“Our Abidance Along with Theirs”

In 1965, shortly after the publication of Robert Lowell’s fifth collection of verse, For the Union Dead, the British critic Irvin Ehrenpreis confidently proclaimed that the poetry of the second half of the twentieth century would be christened the “Age of Lowell.” You have to enjoy quite a reputation if you’re going to have an age named after you: it makes you sound like a geological era as much as a literary figure. But Ehrenpreis was echoing the critical consensus of his day, at least that of the dominant literary circles. And there seemed to be abundant evidence to bolster Eherpreis’s claim: the dense, stentorian music and theological struggle of Lowell’s second collection, 1946’s Lord Weary’s Castle, had won him the Pulitzer Prize at the age of thirty, and his fourth collection, 1959’s Life Studies, with its direct and abject treatments of formerly taboo subjects such as dysfunctional family histories, marital strife, mental illness, and psych ward stays (Lowell was afflicted with bipolar disorder during a time when the condition was little understood), can be said to have radically altered the course of American poetry, spawning a movement toward a straightforward and militantly autobiographical poetry that still remains a signature element of our period style, practiced even among poets who may well never have read Robert Lowell. Lowell’s apotheosis was also due in part to his considerable skills at self-promotion at a time when there was still a significant enough regard for poetry to make certain poets actual public figures. In 1965, Frost and Eliot had recently died — Lowell seemed first in line to take their places. Lowell had a spread in Life magazine and appeared on the cover of Time; Lowell told off Lyndon Johnson when he escalated his bombing campaign of North Vietnam, and the poet possessed sufficient cache to cause Johnson’s press secretary to issue a White House response — in the process attributing to Lowell some lines from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” Lowell was subsequently instrumental in the antiwar movement and was at the height of his literary fame in 1973 when he simultaneously issued three collections of his loosely metered unrhymed sonnets.

And this was the event that began Lowell’s slide down the mountainside of Parnassus. One of the volumes, The Dolphin, chronicled the end of his second marriage (to the novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick) and the start of what would be his disastrous third marriage to the British journalist and short story writer, Lady Caroline Blackwood. By this point readers expected unabashed frankness from Lowell, but the book quickly came to be seen as self-justification rather than self-disclosure, largely because Lowell larded its poems with passages of the anguished letters Hardwick wrote to him during the period when their marriage collapsed. Worse still, Lowell saw fit to modify and distort the letters when he felt that his phrasing or meter called for it. Elizabeth Bishop, Lowell’s most stalwart correspondent, was not the only one of his circle who counseled him not to print the book, famously telling him that “art just isn’t worth it.” And Lowell’s onetime friend Adrienne Rich excoriated the volume in American Poetry Review, labeling it “bullshit eloquence.” In eight short years Lowell had gone from being the defining poet of his age to being branded a “sexist elitist bullshit artist.” And each of these extremes has a certain validity. Suffice to say that readers and critics have been hotly debating Lowell’s stature for almost fifty years. And if Lowell’s reputation has recovered to some degree from a kind of nadir in the 1980s and ’90s, his status as major major poet still seems a bit tarnished.

Of course, as Lowell’s reputation faltered, that of his...