BOOKS
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his uncompromising, antiromantic personality, which insists on directness
and clarity and minimal poetic inflation . And it is partly because that
hard-won clarity possesses such capacities for startling elegance. The power
and mobility of Larkin's contemporary idiom has enabled him
to
by-pass
the problem of what critics once called the lack of a high-style in English
poetry. Larkin has reached that fabulous stage at which words and readers
obey his call.
ROBERT SEIDMAN
LOWELL'S CASTLE
PITY THE MONSTERS: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell.
By
Alan
Williamson. Yale University Press. $10.00.
The proliferation of scholarly studies devoted to living authors is
a dreary phenomenon, promoting as it does the claims of pure academic
criticism at the expense of a more engaged, less consciously professional
mode of discourse. Authors still in the midst of their careers are becoming
hostages
to
the PhD system, which subjects them
to
the rigors of
explication
de
texte,
itself all that is left of the New Criticism. Most of these books are
undistinguished, and I can't imagine who reads them. It seems that only in
turning
to
a writer's own contemporaries or active practitioners of his art
does one find genuine criticism; perhaps competition alone can elicit the
keenest intelligence.
In the case of Robert Lowell , several dispiriting books have so far
appeared, none of which have anything in common with Alan Williamson's
new study; for his
Pity the Monsters
is a work of original, imaginative
clarification, full of brilliant argument and dense with intuition. Apart
from John Berryman's commentary on "Skunk Hour" and Randall Jarrell's
review of
Lord Weary's Cast/e,
Williamson's is the most sympathetic (in the
sense of affinity no less than praise) evaluation we have of Lowell and by far
the most sustained. His readings of individual poems are so thorough and
elaborate that one often suspects them of being more realized than the
