Robert Lowell: A Biography (35 page)

Lowell’s difficulty, however, was that rhyme and meter were for him very close to
being
the “natural speech” that William Carlos Williams and his followers were always calling for. The iambic pentameter was not an external, imposed literary method; after three books, it had become compulsive utterance. And it was probably
harder for Lowell to discard rhymes than to invent them. Williams, he felt, was unique, but “dangerous and difficult to imitate.” His disciples were spiritless and programmatic. Although Lowell was in regular, admiring contact with the older poet at this time and had been particularly dazzled by a reading Williams had given at
Wellesley
in 1956 (“somehow he delivered to us what was impossible, something that was both poetry and beyond poetry”
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), he knew that the lessons he could learn from him would always be of the most general kind: loosen meter, abandon rhyme, use ordinary speech, introduce more characters, and so on. Even the very personal poems that Williams was writing in the mid-fifties were of a radiant
simplicity
that Lowell could marvel at but never think to copy: “
Williams
enters me, but I could never enter him.”
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All the same, by 1957 Lowell had learned to mistrust both the means and the temper of his earlier work, the “used equipment,” the “inertia of our old rhetoric and habits”: for eighteen months the sober, therapeutic compromise had been to write in prose. And the compromise had been instructive. He had taken to studying prose texts in his poetry classes—“In prose you have to be interested in
what
is being said … it’s very exciting for me, like going fishing.”
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He had discovered a (for him) new style of formal discourse—paradoxical, ironic, whimsically oblique but capable of elegiac weight. He had learned how to give voice to a wide range of what might be called the moderate emotions: affection, regret, nostalgia, embarrassment, and so on. He had become expert at contriving sentences that could be elevated and yet speakable, and had found a literary voice that could encompass something of his social self—that is to say, the teasing, mischievous, gently sardonic side of his own nature. The obvious next step for Lowell was to perceive that some, if not all, of these considerable gains could be carried over into poetry, that if elements of rhyme and meter could be injected into the sane and solid corpus of his prose reminiscences, he would in effect have found a new but “safe” function for many of the “old tricks” he had been ready to abandon. The “excitement” of poetry could vitalize and be restrained by the sturdy, detailed worldliness of prose:

And, of course, Lowell’s prose “studies” not only suggested a new style; they also offered an almost limitless new subject. In 1976, looking back over his life’s work, Lowell was to acknowledge that “the thread that strings it together is my autobiography, it is a small-scale
Prelude
,
written in many different styles and with
digressions
, yet a continuing story….”
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In his first three books,
autobiography
had been oblique, almost clandestine; now he was free to be both distorting and direct. It seems never to have occurred to him that his personal history might not be of considerable public interest. And this, as Elizabeth Bishop pointed out to him, was his huge natural advantage:

From mid-August through October 1957 Lowell completed eleven poems in free verse—many of them turned into free verse from a first draft in couplets. He wrote to William Carlos Williams:

These poems included final versions of “Beyond the Alps,” “Words for Hart Crane,” “Inauguration Day: January 1953” and “To
Delmore
Schwartz” (this last a poem he’d begun in 1946). The new poems were “Skunk Hour,” “Man and Wife” (though,
interestingly
, the superbly metrical first lines of this had been written three months earlier), “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” “To Speak of the Woe That Is in Marriage” (originally part of “Man and Wife”), “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” “Commander Lowell” and “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms.” In October he wrote—rather nervously—to Randall Jarrell:

Two weeks later he has heard that Jarrell does like “Skunk Hour,” and he writes again:

In the first of these letters to Jarrell (October 11), Lowell remarks, “There’s a new English poet called Larkin that I like better than anyone since Thomas. I’ve been reading him since the Spring and really like him better than Thomas.” In his second letter (October 24) he recommends that Jarrell read the poems by W. D. Snodgrass which have appeared in an anthology called
The
New
Poets
of
En
gland
and
America:
“I’m sure you remember him with his silly name and his Mahler songs. I had him off and on in classes at Iowa for years and thought that he had done one or two of the best poems that my students had written there.”
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In the case of these two younger poets, Lowell’s interest was not to do with matters of technique: Larkin used conventional forms, Snodgrass an intricate system of syllabics. It was more that, “unlike our smooth young poets,” each of them “says something.” Lowell spoke later, in an interview, of Snodgrass’s “pathos and fragility … fragility along the edges and a main artery of power going through the center,”
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and he admired the way in which Snodgrass’s sequence “Heart’s Needle” managed to treat with a kind of wry nobility a subject that in other hands might not have avoided
sweetness
and self-pity: the separation, by divorce, of the poet from his baby daughter. In Larkin he found irony, self-deprecation, a
mockingly
repressed unease, a willingness to speak directly out of
intimate
, if mediocre, states of feeling. With both poets the reader is more eavesdropper than audience; in both there is an anti-bardic element, an insistence on the poet as ordinary man, with ordinary life problems.

During 1957, Lowell had also been reading (and seeing) a lot of Elizabeth Bishop. He had often enough expressed his admiration of her “humorous commanding genius for picking up the unnoticed,” and he had warmly reviewed her first book,
North
and
South
,
in 1947; ten years later, poems like “Florida” and “At the Fishhouses” would have come back to him with an exemplary new vividness. In 1947 he had written indulgently of her “bare objective language” and merely noted that “Most of her meters are accentual-syllabic.” In 1957, though, he saw her as “a sort of bridge between Tate’s
formalism
and Williams’s informal art.” Again it was a combination of high, unfettered artfulness and “thinking-aloud” emotional
directness
that appealed to him. Bishop—with her intently charted
shorelines
, her humanly caught but still nonhuman creatures of the deep, her almost devout regard for humble details—offered a thoroughly “sound” model for a poet looking for ways into his own worldliness. And a poem like “Man-Moth” would have intensified his sense of fellow feeling; Bishop’s fine poem showed that there were ways of writing about, as well as out of, desperation:

In the summer of 1957 Lowell spent hours in conversation with Bishop. She had visited Boston from her home in Brazil; “Before she had gone we had told each other almost everything that had ever happened to us. She really has risen from the ocean’s bottom.”
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Her response to his new poems was all that Lowell could have wished:

Bishop goes on to say that she still likes “the skunk one enormously” (“Skunk Hour” is dedicated to her), but she modestly supposes that “it’s exercises compared to the other ones.”

Lowell also sent his new poems to Allen Tate. Tate wrote back
to him on December 3. His letter confirmed the extent of Lowell’s defection from the traditionalist camp, from the “rooftree” of Tate’s influence. It was almost as if Tate had suffered a personal—or even filial—betrayal. The only poem Tate liked was “Skunk Hour” (“very fine”—perhaps because it is in neat sestets and has an almost regular rhyme scheme), and he grudgingly allowed that the rhymed and metrical “Inauguration Day: January 1953” could be published “without compromise.” As to the rest: