~EDWARD BYRNE~
LIFE
AND LANGUAGE: ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY
OF ROBERT LOWELL's LIFE
STUDIES
Robert Lowell was born in Boston on
March 1, 1917 to a Massachusetts family well positioned in New England
society and already rich in literary tradition, including two prominent
authors among his ancestors—Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell. Robert
Lowell’s personal heritage as a writer was enhanced when upon the
recommendation of Allen Tate he appeared as a young man at Kenyon
College eagerly seeking to learn the poetic craft from John Crowe
Ransom, Tate’s one-time teacher. Following his graduation from Kenyon
in 1940, Lowell pursued graduate work at Louisiana State University
under the guidance of two other highly-regarded literary personalities
associated with the New Critics and their notions about how a poem’s
composition or its reception by readers should be discerned: Cleanth
Brooks and Robert Penn Warren.
Clearly, Robert Lowell’s first couple of poetry
collections, Land of Unlikeness
(1944) along with the subsequent volume titled Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), display
characteristics developed under the direction of those formidable
figures who helped shape his early writing. As Frank Bidart explains in
his introduction to Robert Lowell’s Collected
Poems: “What most people think of as his first book, Lord Weary’s Castle, is not a
‘revision’ of Land of Unlikeness—less
than a quarter of it transforms material from the earlier book—but it
is, I think, the book that Land of
Unlikeness wanted to be.” Lord
Weary’s Castle quickly achieved critical praise and proved a
successful introduction into the literary world for Robert Lowell when
that volume was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1947.
The young poet was lauded for his precisely wrought
formal poems, heavily metrical lines with meaty language often
presented in a tightly wound syntax that seemed knotted by metaphors or
similes. Already, some critics began to view Lowell as an ascending
star, perhaps a major poet whose style would solidify an approach to
poetry they appreciated. However, when his follow-up book of poetry, The Mills of the Kavanaughs,
appeared in 1951 to a mixed reception by critics, some of whom had held
higher expectations for the new work, Lowell’s disappointment may have
caused him to pause for reconsideration of his writing style. Indeed,
for various reasons, eight years would pass before Lowell’s next
collection, Life Studies, was
published in the spring of 1959.
During the 1950s Lowell experienced traumatic
personal incidents and impacting professional instances forcing
self-reflection. Both of his parents died during this decade. The poet
was troubled by a series of mental breakdowns, which at times required
hospitalization and therapy, including an exercise in which he
conducted a review of his life through the writing of a prose narrative
exploring his childhood and submerged feelings about family members. In
addition, his marriage to second wife Elizabeth Hardwick, whom he had
married in 1949, had undergone difficulties.
At the same time, when Lowell looked at the evolving
poetry scene in the United States during the 1950s, he began to
recognize some changes that intrigued him. He heard the poetry of Allen
Ginsberg—whose forceful poem, “Howl,” had been published in 1956.
Lowell also observed the new emotionally open poetry of one of his
students, W.D. Snodgrass—whose wonderful manuscript, Heart’s Needle, would be published
in 1959 and beat out Lowell’s Life
Studies for the Pulitzer Prize. Adding these influences to his
admittedly increased admiration for the work of William Carlos Williams
and his growing friendship with Elizabeth Bishop, as well as Lowell’s
own enjoyment when reading autobiographical poems that were more
readily accessible to audiences, Robert Lowell chose to revise his
poetic voice, remaking the style with which he’d achieved so much
success.
Throughout the 1950s, in letters to fellow
writers—such as Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Peter
Taylor—Robert Lowell expressed confidence in his conscious effort to
separate from the old style of poetry that readers recognized, and he
suggested he was convinced the new work would surpass what he had
previously produced. In his biography of the poet, Ian Hamilton quotes
a note Lowell wrote to Taylor in 1958: “I’m in the fine mood of an
author with a new style and feel nothing else I’ve ever done counts.”
Although a few of the poems eventually released in Life Studies were begun in drafts
as formal verse, Lowell transformed his poetry before the book’s
appearance, and an altered voice—more autobiographical, loosely
lyrical, intimate, vulnerable, and plain spoken—signaled a new
beginning. In fact, Lowell seemed to borrow effective elements evident
in his reflective prose memoir, “91 Revere Street,” which he included
among the poems of Life Studies.
Initial reactions to the poet’s dramatic transition in style varied;
however, a number of critics—including his former guide, Allen
Tate—felt somewhat betrayed by Lowell’s shift.
After its release, much discussion and some mounting
debate about the pieces in Life
Studies created a split among readers of American poetry.
Responses ranged from a welcoming of this novel tack in contemporary
poetry to calls of outrage from some who were surprised, even shocked,
by its content and presentation. Among those who decried Lowell’s new
direction, M.L. Rosenthal declared the transparent style
“confessional,” which he meant to be read as a disparaging label, and a
term which Lowell rejected.
