HISTORY. By Robert Lowell. Faber & Faber. £2.95.
FOR LIZZIE AND HARRIET. By Robert Lowell. Faber & Faber. £1.40.
THE DOLPHIN. By Robert Lowell. Faber & Faber. £1.75.

A GOOD MANY critics have paid their routine respects to the scale of what Robert Lowell has done in Notebook and in History, its latest revised version. He aims at world stature — the argument seems to be — both in themes and in personal achievement as a poet, and although he may not wholly succeed we should respect him — in this age of hole-and-corner over-privatised poetry etc., etc. — for at least trying. But should we really?

     ‘About 80 of the poems in History are new,’ Lowell tells us in his prefatory note to that volume, ‘the rest are taken from my last published poem, Notebook begun six years ago. All the poems have been changed, some heavily. . . . My old title, Notebook, was more accurate than I wished, i.e. the composition was jumbled. I hope this jumble or jungle is cleared — that I have cut the waste marble from the figure’. As well as History Lowell gives us — also reorganised from Notebook — a sequence about his last marriage, called For Lizzie and Harriet, and a new sequence called The Dolphin which is mainly about his present one. The three books have appeared simultaneously in America and in England (where Lowell now lives) and run to a total of some 535 poems. 368 of these make up History. All the poems, with trivial exceptions, are — as in Notebook — in fourteen lines.

     Unlike the jumble or jungle of Notebook, History is arranged chronologically by its ostensible subject-matter. Beginning in mythic and Biblical times we are taken on a long journey through recorded history with the names of several score of famous historical personages as our main stopping-places. When we eventually reach our own times and the poet himself comes on the scene, the scope widens to include contemporary politics, people (frequently artists) the poet has known and a variety of things and events he has experienced or reacted to. History has its sources not only in Notebook but also in Lowell’s other early poetry, a good deal of which is cannibalised or else simply re-written into the new fourteen-line form; it also contains a lot of translations, some of them re-written from Imitations and other early books. If Notebook (‘my last published poem’) is a poem, then History, with all its further re-orderings and revisions, must presumably be even more of one. The indications are, in fact, that Lowell’s whole poetic output may from now on be eligible for this process of self-digestion, the resulting enormous work-in-progress being offered to us as a continuously mutating single poem. But one might also wonder if the revisions are heading in a very sensible direction: the jumble or jungle of Notebook seems in many ways a more fertile arrangement (if there is fertility here at all) than the would-be objective chronologising of History with its rather arbitrary hiving-off of more intimate matters into another volume.

     The more so since History is thoroughly personal anyway. The real raison d’être of nearly all the famous names who crowd these pages, from Sappho and Alexander through Napoleon and Goethe to Robert Kennedy and Sylvia Plath, seems to be as pegs to hang Robert Lowell poems on. Sometimes this is more or less explicit: there is a poem which begins

My live telephone swings crippled to solitude
two feet from my ear; as so often and so often,
I hold your dialogue away to breathe —
still this is love, Old Cato forgoing his wife

and spends the rest of its fourteen lines talking about Old Cato (the poem is called ‘Marcus Cato 284-149 B.C.’). Or there is one called ‘Cleopatra Topless’, which in its Notebook version was just called ‘Topless’ and had no mention of Cleopatra — about a girl in a nightclub:

She was the old foundation of western marriage . . .
One was not looking for a work of art —
what do men want? Boobs, bottoms, legs . . . in that order —
the one thing necessary that most husbands
want and yet forgo. She’s Cleopatra,
no victim of strict diet, but fulfilment . . .

Sometimes, when the poems are more obviously about what they claim to be about, we get flashes of insight put across with all of Lowell’s compressed rhetorical power: Coleridge, for example —

his alderman’s stroll to positive negation —
his passive courage is paralysis,
standing him upright like tenpins for the strike,
only kept standing by a hundred scared habits . . .
a large soft-textured plant with pith within,
power without strength, an involuntary imposter.

Or more reflectively, Goethe,

past rationalism and irrationalism,
saved by humor and wearying good health,
hearing his daemon’s cold corrosive whisper
chill his continuous ardor for young girls.

