474
PARTISAN REVIEW
Easter Day to ferry Grandfather Winslow to Acheron in a swan boat
from the Public Gardens. A Concord farmer trying to kiss his wife saw
himself growing scales like Eden's serpent. The Atlantic was fouled
with dead sailors and itched to possess nuns and other virgins. A man
dreamed, only dreamed, of writing the
Aeneid.
In the apocalyptic climate of the last decade, Robert Lowell
be–
came the leading poet of his generation. He wrote as if poetry were still
a major art and not merely a venerable pastime which ought to be
perpetuated. But there were difficulties in his extreme position and
style. RandalI JarrelI, an intensely sympathetic critic, once summed them
up by speaking of the contagion of violence, the excess of wilful effort,
in Lowell's work. "As a poet Mr. LowelI sometimes doesn't trust enough
in
God and tries to do everything for himself." It may be that he didn't
trust enough in nature and human life. His native place and chosen
setting offered little that appealed to his senses and affections as in–
timatelyas, say, the southern Negroes and poor whites, with their work–
worn hands, sun-seasoned shacks and other attributes, appealed to
Faulkner. Nor did religion seem to be a substitute for the tempering
effects of such immediacies, except as religion was embodied in char–
acter-the character, for example, of the proud Mother Superior in
his fine monologue, "Mother Marie Therese." Here as in many other
poems, like "The Drunken Fisherman" and "FalIing Asleep Over the
Aeneid," LowelI's wryly tragic imagination found its form . Elsewhere it
tended to run riot even more than Faulkner's rather similar imagination
has done.
A consciousness of these old difficulties seems to be implied in
Life
Studies,
a volume made up of new poems together with a few older
ones and an autobiographical fragment in prose. The new style is con–
spicuously barer than the old style, and the poet is more intent now on
understanding the causes of his tragic imagination than on flaunting it.
He seems no longer to seek support from theology. The opening poem,
"Beyond the Alps," about a train journey from Rome to Paris, appears
to record his apostasy; and there is further evidence in the absence of
religious feeling and imagery in the poems themselves. A frankly de–
converted poet is a rarity in these times ; but the poetry here is not
about the drama-if any-of de-conversion. It is about the aftermath.
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Guilt, remorse, feelings of loss?
Not at all. With scarcely a backward glance at alI that, Lowell addresses
himself to his life studies like a painter or sculptor who wants to ground
his
art
more firmly in the observation of things as they are in the
natural world. But the title of the volume has, of course, only limited
