The Three Voices of Robert Lowell

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S T E V E N GOU L D A XE LROD
The Three Voices of Robert Lowell
So much of the effort of the poem is to arrive at something

essentially human, to find the right voice for what
we have to say. – Robert Lowell1
I take as my starting point Christopher Ricks’s generative review of Lowell’s

For the Union Dead written back in 1965.2 Ricks posited that Lowell had
“three lives,” which he also termed “contexts” and “sources of Lowell’s
imagination.” The lives were “personal experience,” a “social and political
we,” and an outer layer that was “historical, literary, and religious.” Revising
that model, I’m going to leave Lowell’s life to the side and focus instead on
his texts and career. I’m going to identify three “voices” that alternate and
sometimes blend in his work, voices that were right for what he had to say.
Although these “voices” bear a family resemblance to Ricks’s “lives,” they
represent a somewhat different set of categories. As I see it, Lowell’s first
voice does indeed speak of what seems to be personal experience. Lowell
claimed that “autobiography” was the thread that strung his work together.3
Yet he also admitted, “My ‘autobiographical’ poems are not always factually
true . . . I’ve invented facts” (Interviews 94). This autobiographical voice – a
somewhat contradictory compound of memory and invention – produced
the “confessional” style he pioneered and for which he is still famous today.4
As I shall try to show, this voice is as much a technical achievement as a
refocusing of the subject matter of lyric poetry.
Lowell’s second voice is public, combining Ricks’s notion of a “social and
political we” with a speaker who also evokes “historical . . . and religious
contexts.” Lowell’s self-positioning as spokesperson of conscience and com-
munal memory contributed importantly to his cultural aura back in the day
but is overshadowed now by what Deborah Nelson has called his “trans-
formations of privacy.”5 Yet I hope to show that Lowell’s public voice was
essential to his achievement – and that the private and public voices were
not oppositional to each other but interdependent.
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Steven Gould Axelrod
Finally, I wish to focus attention on Lowell’s least noted voice, which I will
term metapoetic. Throughout his career, Lowell cited and revised the words
of his precursors, letting them speak again while simultaneously recalibrat-
ing his relation to them. In his latter days he also meditated self-reflexively
on his own contributions to poetry. These three voices – autobiographi-
cal, public, and metapoetic – are distinguishable though confluent. Together
they moved American poetry along new pathways, helping to create an
ever-changing, ever more complicated network of words.
1
Lowell’s renovation of the poetics of privacy occurred in 1957–1959 with
his work Life Studies. Critics have often termed the volume “a break-
through,” though James Longenbach has ironized this perspective by refer-
ring to it as the “ ‘breakthrough’ narrative.”6 That is, it is merely a story we
tell ourselves rather than an accurate descriptor. Longenbach’s point is that
Lowell did not really “break” from the canons of modernism but repeated
them. Certainly there is some truth in Longbach’s demurral. Literary change
does not obliterate the past but modifies practice in some crucial regard,
selecting from the usable past in some novel way. That almost goes with-
out saying. Lowell modestly framed his change of direction in Life Studies
thusly: “Literary life is just one little wave after another . . . One manner
seems as bad or as good as another; it freshens the atmosphere for a moment
and then seems to have faults as disastrous as the ones they were fighting
against” (Interviews 74–75).
Reacting to and against the anonymity of modernism, Lowell created in
Life Studies a poetry that was clearly identified with his own “experience”
(Interviews 55). Instead of listening to Tiresias or to a voice from nowhere,
we hear the figure of Robert Lowell. It is telling that when Longenbach
turns to Lowell’s texts to prove his point about modernism’s endurance, he
largely avoids Life Studies. Attached to modernism, he minimizes resistance
to it as a mere narrative in scare quotes and then deflects attention to mod-
ernism’s lingering vestiges.
It was not simply Lowell’s critics who have spoken of a breakthrough
but also Lowell himself and the poets who were influenced by him. In an
interview after the publication of Life Studies, Lowell argued that writing
had become “divorced” from culture and unable to “handle much experi-
ence” (Interviews 55). “It’s become a craft, purely a craft, and there must be
some breakthrough back into life.” Lowell was not characterizing his own
volume as a poetic breakthrough but rather expressing the hope that he had
broken through to lived experience by constructing a style linked to interior
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monologue and refocusing subject matter on heretofore private matters.

