‘It’s better to get your emotions out in a Macbeth than in a confession,’ Lowell said in 1961, two years after Life Studies, which, he implied, would be his last autobiographical collection. And about that he was wrong. He had recreated himself in poetry once, in 1959, and though his life was to change dramatically when he left Elizabeth Hardwick and America (he became a visiting fellow at All Souls, Oxford, and a lecturer at Kent and Sussex) he would continue to carve out of the personal much of his most enduring poetry.
But not all. Lowell wrote two of the greatest political poems of this or any age, ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’ and ‘For the Union Dead’ – title poem of his hugely praised 1964 collection. This last is a haunting tribute to Col. Robert Gould Shaw, white, twenty-five when he bravely led his Black 54 Massachusetts Regiment against Fort Wagner in the Civil War (‘They relinquish everything to serve the Republic’). A monument to his courage by Augustus Saint Gaudens stands in stark contrast to what Lowell perceives as a less honourable time. Lowell felt in his public utterances and behaviour the weight of history inherent in his family name. During anti Vietnam demonstrations he had ‘the unwilling haunted saintliness of a man who was repaying the moral debts of tens of generations of ancestors’. Norman Mailer at his most restrained. ‘Commander Lowell’, the poet’s father – ‘once / nineteen, the youngest ensign in his class, / he was “the old man” of a gunboat on the Yangtze’ – is ‘paid out’ for his failure, more economic than moral in this brutal, minor masterpiece. In ‘Memories of West Street and Lepke’, written in the ‘tranquillized Fifties, / and I am forty . . .’, Lowell remembers his ‘manic statement, / telling off the state and president’ which led him to prison and to Lepke of Murder, Inc., ‘the electric chair— / hanging like an oasis in his air / of lost connections . . .’ A perfect last line, and last lines, as Donne reminds us, ‘are the stamp’ that authenticates great poetry.
Perhaps his most unforgettable line lies just off-centre of one of his best poems, ‘Skunk Hour’ – his tribute to his great friend, the poet Elizabeth Bishop. It abruptly changes the rhythm of the poem, and
stuns with its awful simplicity: ‘My mind’s not right.’ ‘Waking in the Blue’ is a dazed love poem from McLean (psychiatric) Hospital as alumni of Boston University ponder I. A. Richard’s The Meaning of Meaning with those who in their jeunesse dorée had been members of Harvard’s exclusive club, Porcellian ’29. Legend has it that if you did not make your first million by the time you were forty the club would give it to you! Now each holds ‘a locked razor’.
The very handsome Lowell married three brilliant writers and was exquisitely sensitive to marital manoeuvres – even in the dark. In ‘Man and Wife’, her back now turned to him, her ‘old-fashioned tirade— / loving, rapid, merciless— / breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.’ A line to be treasured. The poem is, according to one critic, in balance with the savage sexuality in ‘“To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage”’, as the female narrator bemoans ‘the monotonous meanness of his lust’. Lowell said the poem owed a debt to Catullus. The imagery, however, of the woman who each night tapes a ten-dollar note and the man’s car keys to her thigh is based on a shared insight from a friend into his clearly less than ecstatic marriage.
‘I enjoyed writing about my life more than living it’, Lowell said towards the end. ‘Alas, I can only tell my own story.’ His last poem, ‘Epilogue’, tells us again what it is he tried to do and at such cost. ‘Yet why not say what happened? / Pray for the grace of accuracy . . . We are poor passing facts, / warned by that to give / each figure in the photograph / his living name.’