“What am I missing,” a friend asked of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, encountering it in a graduate seminar on modern poetry. He knew I admired Lowell and found himself disappointed at how narrow it all seemed. Some would respond that the grandeur of Lowell’s earliest poetry, the stuff of “The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket” and “Jonathan Edwards and the Spider,” dwindled into the 1950s, in poems that were often about dwindled lives and their dwindling remains.

The best expression of frustration at Lowell’s trajectory comes from his contemporary, the British poet-critic and expatriate Donald Davie:

Now that we have Life Studies as a whole, and find them full throughout of the names of relatives and personal friends, our first reaction is to see in this, as in early Auden, a damning confusion in the poet’s mind between his public role as a poet and his private life, a spurious vitality injected into the first from a coy exhibitionism about the second…In fact, however, in Lowell’s strangely touching, jagged and painful poems about his parents and grandparents and uncles, it is precisely their being Lowells or Starks or Winslows which saves them and makes them public documents. For it seems true that to be born into one of these Boston mandarin families is to find one’s self with a public role willy-nilly, from birth. ‘The Rahvs,’ however remain as much of an embarrassment as ever; and mostly, when the poet treats of intimate affairs like marriage, his child or children, and his spells of mental illness, I am not so sure as I should like to be that I’m not peeping through keyholes. (Davie, 72-3)

Davie objects to Lowell’s conflation of the private and the public, not in the fashion of Whitman, who never forgot to imagine that he had a public to address, but in the fashion of a poet who finds his private affairs have inherent public significance—the significance of a poem that will be read by strangers. For Davie, this is an extension of the Romantic expulsion of rhetoric from poetry, where rhetoric is the public posture of the private self.

Davie is no less ambivalent about Lowell’s poetry of the mid-1960s to early 1970s, an era in which he wrote relentlessly in a rough (and roughed up) sonnet form, culminating in the notorious sequence, The Dolphin, which opened Lowell to censure even from close friends, for the poems it contained that he composed from direct quotations from private letters his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick had written him. But Davie’s ambivalence about The Dolphin is ultimately more generous with praise on the place of private matter in poetry than are his remarks on Life Studies:

Fortunately, by the time he finished The Dolphin—perhaps before he started it, certainly by the time he passed it for publication—Lowell had reached these conclusions for himself. He has had the grace to allow that the poems that present themselves as literal transcripts of letters and phone calls may be nothing of the kind (I am devoutly glad to hear it, and over-ready to believe him); he has by implication taken the side of the arch-rhetorician Yeats: and he has ‘plotted’ the book in an acceptable public sense, by way of a cluster of dominant images signalized by the title—images of fishnets, stirred mud, eels, salmon-trout (Davie, 81).

Whereas most other readers felt that in The Dolphin, they were being asked to peer through keyholes (to borrow Davie’s phrase from his review of Life Studies) into rooms that are not even the poet’s own, Davie believes the symbolic plotting transforms the poetry into something else—something that has public stature independent of the lives it (callously, Davie might admit) draws upon. It does not merely, Davie might say, expose to public view those private matters that can never be acceptably public; it converts them to public materials. I do not share Davie’s view, but I find it illuminating for understanding what he feels Life Studies does not do: it does not take the proper names, places, and objects from the spaces of private life, past and present, and endow them with a significance that can maintain itself in the public space of poetry. For Davie, the “Rahvs” is absurd (“an embarrassment”) because it dissolves in the context of the poem, whereas at least “Winslow” and “Lowell” have enough historical stature to hold together.

In his criticism, Davie has the right stick by the wrong end. He correctly judges the nature of the challenge that Lowell faces, the forces that the poems are up against, but he does not do justice to how Lowell builds those forces into the design of the poem, making of the poetry an arena in which they are imagined, rather than making poems inertly subject to their pressure.