Yet the notion of breakthrough metonymically expanded soon enough to
include his contribution to literary history.
Plath attributed her own achievement in Ariel to Lowell’s “breakthrough”
in Life Studies.7 Lowell himself tried to minimize this perspective while still
recognizing the change he had installed. He initially attributed qualities
found in Life Studies to achievements in the work of earlier poets such as
Frost, Eliot, Pound, Williams, and Bishop. Later he reflected, “When I wrote,
most good American poetry was a symbol hanging on a hatrack. Many felt
this” (Interviews 168–169). When pressed, he named W. D. Snodgrass and
the Beats as other “breakthrough” poets. Yet he also tried to differentiate
his own practice from what he termed Snodgrass’s “expert little stanzas”
and Ginsberg’s “stirring sermon” (Interviews 56, 169). His modesty had its
limits.
In a time of widespread cultural interest in issues of conformity, surveil-
lance, privacy, and public confession, Lowell’s poetry – along with that of
Ginsberg, Sexton, Plath, and others – gathered cultural anxieties and desires
together in a compelling way. It turned out to be a way that has intrigued
readers and empowered poets ever since. Poets are still inventing new
languages for the exploration of personal, domestic, and inter-subjective
spaces. This exploration has become a central endeavor for contemporary
lyric poets and increasingly for those influenced by Language poetry. Lowell
and his cohort stumbled into a new terrain for poetry, or perhaps they pur-
posefully broke through to it.
Lowell later reflected that getting his personal story and memories into
Life Studies was largely “a technical problem, as most problems in poetry
are” (Interviews 83). Perhaps we might say that his “breakthrough” was not
into experience but into a new permutation of free verse, one quite differ-
ent from that practiced by his mentors. Having nothing to do with breath
and only something to do with conversation, Lowell’s free verse occupied a
shifting borderland between free verse and traditional versification. If rhyme
and meter originally had mnemonic purposes for oral recitation, Lowell
reimagined them as fleeting features just palpable enough to reveal the arti-
ficial nature of the discourse and to provide an almost jazz-like pleasure.
Lowell’s free verse, enhanced by fragments or samples of traditional pros-
ody, foregrounded the tension between self-disclosure and verbal design that
set his project in motion. He had developed a technique that simultaneously
reached out to generic memory and to linguistic play.
Lowell observed that his poems achieved their contradictory density in
“four or five different ways” (Interviews 41). He composed “Commander
Lowell” in regular meter and rhyme, which he then dismantled in revision,
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leaving shards of the original devices to appear and disappear unpredict-

ably in the final text. Conversely, he wrote “My Last Afternoon with Uncle
Devereux Winslow” as prose and then revised it into poetry with flashes
of meter, off-rhyme, assonance, and consonance. He composed and kept
“To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage” in iambic couplets, though with
different numbers of feet per line. And he gave “Skunk Hour” six-line stan-
zas in which many lines rhyme but none scans. Whether metered or not,
rhythm remained crucial to Lowell’s new style because “the rhythm is the
person himself” (Interviews 34). Most of the poems have a superabundance
of sonic effects, deployed in arbitrary fashion. The poems vibrate with a
contradictory sense of freedom and artifice, of real-seeming memories and
foregrounded style. Technique then was the arena in which Lowell explored
and problematized the border between the figure of the poet and the fig-
ure a poem makes. His autobiographical poems appeared to be an escape
from poetry while actually being an immersion in it. They built something
new and generative out of the remains of past poetic practice. Collages of
remembrance, they are just as importantly pastiches of loved poetic devices.
They say, “I am a poem” even while adding, “I am not just a poem.”
Technique, however, is never the whole story. The key to the power of
the “Life Studies” sequence is that it tells a story and uses lyric poems to
tell it. It’s not a great story, as Lowell himself knew, but it’s a relatable one,
and it only gains interest upon rereading. Perhaps it’s accurate to say that
you come for the story and you stay for the way the story is told. On both
macro and micro levels, the text begins off center and gradually homes in
on its essential topic. The result is a pattern of an ever-thickening structure
suddenly yielding a surprise – that is, a dance between the familiar and the
strange.
We see this pattern on the macro level in the unsettling way the chrono-
logical structure of Part I folds back on itself in Part II. The familiar stabi-
lizing element of time passages, signaled by the recurrent highlighting of
dates and the speaker’s age, disappears as Part II loops back to the events
just preceding “Waking in the Blue” and then (in “Memories of West Street
and Lepke”) loops back again to an even earlier time. Uncovering the diffi-
cult material the chronological narrative has repressed, Part II zeroes in on
domestic disappointment (“Memories of West Street and Lepke”), marital
conflict (“Man and Wife”), sexual aggression and impotence (“To Speak of
Woe That Is in Marriage”), and finally loneliness, voyeurism, and mental
disorder (“Skunk Hour”).
We see this pattern of familiarity leading to discovery recur on the level of
the individual poem as well. For example, “My Last Afternoon with Uncle
Devereux Winslow” begins with a scene from the child’s broken home life: he
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shouts to his parents at Sunday dinner, “I won’t go with you, I want to stay
with Grandpa!” (Poems 163). The poem contrasts his discord with his par-
ents to his harmony with his grandparents. The style complicates conversa-
tional rhythms with a startling array of dictions and an extensive network of
irregular off rhymes (water-dinner-summer-farms-poplars; Norman-garden;
pine-pioneering). The only line in the first verse-paragraph that doesn’t end
in an off rhyme is that first dissonant rebuke to the parents – an exception
that highlights the rebellion articulated in the line and indeed the poem. But
the poem’s very last verse-paragraph reveals a till-then unspoken detail that
gives new focus to the entire poem: “My Uncle was dying at twenty-nine”
(Poems 166). The poem thus moves unexpectedly from an already momen-
tous topos, the shattered family, to one even more destabilizing: the presence
of death. The dissonance of the poem’s initial unrhymed line is counterpoised
by the poem’s awkward last couplet, which refers back to the poem’s recur-
rent image of black earth and white lime: “Come winter, / Uncle Devereux
would blend to the one color” (Poems 167).
A similar pattern of an already disturbing scene eventually yielding a fur-
ther shock occurs in “Commander Lowell.” The poem begins with a depic-
tion of the mother-son dyad, indicating the father’s insignificance even in
a poem named for him. When he does finally appear, he is far from com-
manding: “ ‘Anchors aweigh,’ Daddy boomed in his bathtub” (Poems 173).
The childlike father receives no praise, and the poem offers little consola-
tion for his demise. If “My Last Afternoon” surprises us by turning into an
elegy, “Commander Lowell” disturbs us by hardly being one. “Sailing Home
from Rapallo” similarly deflates the figure of the dead mother. In the open-
ing lines, we encounter the speaker expressing a more or less traditional
grief: “tears ran down my cheeks” (Poems 179). But by the end, he wears
an unnerving smile: “The corpse,” he says, “was wrapped like panetone in
Italian tinfoil.” The corpse, not even her corpse. Once an eminence capa-
ble of elbowing her husband aside, she has now disappeared from her own
poem, leaving a loaf of festive bread in her stead.
The pattern of deferred shock reaches its apogee in “Skunk Hour.” Lowell
explained: “The first four stanzas are meant to give a dawdling more or less
amiable picture of a declining Maine sea town . . . Then all comes alive in
stanzas V and VI.”8 Again, his wandering description enfolds a revelation
that troubles the preceding discourse: “I myself am hell” (Poems 192). The
poem and the sequence lead to this. Afterward the poem recovers its rueful
humor while implying the ironies of survival.
Lowell continued to employ a personal mode throughout the rest of his
career, though for some years he resisted returning to the autobiographi-
cal. He had a congenital fear of repeating himself. The autobiographical
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topos eventually revived in some of the diary-like poems first collected in

