Rebellious Authority: Robert Lowell and Milton at Midcentury

Abstract

Robert Lowell's most memorable lines undermine, negate, and denounce: each phase of his career rejected one source of value and authority in the name of another, which Lowell rejected in its turn. The story of Lowell's negations and rebellions also and therefore makes a story about the changing grounds of his poetic authority. As several writers have explained, Lowell's early embrace of New Critical poetics, along with his apocalyptic Catholicism, served him as ways of rejecting his own genteel New England Protestant ancestors and the secular history which they had helped to make. Frequently noticed but never addressed at length, Lowell's frequent deployment of Miltonic devices, echoes, and allusions served him as ways to reject or rebel against the orthodoxies about poetry which Lowell had slightly earlier embraced. Milton's short poems helped the young Lowell develop his distinctive persona and tone, one that could sound at once authoritative and iconoclastic. His early uses of Milton can give us not only ways of reading Lowell, but also insights into the reception of Milton himself, who presented to the poets and critics of midcentury America a very different face from any he presents now.