The World Out-Herods Herod

Abstract

The World Out-Herods Herod Robert Lowell. Collected Poems. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2003. 1186 pp. $45.00 Sometimes, however, to be a 'ruined man' is itself a vocation. -T.S. Eliot Robert Lowell's death might have been the last scene of a mordant opera bouffe. After the collapse of his third marriage, he had flown to New York to reconcile with his previous wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. On the way from the airport, he suffered a heart attack, dying so phlegmatically the cabbie didn't notice. When the taxi drew up before Hardwick's apartment building, the dead poet was slouched in the back seat, his arms cradling a mysterious package. Unwrapping it hours or days later, Hardwick found herself staring at a portrait of Caroline Blackwood, the woman for whom Lowell had left her. A poet often falls into neglect as he is lowered into the grave, particularly if he has been identified with his time. When a reputation is pulled down, razed like a rotten building, it may not be rebuilt for decades or centuries, if ever. We are unlikely now to see the resurrection of Bryant or Whittier, or even Longfellow. Lowell was the most brilliant American poet after the moderns, richer and more complex in instinct than any poet we have had since. His long-delayed, spatchcocked, and jury-rigged Collected Poems, a thousand and more pages long, prepares his belated revival. At the close of World War II, a young American poet could look around nervous about his prospects. The major poets were older, even much older, though still vital and uncomfortable figures-who knew what yawps might issue from the caged Pound (and The Pisan Cantos came), what morose keenings from Eliot might follow Four Quartets? Stevens, the most unusual insurance man who ever lived, had only recently published Esthetique du mal and Notes toward a Supreme Fiction. Dr. Williams had yet to publish Paterson, or the better meditative poems that surrounded it. Something might still be expected from Frost and Marianne Moore. When young, these aging gods had given English poetry a shock as galvanic as the Romantics. In scarcely a decade, roughly from Pound's Ripostes in 1912 to Moore's Observations in 1924, the force and tactics of modern verse had been imagined, investigated, and installed. A century later, there has been little formal innovation the moderns did not think of first, or execute with more intensity and spirit. Poets born too late might be forgiven for thinking they were born too late. One did not have to be daunted by the governing reputations (including newer ones like Auden's) to feel that the times were not propitious, that there was little to do except write in the shadows of greater poets. Looking back we can see how little resistance other young poets offered to Lowell's moody, feral intelligence, or to lines manufactured like hawsers in the glowing mills once used by Webster and Shakespeare. War poets like Karl Shapiro and Randall Jarrell, wild men like Delmore Schwartz and Theodore Roethke, dapper young elegants like Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, or a poet charming and trivial (it seemed then) as Elizabeth Bishop-none could withstand a poetry of such physical force. What is surprising six decades later is not that a hurricane could blow down all the houses in sight, but that critics believed poetry should be measured on the Beaufort scale. Lowell's poems were conceived within the great tradition, so much a matter of history and histories, of the private chronology of family and the public one of war and peace, they were laid down book by book like layers of archeology. Behind every poem there were other poems. Lord Weary's Castle (1946) Behind Lowell's first book, indeed, lay the chapbook he had published two years earlier, Land of Unlikeness. Introduced by Alien Tate, printed by a distinguished small press in an edition of only 250 copies, it had been reviewed with unusual respect for a limited edition by an unknown poet. …