Half- (or even quarter-)truths, perhaps — and comparison with Notebook shows bits of the Coleridge poem starting life in a poem about Lowell himself — but still worth having. At other times, and often in poems which hardly succeed in bringing their subjects to life at all, there are lines which are themselves full of life and which any poet might be glad to have written:

Down there, below a bridge, his back on the arch,
Hannibal listens, thoughtful, glorying,
to the dead tramp of the advancing Roman legions.

Occasionally there is something which almost seems done with love — like the death of Anne Boleyn:

Her jailor told her that beheading is painless —
‘It is subtle.’ ‘I have a little neck,’
she said, and put her hands about it laughing.
Her Husband hoped she’d have small displeasure in her death —
no foreigners, though by the King’s abundance
the scene was open to any Englishman.

But if we ask why this is so good, and where its real emotional roots lie, we are back with the difficulties that underlie Lowell’s whole revision programme: Anne’s death has a lot more to do with the privacies of For Lizzie and Harriet than with the powerful figures who are made to jostle her in History.

     Obviously it is not history that Lowell is writing. There are times when the historical vehicle takes over — moments of empathy, briefly and capriciously sustained — but for the most part the history in these poems is present only as exploratory metaphor: at the centre of them we find the poet himself and his already well-documented concerns and anxieties. Lowell — no chameleon poet — is ransacking the universe for emotional support. If there were doubt about this it would be resolved by the poems’ diction alone: as with the translations, the idiom is unmistakable Lowell—febrile, spiked with anachronisms, harshly ultra-American. Orestes wonders whether he can call the police against his own family, Cicero is garrulous on a sofa of magazines, Trojan chivalry is shit, and so on. Lowell’s diction is a unique poetic argot, powerful enough on occasions but also guaranteed to deracinate an experience from anywhere except the corpus of this one poet’s work. It would be possible to suppose that Lowell’s imperious colonising of history expressed some kind of half-buried philosophy — about the unchangingness of human nature perhaps, or some version of the eternal return. One is reminded sometimes of Auden’s almost geological readings of our cultural past. But Auden’s interest was always quizzical and detached; here it is inescapably the poet’s own world which is the real subject and to which everything is appropriated, and within that world it is the poet himself. History eventually homes in on the present, and when it does so the poetry — though almost always rather boring in its assumption that the poet’s self-preoccupation and most casual experiences must eo ipso be interesting to a reader — is not particularly problematical. Lowell can be momentarily engaging in lines like

Can I suppose I am finished with wax flowers
and have earned my grass on the minor slopes of Parnassus. . .

but otherwise (and one doubts anyway if the minor slopes would do) the second half of History is mostly self-centred biographical material without any of the power or poetic urge behind it of Life Studies or For the Union Dead, with which it is in some ways continuous; the metaphorical tension is collapsed almost entirely and we are made to follow the poet in his unrelieved self-involvement. Such interest as the poems have is mainly borrowed from their subjects, as when they touch on publicly known events or persons. It is the earlier, more historical-looking poems of History which are the most rewarding; they have an air of would-be tour de force about them, even of vulgarity — rather as Pound’s Propertius did — but they also contain most of the book’s poetry. They are poems about Lowell in the guise of poems about something else; proof perhaps — if we needed it — that egocentricity works better as a subject for poetry than as a faute de mieux substitute for it.

The privacies of For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin are really very much a part of History — like details from a larger canvas — even though they are assigned to their separate volumes. The essential subject is still Lowell himself, since the relationships dealt with only really establish themselves in their capacity as sources of concern for the poet. There are some impressive lines, but they nearly always arise out of the poet’s meditations on his own destiny, on the possibility of happiness, or on his ultimate solitude:

The warm day brings out wasps to share our luck,
suckers for sweets, pilots of evolution;
dozens drop in the beercans, clamber, buzz,
debating like us whether to stay and drown,
or, by losing legs and wings, take flight.

Or

                                  We are at home and warm,
as if we had escaped the gaping jaws —
underneath us like a submarine,
nuclear and protective like a mother,
swims the true shark, the shadow of departure.

No one but the poet himself is convincingly realised in these poems — and it seems ironical that some of the most moving lines in these two books should appear as part of a letter written to Lowell by someone else:

‘ . . . I love you, Darling, there’s a black black void,
as black as night without you. I long to see
your face and hear your voice, and take your hand —
I’m watching a scruffy, seal-colored woodchuck graze
on weeds, then lift his greedy snout and listen;
then back to speedy feeding. He weighs a ton,
and has your familiar human aspect munching.’

And yet: whether Lowell wrote these lines, or half-wrote them, or merely came by them in something written by someone else, it was Lowell who put them in a poem, and the result is poetry.

     How much does Lowell’s egocentricity matter? Not at all, perhaps, in the sense that any strong feeling can be a source of poetry. It does on the other hand seem to undermine the rather obvious drive to greatness which all these poems exhibit. Lowell, like John Berryman has allowed his life — if one can judge by the poetry — to be consumed in the effort to produce art, and the result is a moral impoverishment at the heart of the poetry itself. If poetic greatness can be driven towards at all it would seem to require a more subtle and flexible approach than Lowell has so far shown himself capable of. Lowell’s way with words in these latest books is as gladiatorial and unsubmissive as ever; his ability to remain in doubts and mysteries seems as untried as it was when he took the universe by the throat in Land of Unlikeness and Lord Weary’s Castle. What is miraculous is that in the interstices of all this personal turmoil he has been able to give us poetry at all. Like an anxious swimmer who flounders more and more desperately instead of trusting himself to the water, Lowell seems unable to relax and simply allow things to happen. Is he perhaps haunted by the fate of the powerful throughout history, like Napoleon —

All gone like the smoke of his own artillery?

And yet in the teeth of all the probabilities he has produced his poetry.

In Lord Weary’s Castle Lowell dealt with his personal problems in religious guise, but what was most striking was not so much the vehicle chosen as the savage manhandling of language and rhythm with which the poems were put together. On the face of it nothing could be less religious — and in the end perhaps, by the same token, nothing could be less genuinely poetic. The emotional material of these poems is never for one moment allowed to discover and declare the verbal rhythms which will properly express it; it is treated instead as an antecedently and separately known thing which needs to be forcibly manipulated — and which is in fact buckled into antecedently and separately chosen poetic metres. The violence with which this is done is really the true subject of the poetry, or rather its subject manqué; but it remains almost entirely uncomprehended and has no proper embodiment in what the poems say. Starting to read ‘Colloquy in Black Rock’ we may wonder what the poem is going to be about —

Here the jack-hammer jabs into the ocean;
My heart, you race and stagger and demand
More blood-gangs for your nigger-brass percussions,
Till I, the stunned machine of your devotion,
Clanging upon this cymbal of a hand,
Am rattled screw and footloose . . .

— but what follows doesn’t really enlighten us; the rhythm of the poem as a whole suggests if anything a rather mechanical kind of sexuality, but this is unconfirmed by anything the words say, and the clutter of vehicle and metaphor which makes up the remaining stanzas — though (like anything else) it can be laboriously sorted through and explicated, and even has its moments of unmistakably resembling poetry — nowhere comes near to liberating an actual poem. Lowell’s spectacular abandonment of this kind of formal fanaticism in his Life Studies sequence was surely his liberation as a poet. Behind the low-keyed diction and the understated, bitten-off emotion of the Life Studies poems we can sense the poet facing up to the possible chaos and emptiness of life and doing so without any religious mitigation or bombast; and against this possible chaos or emptiness we see Lowell measuring himself and his own life. By taking himself as subject, and by seeing himself as exemplary for all of us, Lowell achieved an authentic impersonality in his verse despite the extreme subjectivity of its surface manner. The authenticity was also underwritten by charm and humour, qualities which these poems share with the autobiographical piece 91 Revere Street but which were not very conspicuous in the earlier verse. (Lowell’s decision to write Life Studies as verse rather than prose is surely one of the happiest near-accidents of modern poetry.) The process begun in Life Studies is carried further in For the Union Dead, where Lowell’s concern with survival is projected outwards into a concern for the survival of anything of enduring human value and into a controlled anger on behalf of all humanity against what is being done to us. This is Lowell’s first move towards historical and political material, and together with some of the poems of Life Studies it begins to seem now like the high point, both poetically and morally, of his work. In a poem like ‘The Mouth of the Hudson’ the real world is there, just as the real other people of Life Studies are there, and the buried rhymes, the blurring of transitives and intransitives and the many other Lowellian hallmarks of the diction (which even so remains low-profile and near-to-naturalistic) combine to convey the frustration which is the poem’s subject:

A single man stands like a bird-watcher,
and scuffles the pepper and salt snow
from a discarded, gray
Westinghouse Electric cable drum.
He cannot discover America by counting
the chains of condemned freight-trains
from thirty states. They jolt and jar
and junk in the siding below him.
He has trouble with his balance.
His eyes drop,
and he drifts with the wild ice
ticking seaward down the Hudson,
like the blank sides of a jig-saw puzzle.

The ice ticks seaward like a clock.
A Negro toasts
wheat-seeds over the coke-fumes
of a punctured barrel.

Chemical air
sweeps in from New Jersey,
and smells of coffee.

Across the river,
ledges of suburban factories tan
in the sulphur-yellow sun
of the unforgivable landscape.

The more elaborate title poem of For the Union Dead has many of the same qualities. These poems find their own rhythms — and they are allowed to do so. Despite the central place which most of them give to Lowell’s personal anxieties, the anxieties are redeemed as poetry by being located in a recognisable and shareable world; the comparatively low-keyed diction ensures that this world is created in the poem rather than appropriated into it; the poet speaks for himself and for us all.

     It looks as though Lowell’s humanitarian phase could now be over. His concern with the common fate seems to have dwindled and hardened into a concern with personal survival and fame; the poetry has curved back into an egocentricity of content which matches the egocentricity of form with which it started out. Lowell’s publication of Notebook was an act of arrogance which a less famous poet would never have been allowed to get away with, and his talk of cutting ‘the waste marble from the figure’ in the transition from Notebook to History only compounds the pretence that something seriously poetic (not to say immortal) is going on. In fact there is rarely anything resembling a figure in these recent poems — or for that matter anything resembling marble. They are almost wholly kinetic in nature — untransmuted (if personally hallmarked) passages from life and history — with only rare moments that approach any kind of artistic stasis. Almost any quotation from the later part of History — whatever its interest as subject-matter — would serve to illustrate the extent of this artistic impoverishment.

     What can have happened to bring this state of affairs about? The most likely explanation is that Lowell’s poetic activity has come to seem — when put to the real test as it was in the Life Studies and Union Dead period — the only durable thing that the poet could find to hold on to, the only re-birth of meaning possible from the ashes of his religious belief. From this discovery onwards the commitment to poetry seems to have eaten its way backwards into the poet’s life — leaving very little time, in the end, for life itself. This malignant development has meant that the lived moments of life are undermined as lived moments and have meaning only as prospective occasions for poetry; no possibility of self-forgetfulness remains, or of poetry-forgetfulness: the poet is condemned to be more or less permanently on duty, his eye and mind continuously alert. It is here, perhaps, after his abandonment of formal religion that Lowell’s puritan temperament most clearly manifests itself: the condition he seems to have reached is a kind of aesthetic version of Calvinism, with poetry — instead of God — dominating every moment, and with the need always to worry (but inevitably fruitlessly) about whether one is saved and immortal. This curious combination of egotism and productivity is at some kind of opposite pole from Catholicism, which Lowell once tried to espouse, with its more amiably human cycle of sin, repentance and atonement. Keats once spoke of the poet as drifting between life and art, but for Lowell such a thing is clearly impossible; one cannot imagine him becoming a sparrow and picking about in the gravel. Nor can one imagine him taking some self-effacingly oriental turn in his future work (for which we should perhaps be respectfully grateful). It is hard to see what might now break into this circle of life apparently lived for poetry and poetry made almost exclusively out of the life lived for it. ‘The artist finds new life in his art and almost sheds his other life’, Lowell said in an interview as long ago as 1965. But how far can such a process go and still leave either life or art? The almost-shed life which remains ends up only as echoes of life, the fulfilments of other people, the young in one another’s arms. The only fulfilment left for the poet himself is fame, which is dust also. He remains excluded from serenity. Lowell speaks in one of the poems of History of being ‘Overtrained for England . . .‘, but really it seems more a matter of being overtrained for poetry. In these latest poems Lowell has opened up his poetic engine and it is going flat-out; everything is consumed into the verse. But it is verse which in its compulsive energy reflects the very world that it tries to repudiate; there is a bragging frenzy about the productivity itself and about much of the actual poetry which is wholly American. Lowell’s poetry seems at times like one of the death-throes of Puritan America.

