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PARTISAN REVIEW
poems themselves ; so taken is he with the ambiguities implicit in all of
Lowell's work, the complex modulations of his many poetic voices, that
Williamson often abandons the scrupulous examination of a poem for
exhilarating speculations about its deepest social meanings .
There are, of course, risks involved in such speculations ; in this
instance , though, the poems invite them, require that even their most
subliminal content be explored. We have become accustomed now to
reading contemporary imaginative literature as autobiography; it is a habit
of mind that works of supposedly deliberate artifice like
Lord W eary's Castle
induce in us no less than
Li/e Studies,
if only because authors can no longer
depend on being shielded by literary convention from the inclement
climate of psychoanalysis. To follow such a course leads easily to the sort of
insinuation and veiled gossip that vitiates Philip Cooper's book on
T he
Autobiographical Myth o/Robert Lowell.
Alan Williamson, while establishing
necessary connections between Lowell's poems and what is known of his
personal life, does so only to plot the nature and origins of those conflicts
which provide a unified motif in the span of Lowell's work . This he has
accomplished with remarkable tact, calling as much on Lowell's literary
sources (Jonathan Edwards , Marvell , the many Biblical analogues) as on the
specifically biographical , so that his book provides both textual exegesis
and sudden inspirations . Lowell's poetry demands the latter; only flights of
invention combined with a sort of grand architectonic view of human
history can really hope to exhaust his virtual infinitude of nuance.
Williamson's organizing notion , stated at the very beginning , is to
mean by political " the collective shaping of human destiny-ranging from
the pressure of a family on an anarchic individual to the cumulative action of
almost the entire human race in the current crisis of technology and
ecology ." Well, he certainly gives himself ample enough latitude to say
what he wants; and yet there is a thematic principle at work in
Pity the
Monsters,
one that advances parallel to Lowell's own development. In its
most generalized form , this principle could be identified as a mediation
between the properties of our meqtal world , imagination, will, desire, and
the manner in which these properties impose themselves on reality . Put
another way , it is the rude, urgent impulses of the unconscious that direct
us toward our inevitable, biologically determined actions; in even the
collective sense, "character is fate ."
All of this Williamson documents in his long chapter on
Lord W eary's
Castle,
which here receives the most intimate, comprehensive discussion I
know of; to him it seems "as deeply and rewardingly personal a book as
Life
Studies,"
an opinion he persuasively puts forward by looking to the poem's
hidden motives more than to their overt religious material . In this way ,
