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189 “Genius at Work” Revision, Presentation, Contribution Drafts of Lowell’s poems appeared again and again in subsequent volumes of his poetry. In his study at Marlborough Street, I saw drafts of some of his best poems for Life Studies. I remember the window open, the scent of magnolia rising, and Cal showing me drafts of “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage.” He read the lines aloud in a soft and halting way, murmuring right through to the end. Gored by the climacteric of his want, he stalls above me like an elephant. Oh my! I shivered, delighted, only half-understanding the poem itself. I could never think of Lowell’s household in Back Bay Boston without thinking of that poem: was I seeing the “truth” of his marriage? It was a hidden thing, slightly pleasurable and not—like biting one’s nails. I also saw a lot of drafts of the poem “For the Union Dead,” in which the “Mosler safe” was worked and reworked. Elizabeth Hardwick, Stanley Kunitz, and other friends of Lowell’s sometimes were fed up with his constant questioning and revision of each line. He was obsessed with a poem while working on it and demanded the same attention, or obsession, from others. Lowell flattered me, as he did later Bidart and others, by asking my opinion of the versions. But I did not feel in a position to give an opinion, nor, I suspect, did he want an opinion as much as a sounding board to test out various alternatives. So the poems got changed, and changed again. “Skunk Hour,” a beautiful and complex poem, got clearer in subsequent drafts. “Near the Ocean” emerged fully lyrical and formed, it seemed. When Lowell started working in sonnet form, he wrote and rewrote, and the original drafts were clotted in parts, and more clear in others. Grey Gowrie saw a lot of them as well. Sometimes the poems got clearer as subsequent drafts helped Lowell rethink the poems. But a lot of them could not be called “clear,” even when they were finished. I had come to study with Lowell, but I did not understand a word of his early work, Lord Weary’s Castle. It still seems a difficult book. But the “Jonathan Edwards” poem and the “Quaker Graveyard” were masterpieces. • With Robert Lowell & His Circle 190 Lowell sought to achieve the same quality in free verse, and later, in the sonnets. In his later work, he becomes more accessible, less mannered, less privately a “Lowell of Boston.” Endless revision could be a limitation. Sometimes it was an extension of Cal’s madness, as he would become ever more obsessive about the drafts, reading and rereading them to me and my husband—but really to himself—in our living room, carrying them around with him, and asking everyone what they thought. He stared at them endlessly, and a lot of nervous obsessive energy focused on the revision process. “I don’t know which is better,” I would say lamely, miserably, looking at the same very slightly altered Lowell last line for perhaps the twentieth time. “They all seem good.” I hoped that would mollify him, at least for a time. In a personal conversation Elizabeth Hardwick remembered that, even in the mental hospitals, Lowell read aloud to his fellow inmates. “‘Listen to this,’hewouldsay.‘Letmereadyouthis.’Hewasteaching,sotospeak,these mixed-up people. It was really kind of touching.” Hardwick continued, “He was constantly reading his poems. He would come into the kitchen. ‘Oh, listen to this,’ Cal would say. He was constantly revising. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Can’t you see I’m cooking dinner?’ Then I would say ‘I don’t like this, I don’t like this ending.’ And sometimes he would change it.” It was almost impossible to say whether a poem was indeed better in a later version in one of Lowell’s books, or whether one preferred the earlier version. Since Cal was not only writing for posterity, but also for Allen Tate and Edmund Wilson, he could never give up. “Even God rested on the seventh day. And called it good.” But God was not creating for John Crowe Ransom, Richard Blackmur, Mary McCarthy (“our crowd”), Eliot, Yeats, and Milton. Cal was. He never rested. Lowell wrote about the revision process: I am not an authoritative critic of my own poems, except in the most pressing and urgent way. I have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours shaping, extending...

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