     But when all this has been said it must also be said that Lowell seems aware enough of the position he is now in. In one of the poems of History Randall Jarrell appears to him in a dream saying

                  ‘ . . . What kept you so long,
racing the cooling grindstone of your ambition?
You didn’t write, you rewrote . . .’

A poem in The Dolphin talks of

the reviewer sent by God to humble me
ransacking my bags of dust for silver spoons —
he and I go on typing to go on living . . .

and another of

                             the transcendence
I fiddled for imperiously and too long.

It is The Dolphin, in fact, which seems to offer Lowell some kind of hope and possibility of release. The dolphin — at other times mermaid or woman — is an intermediary between the poet and the flashing fish of life itself. The opening poem, called ‘Fishnet’, begins

Any clear thing that blinds us with surprise,
your wandering silences and bright trouvailles,
dolphin let loose to catch the flashing fish. . .

But it also ends

Yet my heart rises, I know I’ve gladdened a lifetime
knotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope;
the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten,
nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.

With this Yeatsian metaphor Lowell turns his dolphin into an instrument, subservient ultimately to his own catching of the fish. Life is subjugated to art, and the hope — though it is a real hope — seems to be for more and better art rather than for a release from the whole over— imperious artistic commitment. Or is it? In another poem we read

‘ . . . I am a woman or  I am a dolphin,
the only animal man really loves,
I spout the smarting waters of joy in your face —
rough weather fish, who cuts your nets and chains.’

Is this Lowell’s real hope of release? The poetry at times suggests it but doesn’t — or doesn’t yet — embody it. It is still the poet and his fishnet which dominate the stage. Lowell tells us at one point that

After fifty so much joy has come,
I hardly want to hide my nakedness —
the shine and stiffness of a new suit, a feeling,
not wholly happy, of having been reborn.

Could not the poet live with his joy for a bit and let poetry take what course it will?

     What we look for in poetry, directly or indirectly, is images of hope or beauty or fulfilment. The poet’s task is to find these. Not to find them in the modern world is one thing, and the failure to find them is a source of one kind of modern poetry. But not to find them anywhere in life at all is to verge on a bankruptcy both poetic and personal. At times Lowell has come near to this. We are left by his latest three volumes with only the slenderest sense of a world out there to be trusted or believed in. There are glimmerings of hope, particularly in The Dolphin, but they amount to very little in terms of realised poetry — and they are not helped in any case by the structural enfeeblement of all this recent work. The verse in these books is almost without exception rhythmically dead, and the fourteen-line form with its sloppy pentameters amounts virtually to a formal abdication. In too many of these poems one feels the poet trying simply for something which will click as poetry; mostly it doesn’t, but the fourteen-line form enables him to stop after fourteen lines without a feeling of awful inconsequentiality. Without the fourteen-line receptacle the majority of these poems would never know when to stop — or perhaps would never have had the courage to start. Once they are given this undemanding space to expand into the poems spend most of their time courting luck for a good image or ending. Lowell has improved individual lines from the Notebook stage of many of these poems, and particularly many of his endings, but somehow it doesn’t seem to make much difference. One knows that the real obligation towards the creation of a finished poem has been allowed to lapse. History seems less of a disordered flux than Notebook because it is objectively arranged, but in the end it comes no nearer to an imaginative coherence — and may even be further away. Lowell has evaded his real task here, which was to quarry a few real poems—or even conceivably a properly organised super-poem — out of the subjective matrix of Notebook. The worst condemnation of this recent work perhaps — and it is surely a crucial test — is that almost none of it is memorable. Can Lowell even now retrench and start again, recovering perhaps the sense of rhythm and of what actually makes a poem which gave us Life Studies and For the Union Dead?