Lowell's "Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line"

Abstract

HE POEMS OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL seem structurally deficient AL to many critics, one whom (George Arms) asserts that Lowell 44regularly commits himself to formlessness. Vision Sir Launfal has been called (by Odell Shepard) one worst constructed poems in English. Though a more appreciative recent critic insists that a volume of considerable literary merit might be culled from Lowell's writings, he admits that would be made up passages and parts, not wholes.' Even the dialect poems The Biglow Papers, Lowell's most enduring poetic achievement, have seemed interest not for their intrinsic, but for their extrinsic poetic qualities-dialect, Yankee humor, political satire and polemics, etc.2 It is not surprising, therefore, that such a much-admired poem as Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line in the Second Series The Biglow Papers is invariably praised for its parts, especially the descriptive introduction, and not the whole. The language praise employed by Lowell's early biographer suggests structural deficiency in the poem: according to Scudder, before arriving at the truth he wished to press, Lowell needs first clear his throat by a long sweet draught nature.3 George Arms, whose new critical therapy for the school-room poets is least beneficial to Lowell, refers to the controlled improvisation the poem, which coheres loosely by the demand for a realistic view native life, whether nature or politics, but it must be admitted that the links are weak both in appearance and in actuality.4 My own opinion is that a much