ROBERT LOWELL
Collected Prose
Robert Giroux, ed.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
377 pp., $25.00
Poetry readings are usually more notable as ceremonial occasions than as memorable events, opportunities to tell one's children, students, or distant friends later that one actually heard so-and-so in the flesh reading from his own work. It doesn't really matter that many of our best poets have been poor readers of their own verse - I think immediately of John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Wallace Stevens - or that, given the difficulty of much modern poetry, one must often listen to unfamiliar works without comprehension and, after a modest passage of time, probably not be able to remember even the titles of the poems one listened to. But during my graduate studies at Duke University (around 1967 or 1968), Robert Lowell came to campus for a formal reading of his own poetry. I attended as much out of curiosity as respect. Lowell's tempers and erratic conduct were already legend, and gossip had it that his audiences could never predict just what he might say or do, or even whether he might perform. There was a kind of notoriety that Dylan Thomas or the younger James Dickey had cultivated. But on this hot afternoon, Lowell was on his best behavior; impeccably dressed in a dark blue suit, he looked and sounded as I imagined a Boston aristocrat should. Speaking in a rich, beautifully modulated voice as he chain smoked, he introduced each poem to place it clearly in perspective for the audience. His readings themselves were elegant and moving, although - true to form - I have forgotten the exact selections. The occasion was probably the most effective reading I have ever attended and certainly did more to introduce me to Lowell's poetry than any classroom study or independent reading would do. I begin with this modest story because, although I would never meet Lowell or even see him again, it revealed to me an attractive, sympathetic gentleman poet quite different from the wild figure that rumor had established. And while the legend certainly had its truths, as we can learn from Ian Hamilton's fine biography, it is the restrained, sensitive, and intelligent figure of that afternoon some twenty years ago that we meet in this interesting collection of Lowell's Collected Prose, edited and introduced by Robert Giroux.
If Lowell's place in American literature as a poet is secure, his occasional prose and literary criticism are almost unknown. In a 1961 Paris Review interview by Frederick Seidel, included in this volume, he responded to a question about his small critical output, saying that he wrote only one or two reviews a year. "Sometimes," he added, "I wish I did more, but I'm very anxious in criticism not to do the standard analytical essay. I'd like my essay to be much sloppier and more intuitive." Thus the literary essays collected here by Giroux are essentially the sensitive responses of a sympathetic reader who can provide the fresh insights that come only from one who has, in effect, "been there" himself. Lacking a critical ax to grind, Lowell allows himself the luxury of enjoying his fellow poets, ancient and modern, as a fellow traveler who appreciates their labors out of his own experience. A second classification of the essay here is more personal than literary, apparently fragments from an autobiography that Lowell contemplated in the mid-1950s but never finished. Since much of this material, which deals with his patrician background, his tortured family relationships, and his personal traumas, has
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