Nevertheless, Life
Studies was awarded the National Book Award in 1960. Within his
acceptance speech Robert Lowell acknowledged the ongoing evolution of
American poetry, which he felt lent energy to it, and the conflicting
views with which it may now be characterized by suggesting two
categories or schools of thought, “a cooked and a raw”:
Our modern American poetry
has a snarl on its hands. Something earth-shaking was started about
fifty years ago by the generation of Eliot, Frost, and William Carlos
Williams. We have had a run of poetry as inspired, and perhaps as
important and sadly brief as that of Baudelaire and his successors, or
that of the dying Roman Republic and early Empire. Two poetries are now
competing, a cooked and a raw. The cooked, marvelously expert, often
seems laboriously concocted to be tasted and digested by a graduate
seminar. The raw, huge blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience
are dished up for midnight listeners. There is a poetry that can only
be studied, and a poetry that can only be declaimed, a poetry of
pedantry, and a poetry of scandal. I exaggerate, of course. Randall
Jarrell has said that the modern world has destroyed the intelligent
poet’s audience and given him students. James Baldwin has said that
many of the beat writers are as inarticulate as our statesmen.
Writing is neither transport nor technique. My own owes everything to a
few of our poets who have tried to write directly about what mattered
to them, and yet to keep faith with their calling’s tricky,
specialized, unpopular possibilities for good workmanship. When I
finished Life Studies, I was
left hanging on a question mark. I am still hanging there. I don’t know
whether it is a death-rope or a life-line.
With the awarding of a National Book Award to Lowell
for Life Studies and a
Pulitzer Prize to Snodgrass for Heart’s
Needle in 1960, the start of this fresh decade also may have
marked a new beginning for many American poets. Scores of young authors
soon sought to emulate Lowell’s style in their writing. Even a number
of other poets whose paths had originated with traditional writing in
formal patterns eventually followed Lowell’s example by drifting toward
free verse with more loosely arranged language and more obviously
autobiographical content.
The publication of Life
Studies—what Robert Lowell considered a great gamble, not
knowing “whether it is a death-rope or a life-line”—has resulted in his
signature contribution, perhaps the single most persuasive book of
poetry in the last half of the twentieth century, one that has at least
partially identified an entire literary age of American poetry. In Robert Lowell’s Life and Work: Damaged
Grandeur, Richard Tillinghast’s compelling analysis of the
poet’s work, he describes the artistic accomplishment of Life Studies: “He demonstrated a
command of literary architectonics that would put most writers to
shame. At the same time, he achieved a readable style unlike that of
any other poet. While taking advantage of the spontaneity and
resourcefulness of free verse, his poems retain the resonance and
memorability of rhyme and meter. Life
Studies remains his highest achievement.”
This spring, on the occasion representing the
fiftieth anniversary of the release of Life Studies, readers may pay
homage to Robert Lowell and his influence (for better or, as some still
might argue, for worse) over the last half-century of American poetry.
In revisiting his poetry, we again will witness the legacy Lowell has
left us when he chose to move in a different direction. We will once
more remember how this decision has impacted generations of Americans
who have written poetry since then, many perhaps as creators of what
Gregory Orr has called “the postconfessional lyric” in an essay bearing
that title.
As Orr explains, poetry written after the new
investigations of self by Lowell—along with Snodgrass, Ginsberg,
Sexton, Berryman, and Plath—and produced throughout the latter decades
of the twentieth century, as well as now in the opening decade of the
twenty-first century, has displayed itself to be “a variant on the
autobiographical dramatic lyric.” He suggests much of the contemporary
poetry written in America might be labeled “postconfessional,” work
that continues to extend and expand “the implications of the original
confessional enterprise.” More importantly, Gregory Orr hints at an
essential element in Lowell’s Life
Studies that has helped it become so crucial to understanding
subsequent avenues traveled by later poets. Orr writes that the
postconfessional poets seek to “bring lyric strategies to bear on
autobiographical material.”
Consequently, as readers today remember the lyrics
of Lowell’s Life Studies
produced fifty years ago, they might also observe the many ways in
which much of today’s poetry resembles those early explorations of self
through thoughtful reflection and frank language, an examining of one’s
personal situation by a focus on evocative images or exact details.
They
might recall those words written about Lowell’s Life Studies by Helen Vendler in
her essay, “The Difficult Grandeur of Robert Lowell”: “It was not the
confessions that made Life Studies
so memorable; it was rather the quality of memory indelibly imprinted,
a brilliance of detail almost unconsciously preserved in a store of
words perpetually refreshed.”
Since Robert Lowell expressed displeasure with the
“confessional” label with which he had been burdened, he most likely
would be pleased to see readers appreciating him for his distinct
ability to depict dramatic personal incidents or troubling instances in
his private life through an emphasis on his well-chosen words and
compellingly phrased statements, valuing his poetry not as much for the
chronicle of a troubled life lived with personal difficulties but for
the innovative stylistic devices and impressive illuminating studies of
that life in lasting lines of lyrical inquiry.
© by Edward Byrne
|