Lowell is the consummate poet of recovery, and his recovery begins—but does not need to end—at home. Robert Lowell, whose life demanded frequent periods of recovery, was always, even before the manias and depressions that came to define him in the public era, a poet of recovery: the poems are themselves efforts at recovering what would otherwise be lost and wasted from the wreckage of the past. Hemmed in, helpless, where is the freedom to even imagine a future? Often, yes, this past and this present are the debris of private collisions, but they are not only that, since what is being recovered in private is the possibility of a life that could be publicly lived, concurrent to the life that could have a future. Even where future and public are out of view, their possibility presses on the poem, sometimes as a source of anxiety, at other times motivation.

What we find in the poems of Life Studies is not so much an accrual of private images and objects as an accrual of images and objects that have become private, having lost their public meaning; the collection is not about private life but about public life that has been rendered private by disuse, forgetfulness, and the dissolution of history. The faded musk of a public life remains. Here is the third section from “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow”:

Up in the air
by the lakeview window in the billiards-room,
lurid in the doldrums of the sunset hour,
my Great Aunt Sarah
was learning Samson and Delilah.
She thundered on the keyboard of her dummy piano,
with gauze curtains like a boudoir table,
accordionlike yet soundless.
It had been bought to spare the nerves
of my Grandmother,
tone-deaf, quick as a cricket,
now needing a fourth for “Auction,”
and casting a thirsty eye
on Aunt Sarah, risen like the phoenix
from her bed of troublesome snacks and Tauchnitz classics.

Forty years earlier,
twenty, auburn headed,
grasshopper notes of genius!
Family gossip says Aunt Sarah
tilted her archaic Athenian nose
and jilted an Astor.
Each morning she practiced
on the grand piano at Symphony Hall,
deathlike in the off-season summer—
its naked Greek statues draped with purple
like the saints in Holy Week....
On the recital day, she failed to appear.

This is, in Davie’s words, “an impressive example of the merely anecdotal purged and lifted to a new power” (Davie, 76). It is not lifted by what Davie finds in The Dolphin, a Yeatsian plotting of symbols discerned in the raw materials of experience. Instead, it is lifted, like an airplane, by the upward thrust generated by absence: the public reality that Aunt Sarah never possessed. Christopher Ricks, in an essay on the anti-pun and violence in Lowell’s poetry, writes of “she thundered on the keyboard of her dummy piano”: this thunders on neither a real piano nor a dummy one, and itself constitutes a strange art of the shadowily unimaginable or inaudible. The unreality is sometimes an evocation of an absent reality, imaginable but not here fully imagined” (Ricks, 268). She “rises like the phoenix” from her bed not of ashes but of the waste of a life: “her troublesome snacks and Tauschnitz classics.” “Like a phoenix” is mocking and playful, but in the lines of the poem she does rise to the grandeur of the life she did not lead. The second stanza intensifies the suggestions of civic life—Athenian, Astor, Symphony Hall, saints in Holy Weeks—only to culminate in “she failed to appear.” But it is her failure to appear on the stage of Symphony Hall that occasions her taking the appearance she does in Lowell’s poem.

In this, she reveals an operation we find time and again in Lowell, especially in the poems of Life Studies and the subsequent collections until his death: how from the disappearance of a life into a compromised privacy, sustained and surrounded by the wreckage of objects and memories that once had public status, a self can be recovered that regains the potential of public significance. The poems do not merely represent this process, but they participate in it. When Davie objects to Lowell’s mention of his friends “the Rahvs,” he misses what it is that Lowell is attempting: the recovery of a public voice, the recovery of a self that is not reduced to the profound privacy of a mental illness that severs self from self.

In even the earliest religious poetry of Lord Weary’s Castle, Lowell was fascinated by the dissolution of the self, albeit in spiritual terms. In Life Studies, the by-then-famous Lowell, having left his Catholicism behind, and having suffered mental collapse, becomes preoccupied—in a preoccupation that will last for the remainder of his career—with the erosive pressure of historical time on a single life. Even where the poems seem to be accounts of especially personal recollections, they are constituted by relics discarded by a process of change that exceeds the personal.

