Robert Lowell: Payment Gat He Nane

Abstract

place to begin is with the Aeneid. Not because Lowell started reading the classics after his second year at Harvard, or because his poems are full of classi cal allusions and imitations of Vergil, although these facts are part of the pic ture. reason for my starting there is that Vergil, in creating Aeneas, is so remarkably close to Lowell's own position both as man in history and as artist. Much of the Vergilian melancholy is due to his feeling of the movement of Roman history: the loss of the past and the stature of the early Romans, the growing complexity and importance of the state and the law, limiting the scope of individual action and importance. Aeneid itself is almost an example, a commissioned panegyric which manages, because of Vergil's greatness, not to be only that. One could elaborate more, but the point should be clear to a reader of Lowell who has experienced his nostalgia for the old order?the period of this country's greatness, and his own family's. was in the same kind of transi tional state that Lowell is in, with the melancholy feeling that history is over, that we are marking time waiting for some new development which may or may not be desirable?the end of everything, or a totally new beginning. This spirit was common in England in the nineteenth century, while America was still po tentially a new world. It has hit America even harder in the twentieth century, because we are so close to our own heroic past, so aware of the nature of the change without being able to understand it. In the twenties Hart Crane set out to become the Vergil of the new world, only to learn that the world was no longer new and to become, ironically, even more Vergilian in the process of dis covery. In many ways, Lowell begins Life Studies (1959) at a point Crane reached only in The Tunnel section of Bridge: the explicit recognition that an older mode of vision produced only illusion or madness. But even before Life Studies, with its major change in direction, he had struck the note of experi ence as a diminished thing?first, as a spiritual phenomenon, where the failure or