Notebook 1967–68 and then revised in Notebook, History, and For Lizzie
and Harriet. He carried the story even further in The Dolphin, a sequence
based on his love for Caroline Blackwood, the birth of their son Sheridan, his
divorce from Elizabeth Hardwick, and his troubled marriage to Blackwood.
Whereas Lowell intended Life Studies to be as clear as a photograph album,
The Dolphin was opaque. It was a dream vision of events, composed “under
heavy [Thorazine],” a counterpoint of “introspection and art speculation.”9
Lowell returned to his autobiographical voice one more time, in Day by
Day. Rather than tell a recollected story (as in Life Studies), and rather
than frame his reflections in sonnets (as in Notebook 1967–68), Day by
Day casts about for topics in the least ornamented style of Lowell’s career.
As he wrote to me, “I fear it comes close to tragic, though that’s not clear
either in the book or life” (Letters 671). Perhaps the volume’s key poem is
“Unwanted.” No off rhymes, sound play, or traditional meter here. No “eva-
sion,” either, the term he uses in “Unwanted” to dismiss the “Life Studies”
sequence (Poems 831). Nothing but meditations on himself and his mother.
He asks: “Is the one unpardonable sin” (echoing but altering Hawthorne’s
“Ethan Brand”) “our fear of not being wanted?” (Poems 834). And: Is “art
a way to get well?” Two questions, not answers. But perhaps for Lowell,
they were always the key questions, never asked till now. Having asked
them, he attaches three further poems to the sequence, including one called
“Thanks-Offering for Recovery.” The volume is over, and the career essen-
tially concluded.
Robert Lowell reimagined the autobiographical voice. Few have written
in precisely the autobiographical styles he invented. His poems are too idi-
osyncratic for that; no one could write them but him. Yet in making lyric
poetry accessible to autobiography, he opened a door that many have passed
through. He functioned, in that sense, as a culture hero.
2
Lowell’s public voice sounded at the very outset of his career, in the privately
printed Land of Unlikeness, in his first trade book, Lord Weary’s Castle, and
in a publicly circulated letter to President Franklin Roosevelt refusing the
draft (Prose 367–370). This voice continued to speak, in poetry and other
discursive genres, until the end of his life, though its period of greatest flu-
ency was surely the 1960s, evidenced in such texts as “For the Union Dead,”
“Waking Early Sunday Morning,” “Central Park,” and Notebook 1967–68.
In midcareer, Lowell told Stanley Kunitz that a poem should include a
poet’s “contradictions” (Interviews 85). He described one side of himself as
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“a conventional liberal, concerned with causes, agitated about peace and jus-
tice and equality.” His other side, though, was “deeply conservative, wanting
to get at the root of things, wanting to slow down the whole modern process
of mechanization and dehumanization.” (Interviews 85–86). Clearly, he was
articulating here a conception of conservatism rather different from the ones
prominent in popular discourse today. The point is that Lowell believed that
“all of our compulsions and biases should get in, so that finally we don’t
know what we mean.” This willingness to delve below the ideological ego
and superego to explore the political unconscious has subjected Lowell to
some critique.10 He seemed to turn political poetry into another arena for
inner debate rather than a basis for action.
Lowell’s early work burst at the seams with “compulsions and biases.”
Influenced by such thinkers as Pound, Eliot, Allen Tate, and Etienne
Gilson, Lowell presented himself as an idiosyncratic conservative, condi-
tioned by his New England Puritan influences, his southern agrarian men-
tors, and his newly acquired Roman Catholic beliefs. Jerome Mazzaro
has termed this phase Lowell’s “early politics of apocalypse.”11 Lowell
himself eventually looked back and ruefully commented, “I thought that
civilization was going to break down, and instead I did” (Interviews 77).
Lord Weary’s Castle found two strands in the political sphere particularly
to condemn. The first was the materialism and uniformity bred by cor-
porate capitalism. He japed in the opening lines of “Concord” that “ten
thousand Fords are idle here” in search of “a tradition” (Poems 30). The
poem suggests that the pallid affirmations of the Unitarian Church, as
Emerson called them, ultimately proved powerless to control “Mammon’s
unbridled industry.” The second, worse strand of our politics was war
and the drive for dominion. “Concord” ends by mourning the Indians
slaughtered in King Philip’s War or Metacom’s Rebellion (1675–1678). In
Lowell’s view, it was not the revolutionists’ “shot” that was “heard round
the world,” as Emerson put it, but rather Metacom’s “scream” whose
“echo girdled this imperfect globe.” As we will see, the early, “conserva-
tive” Lowell had much in common with the “liberal” and at times radical
figure he later became.
In Life Studies, Lowell flagged his turn from “the city of God” to a sec-
ular “tragic liberalism.”12 He did so overtly in the sonnet “Inauguration
Day: January 1953,” which mourns Eisenhower’s election in imagery of
iron and ice, paralysis and death. The bathos of “the Republic summons
Ike” says it all (Poems 117). One imagines a pause between the first three
words and the fourth as if to say, is this all you can come up with? Not even
“General Dwight David Eisenhower,” the crusader in Europe, but rather
the anodyne, smiling stick figure of “Ike”? Moreover, Lowell implicitly
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undermines his own cultural privilege throughout Life Studies. He admires

or identifies himself with various social others: a “mad Negro soldier”; a
Jewish “great-great-Grandfather”; “gangs of Irish, Negroes, Latins”; “an
older girl”; a “homosexual” poet; “Agrippina” the Younger; a buffoon-
ish mental patient also named “Bobbie”; a “fairy decorator”; and finally a
“mother skunk.” The self-certain young male poet of Lord Weary’s Castle
has remade himself as a fragile figure unsure even of his ethnicity, class, gen-
der, sexuality, or sanity. In such ways, even the most autobiographical poems
take on public meanings.
The title poem of For the Union Dead represents a high point in Lowell’s
development as a political poet. Like some other poets of his generation,
he sought to recover a public world and in some small way to heal it. His
autobiographical voice does sound in the poem, recalling visits to the old
South Boston Aquarium, which is “boarded” up as the poem commences
and “gone” before it ends (Poems 376–378). But this private voice yields
to a more robust public one, which laments commercialization, war, and
thousands of Fords, in a vein similar to that of “Concord.” The difference
is that there is no framework of institutional religion or cultural nostalgia
to bolster this jeremiad. Lowell has made a move not only to “tragic lib-
eralism” but also toward the free play of postmodernism. Yes, heroic acts
punctuated the past (the sacrifice of Colonel Shaw and the African American
enlisted soldiers), but they continue to happen in the present (the courage
of the “Negro school-children”). Moral horrors have indeed occurred in
the present (“Hiroshima boiling”), but they also occurred in the past (the
“ditch” where Colonel Shaw and the enlisted men were thrown). Perhaps
the poem aims too wildly. What is actually so terrible about those fish-tailed
cars and their parking spaces? But perhaps even there one can appreciate
a moral vision far-seeing enough to include environmental awareness. “For
the Union Dead” sets echoing words (“Servare,” “servility”) and rhyming
images (aquarium “fish,” “finned cars”) into motion, thereby engaging the
public sphere in a new and powerful way.
In 1965 Lowell personally reentered the polis, the space of exposure.
President Lyndon Johnson had invited him to participate in a one-day
Festival of the Arts at the White House. Lowell accepted and then, in light of
the escalating war in Vietnam, recanted the acceptance (Prose 370–371). It
was the second time Lowell had refused a sitting U.S. president. The widely
publicized act had resonance for many Americans, strengthening opposition
to the war. As a result, Lowell became a temporary celebrity. He partici-
pated in the anti-war March on the Pentagon, helped guide Senator Eugene
McCarthy’s anti-war campaign for the presidency, and published two vol-
umes of political poetry.
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The first was Near the Ocean (1967), which tied original poems
together with translations of Horace, Juvenal, and others. In his preface,
Lowell wrote that the connecting theme of the translations “is Rome, the
greatness and horror of her Empire” (Poems 381). He then disingenuously
added, “How one jumps from Rome to the America of my own poems is
something of a mystery to me.” If it was a mystery, Lowell himself was
the only person incapable of solving it. The first original poem, “Waking
Early Sunday Morning,” excoriates the rise of an American empire with its
“hammering military splendor” (Poems 385). In the poem’s final stanza,
arguably the greatest Lowell ever wrote, the speaker eulogizes not simply
a fallen empire but a ruined planet, “a ghost” forever lost in “our monot-
onous sublime” (Poems 386). Another original poem, “Central Park,”
also takes a distinctly Juvenalian tone, observing the nation’s endemic
“stain of fear and poverty” and the “knife” or “club” hidden behind each
bush (Poems 393).
If Lowell’s “Near the Ocean” sequence depended on his rediscovery of
“Marvell’s elegant baroque stanza,” his next book, Notebook 1967–68,
required his development of “unrhymed, loose blank verse sonnets”
(Interviews 156). Although both volumes juxtaposed Lowell’s public
voice with his autobiographical and metapoetic voices, it was the public
tone that dominated. Among the first sonnets Lowell wrote for Notebook
1967–68 were “The March” I and II, composed the very day he par-
ticipated in the Pentagon March (Poems 545–546). These poems were
soon joined by others on Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Che
Guevara, the Napoleonic wars, the Civil War, World War II, the Vietnam
War, the 1968 election campaign, and so on. Although Burton Feldman
critiqued the volume as “protest-placard” poetry,13 it’s not that at all.
It’s a complicated series of meditations on power, nation, and individual
agency.
Lowell reengaged with his political Furies one last time, in his valedic-
tory poem, “George III.” Initially published in Newsweek, the poem com-
pares and at times merges George III with Richard Nixon, both deformed
by mental illness and tyrannical impulse. Yet the poem empathizes with
these “mad, bad” figures, leaving us with rather poignant images of
George III singing a hymn to his harpsichord and Nixon listening dis-
consolately to his own voice on tape (Poems 843–845). Lowell’s public
voice was resolutely complex. He once wrote, “I wish to turn the clock
back with every breath I take, but I hope I have the courage to occasion-
ally cry out against those who wrongly rule us.”14 His cry against others
inevitably involved a self-critical awareness of his own investments in the
iniquities of power.
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3
Lowell’s metapoetic voice complements his private and public ones. Whereas
the other voices speak of people, events, and an inner life inherently separate
from literary discourse, the self-reflexive voice is wholly textual and inter-
textual, making no effort to negotiate the world dimensional. This voice
utters only a written language. One might say that it is Lowell’s most post-
modern voice, though I think that his alternative voices – in addressing the
problematics of author, culture, politics, and form – also qualify as post-
modern. Still, his metapoetic poems provide the spaces in which he most
fully inhabits what J. Hillis Miller calls “the linguistic moment.”15
At first Lowell’s metapoetic voice could be heard mostly through his
translations and imitations, which appeared in almost every volume he pub-
lished. His first trade book, Lord Weary’s Castle, includes at least six such
poems, and his later volume, Imitations, is composed of nothing but. In his
imitations, Lowell engages with precursory poets, playing with both his own
voice and that of the predecessor, and unfixing both frames of reference in
the process.
In a linked strategy, Lowell also deposited the language of others in what
was essentially an original poem. He often took passages from prose, and,
like Kathy Acker, did not identify his sources. For example, “The Quaker
Graveyard in Nantucket” silently adapts sentences from the Bible, Milton,
Thoreau, Melville, Hopkins, and E. I. Watkin’s Catholic Art and Culture.
“Hawthorne” includes almost no words not written by Nathaniel Hawthorne
himself. “George III” takes so much from Oscar Sherwin’s Uncorking Old
Sherry that Lowell defensively labeled it a “translation.”
Another of Lowell’s intertextual strategies was to pay homage to fellow
writers, to celebrate and mourn their unique gift but also to search out cre-
ative qualities they shared with others. This strategy comes to the fore in
Lowell’s poems about Ford, Santayana, Schwartz, and Crane in Life Studies.
It reaches its apogee in History, where numerous poems depict creative mas-
ters from the distant past (Sappho, Cicero) and from Lowell’s personal expe-
rience (Eliot, Pound, Frost, Williams, Bishop, Berryman, Jarrell, Plath).
Another manifestation of Lowell’s metapoetic project was his constant
self-revision, especially in Notebook 1967–68, Notebook, For Lizzie and
Harriet, and History. Some of the revisions there involve alternative phras-
ing, whereas others produce major reversals, as when “these are words”
becomes “we are words” (Poems 600). Lowell’s revisionary practice subverts
the traditional conception of a sovereign author who puts his thoughts into
words and instead interpellates the poem as a differential textual endeavor,
an assemblage of words upon words, something both written and rewritten.
336
The final manifestation of Lowell’s metapoetic voice resides in his late