Here are the final lines of “My Last Afternoon with my Uncle Devereux Winslow”:

My Uncle was dying at twenty-nine.
“You are behaving like children,”
said my Grandfather,
when my Uncle and Aunt left their three baby daughters,
and sailed for Europe on a last honeymoon ...
I cowered in terror.
I wasn’t a child at all—
unseen and all-seeing, I was Agrippina
in the Golden House of Nero....

Near me was the white measuring-door
my Grandfather had penciled with my Uncle’s heights.
In 1911, he had stopped growing at just six feet.

While I sat on the tiles,
and dug at the anchor on my sailor blouse,
Uncle Devereux stood behind me.
He was as brushed as Bayard, our riding horse.
His face was putty.
His blue coat and white trousers
grew sharper and straighter.
His coat was a blue jay’s tail,
his trousers were solid cream from the top of the bottle.
He was animated, hierarchical,
like a ginger snap man in a clothes-press.
He was dying of the incurable Hodgkin’s disease....

My hands were warm, then cool, on the piles
of earth and lime,
a black pile and a white pile....
Come winter,
Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color.

In his memory of Devereux approaching his final days, Lowell recovers something that is distinctly impersonal in his existence. He is not transformed into a different version of himself but decomposed into elements that exist apart from who he is: “he was as brushed as Bayard”; “his face was putty”; “grew sharper and straighter”; “he was animated, hierarchical.” The predicates float above his uncle’s life. There is more Matisse or Picasso than Dutch Master in this life study. What we see in the various aspects of his uncle are abstracted aspects of what is potentially any human life. As his uncle is released into a span of time measured by cycles of season growth, these aspects are drawn out and separated; Lowell suggests how the close of a life, constricted into the narrowed straits of privacy, can bring into clarity those elements of experience that are common across lives.

What Lowell recovers from the endings and extinctions that occasion his poems is not, in T.S. Eliot’s words “fragments shored against my ruins,” but is instead an underlying unity of existence; the poems sometimes barely hold together, but to the extent that they do hold, it is a testimony to a public structure of life discernible in the remnants of lives reduced to a compromised private status. When he writes “I was Agrippina | In the Golden House of Nero,” he is winking at the disproportionate fantasies of his youth that would render the pathos of domestic grief into historical terms, but he is also inhabiting a vantage point from the present and acknowledging what was a latent and genuine possibility in his mind at the time. The line is a stroke of wit in T.S. Eliot’s sense, when he writes that wit “involves, probably, a recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible” (Eliot, “Andrew Marvell,” 303). The possibility of public experience is acknowledged in this scene; its elements could, in other circumstances, under other pressures, have been made the stuff of history—at least as he saw it then, for it is common to children to not yet have distinguished private and public spaces, histories and life stories. Eliot wrote those lines about Andrew Marvell, and Lowell would have known them, even if he did not have them at the top of his mind when, elsewhere in Life Studies, he consciously echoes Marvell’s tetrameter and conceits:

Though I am forty-one,
not forty now, the time I put away
was child’s play. After thirteen weeks
my child still dabs her cheeks
to start me shaving. When
we dress her in her sky-blue corduroy,
she changes to a boy,
and floats my shaving brush
and washcloth in the flush…

Dearest, I cannot loiter here
In lather like a polar bear.

He is home from time in the hospital, and the freedom of release is part of the light spring in the lines. But that is not all: the lines are mannered, a performance of the self for himself but also for an imagined audience that extends beyond his daughter who, in turn, is made a character on stage (“Dearest”). The feeling here is entirely removed from the childish posing of Lowell as Agrippina, but it is no less an effort at what is crucial in Lowell’s recovery in the wreckage of privacy: self-dramatization, and self-dramatization under the conditions of a dissolution into private life. It might be compared with what T.S. Eliot calls the “Bovarysme” of Othello’s final moments: Othello’s last speech involves his projecting himself as a hero in the instant of his demise, as his reputation as a great general falls away to be replaced by an envy-maddened domestic murderer. (Eliot, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” 130-131) He would cling to, and remind people, of the public reputation which the private crime has eclipsed and demolished. In Lowell’s poetry, the distance of self from public life is further than this, the self-dramatization less assured of its audience, and—what matters most—Lowell’s self-dramatization rises from the debris of privacy rather than receding into it.

