American Audacity: Literary Essays North and South

Lowell’s Curse

Lowell’s Curse h On June 11, 2005, The New York Times ran a correction: “A picture in Weekend yesterday with the Books of The Times review, about ‘The Letters of Robert Lowell,’ was published in error. It showed the columnist Murray Kempton, who died in 1997, not the poet.” Accidents happen, or mistakes: it wasn’t made clear how the face of the acerbic columnist was substituted for the face of the famous poet. As errors go, this one could hardly approach the Times obituary for Herman Melville, in 1891, which identi‹ed the forgotten author as “Henry Melville.” Nonetheless, it seemed starkly to register a slippage in Lowell’s reputation since his death, a change of status remarked by many reviewers, including loyal friends and defenders such as Helen Vendler and Jonathan Raban. In The New York Review of Books for June 23, 2005, Raban wrote: “Robert Lowell’s star has waned very considerably since his death in 1977, when his obituarists treated him, along with Yeats, Eliot, Auden, and Wallace Stevens, as one of the handful of unquestionably great twentieth-century poets. The publication two years ago of Frank Bidart and David Gewanter’s massive edition of the Collected Poems did much to restore his work to public and critical view, but even now Lowell’s poems are, I would guess, less widely read, taught, and anthologized than those of his two friends and contemporaries Elizabeth Bishop and John Berryman—a judgment, if that is what it is, that would have astonished serious readers of poetry between the 1950s and the 1970s.” Count me among the astonished. Except for one or two attempts to stem the tide (I remember in particular Michael Hof126 mann’s impassioned defense of Lowell’s late poetry in The London Review of Books), expressions of dismay have mainly been aired— at least in my reading—in the samizdat of email. Since I can’t separate my own passion for poetry from my early reading of the redcovered , revised and expanded Notebook, in the fall of 1970 when I turned sixteen—a book that meant more to me than a thousand Howls or Coney Islands of the Mind—I can’t read Lowell’s letters with the distanced and rueful weighing of reputation that seems in vogue. I still remember my own shocked sense of injustice when, in September 1977, I arrived at Harvard to begin graduate school in comparative literature and learned, almost immediately, almost to the day, that the major reason I’d chosen Harvard, Lowell’s presence on the teaching faculty, had come to an abrupt end, in a cab in Manhattan. Elizabeth Bishop gave a reading at Harvard, the following spring I think, dedicated to Lowell; she read a couple of his earlier poems along with her own new elegy for Lowell, “North Haven” A year went by and Bishop was dead. A few months later, James Wright gave a reading at Harvard, dedicated to the memory of Bishop. He recited “Adam’s Curse” from memory in her honor. He also read a curse on the city of Marseilles with the refrain “You wouldn’t want to see it in the rain.” The model for the poem, Wright explained, was Coleridge’s curse on the city of Cologne, which Wright also recited from memory. And then, in March 1980, Wright was dead as well. In those days, these successive deaths of the three contemporary poets who meant most to me seemed the playing out of some curse, as though every poet I cared about was somehow maudit. Lowell’s letters, imbued with the conviction about poetry’s ultimate importance, have brought back to me that parade of readings and deaths, as elegy turned ineluctably into elegized. Lowell never won the Nobel Prize, but his three younger friends who did—Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney—wrote elegies after Lowell’s death. Each poet inventoried different things from Lowell’s legacy. Brodsky and Walcott noted the propinquity of the memorial service and Boston Common ; both invoked the ending of “For the Union Dead,” with Brodsky, writing in English, risking overt pastiche: 127 Huge autoherds graze on gray, convoluted, ›at stripes shining with grease like an updated ›ag. Walcott’s elegy, published in The Star-Apple Kingdom, likewise registers “churches, cars, sunlight, / and the Boston Common,” while asserting the traditional survival of a poet’s work (“something that once had a fearful name / walks from the thing that used to...