure."   William Cowper, a poet from the 1700s, describes his recurrent severe depression to be a feeling that "a thick fog envelops every thing, and at the same time it freezes intensely."

Recall that the cycle is manic-depression, not just depression. We see recitations throughout poetic history of the manic phase – impulsiveness, sudden urges and speeding thoughts. Theodore Roethke wrote:

Suddenly I knew how to enter into the life of everything around me... All of a sudden I knew what it felt like to be a lion. I went into the diner and said to the counter-man, ‘Bring me a steak. Don’t cook it. Just bring it.’ So he brought me this raw steak and I started eating it.

We start to see a link between the manic phase and poetic/literary output as we read such descriptions. Consider Virginia Woolf, who finished her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1913 but did not see it published until two years later because of a severe breakdown

I married, and then my brains went up in a shower of fireworks. As an experience, madness is terrific . . . and not to be sniffed at, and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets as sanity does.

It may be that during the depressive phase of the poet’s mood cycle, the force of depression acts to make the poet doubt and critique himself, his life, and the world: this process of sadness and doubt during the low part of the mood cycle may help the poet to break out of normal modes of thinking, normal clichés of thought, and normal patterns of signifier-signified relationship in his language. The negative, destructive force of depression acts to disrupt and throw into question normal ways of seeing things and normal ways of using words.  Then, during the up phase, the manic swing, the poet has bursts of energy, conviction, hope, faith and insight – he sees things, he writes them down.

Thus, the poetic process is a process of emotional poles or antinomies.  Lowell once said that “a poem needs to include a man's contradictions.”  He also remarked once that “What I write always comes out of the pressure of some inner concern, temptation or obsessive puzzle . . . All my poems are written for catharsis; none can heal melancholia or arthritis.”  Thus it would appear that he was well aware of the linkage between his mood swings and his writing.

According to Kay Jamison, manic-depressive illness and creative accomplishment share these features:  ability to function well on a few hours of sleep; focus needed to work intensively; bold and restless attitudes; ability to experience a profound depth and variety of emotions.  She notes that the manic-depressive temperament is, in a biological sense, an alert, sensitive system that reacts strongly and swiftly.  But assuming that  mood disorders act