The private and public distinction that emerges time and again in any attempt I make at writing about poetry in relation to politics has made me suspect that it is as crucial to poetry as any of the antinomies of the imagination: change and permanence, universality and individuality, or abstraction and concreteness. But whereas these oppositions arise wherever a mind imagines a world, the tension of public and private occurs in the effort at making good on the imagination’s power in a form, and by conventions, that are inherently shared with others. Donald Davie’s criticism—not only of Lowell but more generally—grows from the practicing poet’s concern with a reading public, conceived of as a real social group with a sufficiently shared set of expectations to allow for the poet to understand what it means to successfully communicate. Though it comes with other commitments, Davie’s conservatism resides centrally in his fundamentally communitarian understanding of such a social group: they need to be bound by thick values, of the sort that gave rise, in 18th century London, to “urbane” as a mark of approbation for a poem and a gentleman alike. A liberal response to Davie, rooted in Habermas, say, would suggest that publicness requires much thinner commitments to communicative norms and interpretation—but that publicness is nonetheless a condition of even private thought. It is publicness in Habermas’ sense that I mean to invoke, while wanting for the contours of Davie’s argument. The point is not that a poem needs to be judged or valued for its actual social reception, but that a poem, because it assumes the possibility of publicness, needs to contain within itself some acknowledgment and understanding of what publicness might mean to the poet’s most private experience—and there is one vital and dominant exception to this, which is for a poet to write not with an understanding or assumption of publicness, but with an assumption of God, leading to those brilliant flares of mysticism, from Blake to Hopkins to Dickinson to Geoffrey Hill—but not exclusively, since these poets often (not always) imagine God as a further audience, defining a broader arena in which the public arena is itself situated, and so allowing them to arrive at public and private in a different fashion. This is true of the early Catholic fire-breathing Lowell, whose religious visions were inseparable from the civic role of religious faith, especially in the Northeastern United States.

God, whatever Lowell’s beliefs may have been, no longer surrounds the publicness of Lowell’s poetry from Life Studiesonwards. In these poems, the tension is more narrowly the public and the private, with self-dramatization being the technical means by which a public self can be recovered from the privacy that is, in being private, the waste of a life. It is, in other words, a real mistake to read Lowell’s poems as a retreat into the private, a turning away from the possibility of a public to which a poet is, in some sense, responsible. Instead, the constricted privacy so keenly felt in the poems is that which Lowell must recover from; it is where the poems begin, the end point of a process of dissolution that has left some sense of self intact, mustering its energies to remerge into publicness.

The arc of Lowell’s career from Life Studies onward can be seen as an attempt at moving further and further in the direction of greater publicness—from Life Studies to Imitations to For the Union Dead to Near the Ocean, and then to History, each collection developing possibilities of self-dramatization as a vehicle for recovering from the extreme of private experience, at least until History when something falters, and where the movement stalls. The revision process from Notebooks (as History was first known) to the first edition of History to the second, months later, revised edition of History was as tired and tiresome as it was tireless.

In Near the Ocean, Lowell goes furthest along this trajectory—he could even be said, in some of the poems, to write a fully committed public poetry, especially in some of the poems in the five-part sequence that opens the book. But in these poems the voice of publicness is uneasy with itself. Davie is skeptical of their “prophetic and denunciatory direction” (Davie, 79), perhaps of the sort that we hear in the final lines of the first poem, “Waking Early Sunday Morning”:

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.

The presence of Marvell is inescapable here, and in all the poems in the sequence, written as they are in tetrameter couplets. But the effect is not, as in Life Studies, to suggest a dramatic persona, but instead to accelerate the movement of the lines, as the complex syntax runs through line-endings with enjambments and through entire couplets too. The speed is both exemplified and acknowledged earlier in “Waking Early Sunday Morning”:

Sing softer! But what if a new
diminuendo brings no true
tenderness, only restlessness,
excess, the hunger for success,
sanity or self-deception
fixed and kicked by restless caution,
while we listen to the bells—
anywhere, but somewhere else!

