In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

“Rebellion That Honors the Liturgies” Robert Lowell and Michael Hofmann stephen burt Robert Lowell, Helen Vendler has written,“could dispense with ideology but never with history”; Lowell himself, that he was“learning to live in history .”1 Now he is part of history,and makes critics uneasy; readers still read him, and teach“For the Union Dead,”but it’s common to meet talented youngAmericans not so much hostile to, as unfamiliar with, the last books. Lowell is better received now in Britain, where his fame came later. Both the energetic Lowell of the late blank-verse sonnets, and the dejected Lowell of Day by Day, seem to me far more original, more conscious, more powerful poets than most readers now acknowledge.Michael Hofmann — who grew up in Germany,attended schools in England, wrote about Lowell at Cambridge, travels often to Mexico, and teaches in America — has written very good poems close to Lowell’s late sonnet style.I want here to describe the fourteen-line poems Lowell wrote between 1967 and 1973,and then to show what Hofmann has done with their devices,and why they have served him so well. I focus on Hofmann’s second book, Acrimony (1986), which continues to seem to me his most important.2 Ian Hamilton concludes his biography of Lowell with a cascade of quotation: Christopher Ricks quotes words that I myself was privileged to read out at Lowell’s memorial evening. . . . On Lowell’s death, Ricks says, “there came to me the words of Empson on King Lear”: The scapegoat who has collected all this wisdom for us is viewed at the end with a sort of hushed envy, not I think because he has become wise but because the general human desire for experience has been so glutted in him; he has been through everything. We that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long.3 David Bromwich comments acidly: “One cannot help noticing how many times this sentiment has to be mediated before it could reach us from a safe distance: Hamilton on Lowell quotes Ricks quoting Empson on Lear.”4 Bromwich suggests that Lowell’s late poems rely illegitimately on his biographical myth. But Hamilton’s nested quotations also show what kind of thinking Lowell’s work prompts in others, what kind of thinking the poetry — with or without the biography — represents: Lowell’s work presents itself as responsive, reactive, never autochthonous. As Langdon Hammer has put it, Lowell’s own writing “is derivative in this uncontestable and almost overwhelming sense: it continually uses other writers’ words.”5 Lowell’s matrix of retrospect, reference, rebuttal, and response encourages people who talk about Lowell to compare,cross-check,juxtapose,and mediate. Michael Hofmann has (as his reviewers acknowledge) learned much from the later Lowell in general. He has, I hope to show, proven especially sensitive to this referential or revisionist aspect of Lowell’s work in particular. Writing in 1989, Hofmann defended the later sonnets against Philip Hobsbaum’s attacks, while agreeing with Hobsbaum that “Lowell is an adapter, a borrower, a rewriter. When what he had to rewrite was himself, and in fourteen-line units, it is not surprising that the result displeases the admirer of his early work.”6 In his last decade Lowell became increasingly conscious of his drive to adapt, rewrite, refigure — it became his subject. One “fourteen-line unit” imagined Randall Jarrell’s ghost admonishing Lowell: “You didn’t write, you rewrote . . .” (SP 178). The most persistent symbols in Notebook — rivers clogged with“slush-ice,”and the deciduous foliage Lowell termed“leafmeal”and“leaflace ” — suggest his endless work on his always-rough drafts, his “carbon scarred with ciphers.”7 Lowell rewrites, but can’t do without, the obstructive cipher of his sources and previous selves, as his winter rivers can’t flow without ice. If part of the strength of the early Lowell was the force with which he attacked his sources, part of the later Lowell’s originality (as Vereen Bell has shown) lay in the ways he forced himself to credit those sources, to insist that we can’t make everything new.8 Lowell once complained that Whitman’s preface to Leaves of Grass was a “magnificent document, but there is not one single predecessor mentioned in it.”9 Against more common ideas that poets can create or re-create themselves,Lowell’s poems propose more or less pessimistic or nihilist models for how little we can transform or...

Share