With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz & Others

Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell: Two Branches of American Poetry

198 Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell Two Branches of American Poetry “Modern” American poetry owed much to its forebears, and to two distinct branches, that of Emily Dickinson, on the one hand, and on the other, Walt Whitman. Lowell and Ginsberg might be said to have embodied the two sides of American literary output: that tension between the sides of poetry and of personality. The Apollonian and the Dionysian heritages were often the inspiration for of New England authors. Hawthorne, for instance, and later Henry James, Edith Wharton, and others wrote of the tension between formality and the transgression of passionate abandon and the price to be paid for that: punishment, shunning , or death. Puritanism and its other face, abandon, made for exciting literature. Beneath the formality of Emily Dickinson’s poems was a breathless tension that made her poetry so elliptical and so intriguing. Dickinson combined formal expression of controlled emotion with religion and delight in the natural world. Her work hinted at great love as well as delicate perceptions of nature and the world around her, held in with precise verse. Passion was suggested, unrequited, hinted at, and lay just underneath; scholars have written reams while trying to figure it out. The formal poetry of Archibald MacLeish and Richard Wilbur, for instance, perhaps even that of Robert Frost, relate to the Dickinson branch of the literary family. Whitman, on the other hand, celebrated the body, “forbidden” love, and the larger (masculine) scope of war, history, and passion. There was not another poet like him, although Carl Sandburg, James Agee in some of his work, perhaps Vachel Lindsay, Stephen Crane, Jack Kerouac, and others owed a debt to the freedom and scope of Whitman’s writing. Allen Ginsberg seemed a direct descendant, in his poetic aesthetic, of Walt Whitman. He saw himself that way, and in Howl tried to achieve a modern epic poem with a Whitmanesque sweep.58 While Elizabeth Bishop with her formality and reticence might be seen asdirectlyrelatedtotheEmilyDickinsonapproach,RobertLowellspanned both traditions in the progression of his work. From his early formal work, to History and including Life Studies, he strained against the bounds of either branch of American poetry and tried to transcend them. • 199 Lowell and Ginsberg were polar opposites, but each was a scholar as well as a poet. There was an inventiveness in each, a willingness to push the boundaries of what was and could be written about. In personal style they had little to do with one another; Lowell was and presented himself as an Anglophile High Church (sometimes Catholic) Boston Brahmin whose references were British history and literature. Allen Ginsberg looked to Judaism, Far Eastern tradition, ecstatic poetry, chant and trance states, and mysticism. Yet Ginsberg, in poems like “Sunflower Sutra,” was close to the sensibility of poet William Blake in the romantic/mystical infinity-in-agrain -of sand viewpoint. Blake was a touchstone. Ginsberg identified in many ways with Walt Whitman. He embodied the expansiveness of the American imagination, the “dare-to-write,” “dare-tobe ” poet from Paterson, New Jersey. He came from the side of American poetry that included Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and later, Kerouac , William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder. Ginsberg became a household word, anathema in the late fifties. He was an antidote to Puritanism. He wrote freely about forbidden things: drugs, alcohol, madness, homosexuality. Like Whitman, his poetic voice Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell at St. Mark’s Church, New York City, 1977. With Robert Lowell & His Circle 200 was open, singing, and his poetic lines long and meditative as the landscape itself. In poems like “My Sad Self” and “Sunflower Sutra,” ugly, hopeless, ordinary life became transformed into a transcendent experience. He celebrated loneliness and love and friendship and cities and nature and the tumult of destruction: in the wildness of his poetry was a sense of the oneness of the universe, of multiple human experience. Like Whitman, he let his lines go free, but he managed to contain his universal vision at the same time. He was our bard. Allen Ginsberg believed in the presentation of poetry, and reading poetry aloud became a dramatic event. Where before it was enough for a mousy tweed-suited poet to look down at the page and mutter along to himself for an hour or so, this was no longer acceptable. Poetry readings became less “academic” and less boring. Ginsberg had shaken...