Exposed to the bright light of publicness, these poems run rapidly towards the shadows of wreckage and inwardness we see in the earlier poems. Lowell’s poetry has so succeeded in making good on the readiness to step forward that it prefers to remain there, anticipatory, still unsure of the powers of its recovery. It is as if the emergence to public view is premature, as if they yearn for the wasted condition in which the earlier poems of Life Studies had stirred. The final three stanzas of “Fourth of July in Maine”:

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.

And here the final stanza of “Near the Ocean”:

Sleep, sleep. The ocean, grinding stones,
can only speak the present tense;
nothing will age, nothing will last,
or take corruption from the past.
A hand, your hand then! I’m afraid
to touch the crisp hair on your head—
Monster loved for what you are,
till time, that buries us, lay bare.

These stanzas, and these poems, hasten to images of their own extinguishing. That restless haste, though carefully placed and thematized by the poems, cannot but make it feel that the poems are running away from themselves, refusing to fully realize Lowell’s imagination or to be fully inhabited by it. Despite all of their polish, poise, and formal completion, they are less fully open to the world than Lowell’s earlier work; the polish, poise, and completion seem hollow victories over what remains Lowell’s ongoing recovery of a public self. This is perhaps why the most enduring poems in Near the Ocean are the creative translations: of Dante, of Juvenal, of Horace, and, to close the collection, with a premonitory glance at the form that would dominate Lowell’s next several collections, a sequence of four sonnets, which Lowell titled “The Ruins of Time.” The first two poems in the sequence are sonnets by Quevedo, followed by the two by Góngora, the last of which is “Melos solicito veloz saeta”:

The whistling arrow flies less eagerly,
and bites the bull’s-eye less ferociously;
the Roman chariot grinds less hurriedly
the arena’s docile sand, and rounds the goal…

How silently, how privately we run
through life to die! You doubt this? Animal
despoiled of reason, each ascending sun
dives like a cooling meteorite to its fall.

Do Rome and Carthage know what we deny?
Death only throws fixed dice, and yet we raise
the ante, and stake our lives on every toss.
The hours will hardly pardon us their loss,
those brilliant hours that wore away our days,
our days that ate into eternity.

Unsurprisingly, the word that I see as the semantic center of gravity in the poem is “privately” in the phrase “How silently, how privately we run| through life to die!” It is not conspicuously jarring but it does pull against the phrase: the act of running is public, in the open. It recalls the public, civic race alluded to by Dante’s teacher Brunetto Latini in his final speech of Canto XV, which Lowell had translated earlier in Near the Ocean; Lowell may have appreciated that echo since Dante consigns Latini to the circle of the sodomites, despite admiring him as a teacher, leading to obvious assumptions about Latini’s private life, and rejoinders that we cannot know since there is no other record to confirm those assumptions. The privacy of Latini’s life and the publicity of the race where the winner seems the loser and the loser seems the winner reverberates in the Góngora translation. Even when publicly visible, we run privately, or perhaps we run not as a runner in a race, but as a hidden river, eroding eternity (“days that ate into eternity”). Or else, it might be that “run” indicates haste—the onward propulsion of the earlier poems towards their own end—in which case, the word “privately” pulls less against the grain of the language, but raises still the same question: what judgment or attitude do we hear in the word? Admiration or pity? Are people consigned to this fate despite their wills and wishes, or is it a mark of self-sufficiency and stoicism? Do they accept silence in privacy and or are they exiled in a private silence? Is there anything to recover that is not itself essentially private or that permits one to step into a life that is not essentially private? I think that Lowell came to doubt whether there was. The dramatic self-recovery of Life Studies looked out onto a public existence from which the later poetry retreated, making a private refuge from public debris.

Works Cited:
All poems by Robert Lowell quoted from Robert Lowell: Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003).
Donald Davie, Two Ways Out of Whitman (Carcanet, 2000)
T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (Faber and Faber, 1934)
Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)


--By Owen Boynton

[1] The Spanish, which makes the creative licenses of Lowell apparent, runs: