Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton Page B

products of the stresses recorded in the final few poems of this book, Mr Lowell will not have endured in vain. 43
    The American reviews began to appear in May 1959. Richard Eberhart led the way in the New York Times Book Review. Uncertain about Lowell’s new style, its “prosaic quality,” Eberhart nonetheless elected to go overboard:
    Lowell’s poems have a lasting tensile strength. They are made of finer blood, thrown together in a violence of imaginative reality controlled by sensitive knowledge of linguistics and cognitive nuances…. Savagery and sophistication meet in a style that is original, the Lowell idiom. 44
    But as usual, the important judgments came in the quarterlies. F. W. Dupee in Partisan Review rather regretted the abandonment of Lowell’s old heroic stance: “He wrote as if poetry were still a major art and not merely a venerable pastime which ought to be perpetuated .” On the other hand, though, these new works had none of the “contagion of violence, the excess of willful effort” that forced so many of the early poems to “run riot.” Lowell was now seeking the “causes” of his “tragic imagination”; his “dark day in Boston” now produced “more humor and quizzical tenderness than fierce wit.” There was, though, in Life Studies something “inconclusive”:
    Where, Henry James would inquire, is your denouement? Still, the poems add up to something like the effectiveness of Mauberley ,Pound’s sequence of scenes and portraits from London life. They represent, perhaps, major poetry pulling in its horns and putting on big spectacles and studying how to survive. The once militantly tragic poet, who warred bitterly on himself, is pictured on the jacket of Life Studies wearing big spectacles. 45
    The Kenyon reviewer was John Thompson, the friend who on two occasions—in Chicago in 1949 and in Cincinnati in 1954—had faced the “kingdom of the mad” and helped to drag Lowell “home alive.”His review was by far the most intense and perceptive piece to be written on Life Studies and, indeed, still stands as one of the most intelligent and heartfelt estimates of Lowell’s gifts. Thompson begins by announcing that these new poems are “a shock” and then takes on the not simple task of trying to define the difference between their shockingness and that of those “adventures in sensation” that can be found in “dozens of current novels and memoirs”:
    in these poems there are depths of the self that in life are not ordinarily acknowledged and in literature are usually figured in disguise. Traditionally , between the persona of the creation and the person of the creator a certain distance exists, and this has been so even for lyric poets and their utterances, habitually inclined to the first person as they are. Devices of fiction or concealment large or small accomplish this estrangement …. Robert Lowell’s new poems show that this distance between persona and poem is not, after all, important to art, but has been a reflection of the way our culture conceived character. This conception seems to be dwindling now to a mere propriety. And for these poems, the question of propriety no longer exists. They have made a conquest; what they have won is a major expansion of the territory of poetry. 46
    Thompson, an expert on traditional prosody, then describes the technical “shock” Life Studies also carries and is acute on how “The metrical form … works indirectly, even negatively” in these seemingly “free” poems; he draws on his long friendship with the poet to analyze the difference between a conventional “sense of history” (i.e., “glory of the past, misery of the present”) and Lowell’s unique way of living in the past: “the great past, Revolutionary America, the Renaissance, Rome, is all contemporary to him. He moves among its great figures at ease with his peers. For him the sense of declining glory is a permanent human feeling, not the special curse of