BOOKS
THE BATTLE OF LOWELL
LIFE STUDIES. By Robert Lowell. Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. $3.50.
When Robert Lowell's first book of poems appeared, about
fifteen years ago, it seemed to me and most others that he was the heir
of all the poetic ages, at least from Milton to Hart Crane. He could
write with the abandon of Crane and yet make sense like Milton. He
proved to have a real subject and a real place in the world at just
about the moment when Auden, for one, seemed in danger of forfeiting
his place and subject and becoming a globe-trotting commentator.
Lowell's subject was of the largest; it had to do with history and the
self. And although this was also the subject of some of his great elder
poets, he had special reasons for laying claim to it too. Boston, city of
historic battles and embattled selves, was his birthright as well as his
birthplace; his family history was in some degree its history. And so the
Boston of the old families, with its monuments, its Public Gardens,
its favorite suburbs and resorts, its own Atlantic Ocean, became the main
setting of his poems-his Lake Country, his Yoknapatawpha.
In
his early lyrics and monologues Lowell went to work on this
faded locale as Faulkner had done on his faded South. He took the
city's latter-day unreality to himself, determined to restore to both of
them an awareness of their common past, their common position in
the universe, their common fall from grace.
In
his own mind he re–
vived the vehemence of the old wars and controversies which had made
Boston Boston. A Lowell and not a Lowell, an escaped Bostonian, a
puritan turned Catholic, a Catholic whose puritanism made him con–
tinue to worry his new faith, he seemed to rejoice in his contradictions,
including the pain of them. The hurtful exhilaration of the experience
was written all over the style of his poetry. The muscular verbs, packed
epithets, rushing enjambments, fierce play of wit, persistent interplay
of heroic and mock-heroic modes, made for a bravura medium awe–
some in its magnificence and a little relentless in its intensity.
In
this
verse Boston was brought alive, but as it might be on a Judgment Day
presided over by some half-pitying, half-jeering divinity. An atmosphere
of mad extremity and futility prevailed. Jesus walked the waters on