meditations on his own artistic project. His poems do not ponder themselves,
in the manner of Eliot’s “That was a way of putting it – not very satisfactory.”
Rather, they look back on his oeuvre and try to make sense of it. In “Reading
Myself,” for example, Lowell assesses his poetic production in self-ironizing
ways. He wonders if he’s earned his “grass on the minor slopes of Parnassus,”
taking for granted that his contribution is minor at best (Poems 591). By adding
“circle to circle” in his expanding honeycomb of words, he had hoped to “prove
its maker is alive,” yet his work will only be his “open coffin” in the end.
Perhaps the greatest example of Lowell’s metapoetic voice occurred at the
very end of his poetic career, in the poem called “Epilogue” (Poems 838).
Worrying about the value of an art based on recollection, Lowell’s speaker
persuades himself that his poetics of memory did indeed involve the imag-
ination. He praises the “grace of accuracy,” an enigmatic concept suggest-
ing both precise recall and spiritual well-being. He thus imputes a saving
grace to his poetic aspirations (if not necessarily to his achievements). He
sought to give each textual “figure” its “living name.” In his last published
essay, Lowell similarly prayed that his progress had been “more than recoil-
ing with satiation and disgust from one style to another” (Poems 993). He
hoped “there has been increase of beauty, wisdom, tragedy, and all the bless-
ings of this consuming chance.”
N OT E S
1 Jeffrey Meyers, ed., Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs (Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988): 85. Hereafter Interviews.
2 Christopher Ricks, “The Three Lives of Robert Lowell,” (1965; rpt. The
Critical Response to Robert Lowell, ed. Steven Gould Axelrod (Westport,
CT.: Greenwood Press, 1999): 116–120. My analysis owes much less to T. S.
Eliot’s “The Three Voices of Poetry,” which posits the voice of the poet talking
to himself, addressing an audience, or creating a dramatic character (1953; rpt.
On Poetry and Poets, [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957]: 96).
3 Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, eds. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003): 992. Hereafter Poems.
4 M. S. Rosenthal installed the terminology of confession in his seminal review
“Poetry as Confession” (1959; rpt. Critical Response, note 2: 64–68).
5 Deborah Nelson, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002): 42.
6 James Longenbach, Modern Poetry After Modernism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997): 5.
7 Peter Orr, ed., The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets (London:
Routledge, 1966): 167.
8 Robert Lowell, Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1987): 226. Hereafter Prose.
337
9 Robert Lowell, Selected Letters, ed. Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus

and Giroux, 2005): 671. Hereafter Letters.
10 See, e.g., Philip Metres, Behind the Lines (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,
2007): 27–49.
11 Jerome Mazzaro, “Robert Lowell’s Early Politics of Apocalypse,” Modern
American Poetry, ed. Jerome Mazzaro (New York: McKay, 1970): 321–350.
12 Poems, 113; Lowell quoted in Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and
Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978): 193.
13 Burton Feldman, “Robert Lowell: Poetry and Politics,” Dissent 16 (1969): 550.
14 Robert Lowell, “Liberalism and Activism,” Commentary 74 (April 1969): 19.
15 J. Hillis Miller, The Linguistic Moment (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1985).
F U RT H E R R E A DI N G
Altieri, Charles, The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (London:

Wiley-Blackwell, 2006): 157–173.
Axelrod, Steven Gould, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1978).
ed., The Critical Response to Robert Lowell (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999).
Axelrod, Steven Gould, and Helen Deese, eds., Robert Lowell: New Essays on the
Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Bloom, Harold, ed., Robert Lowell (New York: Chelsea House, 1987).
Doreski, William, Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors: Poetics of the Public and Personal
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999).
Hamilton, Ian, Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1982).
Kearful, Frank J., “ ‘Stand and live’: Tropes of Falling, Rising, Standing in Robert
Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle,” Connotations 17 (2007/2008): 29–60.
Lowell, Robert, Collected Poems, eds. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).
Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987).
Letters, ed. Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).
Mariani, Paul, Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994).
Perloff, Marjorie, The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1973).
Ricks, Christopher, True Friendship (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010):
143–222.
Spiegelman, Willard, Imaginative Transcripts (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009): 247–284.
Spivack, Kathleen, With Robert Lowell and His Circle (Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 2012).
Tillinghast, Richard, Robert Lowell’s Life and Work: Damaged Grandeur (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
Travisano, Thomas, Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, and Berryman
and the Making of a Postmodern Poetics (Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 1999).
ed. Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert
Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
338
Vendler, Helen, “Lowell’s Persistence: The Forms Depression Makes,” Kenyon

Review 22 (Winter 2000): 216–233.
Walcott, Derek, “On Robert Lowell,” New York Review of Books (March 1,
1984): 25–31.
Wallingford, Katherine, Robert Lowell’s Language of the Self (Chapel Hill: University
of North Caroline Press, 1988).
Williamson, Alan Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).
339

The Three Voices of Robert Lowell

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24

The Three Voices of Robert Lowell

So much of the effort of the poem is to arrive at something

I take as my starting point Christopher Ricks’s generative review of Lowell’s

monologue and refocusing subject matter on heretofore private matters.

leaving shards of the original devices to appear and disappear unpredict-

topos eventually revived in some of the diary-like poems first collected in

undermines his own cultural privilege throughout Life Studies. He admires

The final manifestation of Lowell’s metapoetic voice resides in his late

1 Jeffrey Meyers, ed., Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs (Ann

9 Robert Lowell, Selected Letters, ed. Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus

Altieri, Charles, The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (London:

Vendler, Helen, “Lowell’s Persistence: The Forms Depression Makes,” Kenyon

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