Robert Lowell: Scripting the Mid-Century Eschatology

The last few decades of Robert Lowell criticism have been marked by an accumulated awareness that, in spite of the rigorous New Critical apprenticeship of his early years, Lowell's poetry has all along manifested a deep complicity with history both past and present. His poetic utterances engage in a continual dialogue with the momentous contemporary events that stirred the second and the third critical quarters of the last century. His poetic voice, whether in its declamatory prophetic mode or contemplative confessional tenor, constantly reverberates with the violence, crises, and horror of current history. ¹

Frequently, in his response to history, Robert Lowell employs the rhetoric of eschatology and apocalypse. ² In some ways, the fascination for the apocalyptic that Lowell's poetic utterances betray at crucial moments seems to have an inevitability traceable to both his individual and his artistic antecedent. His acquaintance with the Bible, according to his own confession, was deep and extensive. In the Encounter interview with A. Alvarez, Lowell speaks about his upbringing "as an Episcopalian Protestant with a good deal of Bible reading at school": as students, "we were," Lowell says, "rather saturated" with the Bible. ³ The crystallization of the apocalyptic that characterized a good deal of his poetry is an evidence of that saturation.

In addition, the apocalyptic, as many interpreters of Modernism have pointed out, provided a premium metaphor and an overarching framework for a wide range of twentieth-century literary writing. The sense of the apocalypse is perceived by many as one of the crucial shaping forces behind the whole Modernist discourse. Frank Kermode posited the apocalyptic as one of the pivotal elements of Modernism: "If there is a persistent world-view [in the Modernist movement] it is one we should have to call apocalyptic." ⁴ It is the apocalyptic that straddles over and unifies the otherwise divergent categories of his paleo- and neo-Modernisms: "all modernist art and literature between the 'Nineties and now is associated with the [apocalyptic] assumptions in some form or other." ⁵ In The Sense of An Ending, in formulating his theory of fiction, Kermode offers an elaborate consideration of the various Modernist manipulations of the traditional eschatologies and observes that the apocalyptic was "endemic to what we call modernism," as much as utopianism was endemic to political radicalism. ⁶ Monroe K. Spears, in his study of the Dionysian elements in modern poetry, identifies "the concern of modern artists" as "characteristically apocalyptic and eschatological." ⁷ For R.W.B. Lewis, the hallmark of twentieth-century American literature in general is a "resoundingly apocalyptic mood." ⁸ Among Lowell's early twentieth-century poetic predecessors, W.B. Yeats resorted to the terminology of the apocalypse in charting the cosmic movements of history envisaged in his poetry and prose. ⁹ T.S. Eliot's visions of the collapsing civilization also reworked the words and imagery of the apocalyptic. ¹⁰

For Robert Lowell, a conscious and critical inheritor of the American apocalyptic tradition, the rhetoric of the apocalypse formed a part of a rich but complex patrimony. All through his creative life, Lowell's poetry evinced deep intertextual links with traditional apocalyptic writings. The apocalyptic elements in Lowell underwent unique processes of transformation, inscribed by the traces and scars of American cultural and political history. Lowell's early poetry, manipulating the imagery of violence generated by the on-going war, presented a strident indictment of what he himself called "the New World eschatologies"—the Puritan messianism and its current manifestations. Contrary to the prevailing critical opinion, the transformation of Lowell's poetic predilections in the 1950s did not signify a renunciation of the apocalyptic. The visions of cosmic destruction were scaled down in the confessional phase of his poetic career to the microcosmic personal breakdowns without, however, any loss to the intensity of the horror. The re-emergence of the visions of collective annihilation in the later poetry showed...