Robert Lowell and the "Great" Debate

Noting this date (March 1) that marks the birth of Robert Lowell in 1917 and begins a month signaling 50 years since the publication of Lowell’s landmark work, Life Studies, in the spring of 1959, the current debate continuing across the Internet over “greatness” and contemporary poetry suddenly seems even more appropriate. During the past week much has been written online in response to David Orr’s recent New York Times article, “The Great(ness) Game,” which some found insightful and which simply incited others, in either case causing many replies at blogs and on writers’ email lists.

In my own observations, “Rating Great Poets and Considering Contemporary Concerns,” posted one week ago and quoted a number of times at various sites online, including at the Poetry Foundation’s “Harriet” blog, I expressed ambivalent reactions toward Orr’s essay, agreeing with a couple of its conclusions about the current condition of poetry, but wondering about the usefulness of applying past standards on a new and evolving situation for contemporary poets or readers of poetry.

I also questioned the wisdom of critics declaring any contemporary poet great before his or her work has been tested by time. I suggested readers ought to assess concerns today’s poets and critics might hold, “the uneasy relationship a number of them recognize between concepts of greatness or ambition and the current distrust by some for such labels, at least as they have been seen employed in the past.” As I stated then: “today’s readers also ought to consider it a bit risky to regard greatness in any specific contemporary poet since, as we all know, such a judgment is tenuous at best until tested by the passage of time and critically attested by forthcoming generations of readers as worthy of acclaim.”

Conveniently, David Orr seems to support my point about the fragility of a poet’s stature in his essay when he describes the arc of influence and esteem evident in readers’ respect for the poetry of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop during the last half of the twentieth century. As Orr indicates, not too long ago almost nobody doubted Lowell as the premier poet of his time: “Lowell had the style: his poetry is bursting with vast claims, sparkling abstractions and vehement denunciations of the servility of the age. And Lowell had the persona: he was a thunderbolt-chucking wild man from one of America’s most famous Bostonian lineages.”

The magnitude of Robert Lowell’s production of poetry became apparent in the trumpeted appearance of a hefty posthumous volume of nearly 1200 pages containing the poet’s lifetime of poems, Collected Poems (edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter), released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2003. Despite receiving a great deal of attention when published, much of the reporting in reviews remarked upon the apparent steady decline of Lowell’s reputation since his death about a quarter-century before.

On the other hand, Elizabeth Bishop produced a slim body of work over her career, which she quietly pursued. In fact, articles containing debate and strong criticism, led by Helen Vendler, focused upon the release of uncollected poems by Elizabeth Bishop in an anthology, Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2006), edited by Alice Quinn. Many felt the rough drafts and unfinished poems would harm Bishop’s reputation. However, others suggested the volume admirably emphasized Bishop’s reticence to publish unpolished poems. Still, as Orr reports: “she’s invariably described by critics as ‘shy,’ ‘modest,’ ‘charming’ and so forth. Yet it’s Bishop’s writing, not Lowell’s, that matters more in the poetry world today.”

Although one might legitimately argue that final evaluation by David Orr about the relative greatness of the poetry written by Lowell or Bishop, and I could make a case for both poets, Orr’s reference to the changing status in the minds of readers and the writings of critics concerning Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop in recent decades ought to serve as a caution against pronouncements of greatness about anybody, even those we may believe worthy and whom we widely admire among present-day poets, including a designation of John Ashbery as great by David Orr or the Library of America.

Indeed, as I was reconsidering Robert Lowell on this weekend of his birthday for an essay I am writing about the fiftieth anniversary of Life Studies, my research brought me back again to a familiar and intriguing piece of criticism, “The Vagaries of a Literary Reputation,” regarding Robert Lowell and written by Richard Tillinghast. This commentary first appeared in the Summer 1993 issue of Gettysburg Review and was reprinted as a chapter in Tillinghast’s fine book, Robert Lowell’s Life and Work: Damaged Grandeur (University of Michigan Press, 1995).

The critique begins with words about Lowell that once reflected conventional wisdom: “If any midcentury American poet seemed in the estimation of his contemporaries certain to be read and admired by posterity, surely that poet was Robert Lowell.” Tillinghast quotes critical evaluations of Lowell’s greatness, including one by Elizabeth Bishop, and he credits Lowell as a poet whose work in the forties, fifties, and sixties overshadowed everyone around him. In fact, describing a June 1967 issue of Time (pictured above), “featuring on its cover a hideous Sidney Nolan portrait of Lowell, laurels crayoned over his troubled brow,” Tillinghast acknowledges how the magazine, “reflecting prevailing critical opinion, sounded overwhelmed by Lowell’s scope and achievement.”

However, by the time of his article in the early 1990s Tillinghast already had detected a transition in the attitudes among current readers toward Robert Lowell and his work: “Lowell straddled the poetry scene of his day like a colossus—perhaps, in retrospect, to use one of his own favorite adjectives, a ‘top-heavy’ colossus, ripe for a fall. The decline in his reputation since his death from a heart attack in 1977 has been dramatic.” In a passage that seems similar to David Orr’s thoughts on the subject and also perceives change in the poetic community to which I had alluded in my previous post on this topic, Tillinghast declares:

Today no American poet occupies the preeminent position Lowell held in the fifties and sixties. His friend and contemporary Elizabeth Bishop, who died two years after he did, is the admired poet of their generation, while the two most highly thought-of living poets are Seamus Heaney, an Irishman, and Derek Walcott, of Afro-Caribbean extraction. American poetry itself has been gerrymandered into constituencies—reflective of a national trend toward compartmentalization by gender, ethnic group, and life-style.

To name only three contemporary American poets: John Ashbery is admired by readers with a mandarin sensibility who are drawn to the method of elevating indeterminacy of meaning to an aesthetic all its own, which makes him attractive to academic champions of deconstructionism. James Merrill, the most fluent verse-writer of our time, has his own champions, especially among those who enjoy the gossipy dramas of the Ouija-board epic, The Changing Light at Sandovar. Many feminists revere Adrienne Rich, who strikes other readers as being more arresting as polemicist than as a poet. Others might dismiss Rich, Merrill, and Ashbery all three as East Coast elitist. Or as “Eurocentric,” in which case one reads Maya Angelou, Ai, Yusef Komunyaka, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Garrett Hongo, Gary Soto, or Rita Dove. Because no poet today stands out above the crowd, no poet is able to use whatever prestige poetry might have in the service of public issues. Robert Lowell’s assurance, the ease with which he assumed a place for poetry in the councils of power, seems unthinkable today.

By the close of Tillinghast’s essay, he determines that in his opinion Lowell’s status really hasn’t been altered: “Despite the shifting winds of critical fashion, Lowell remains the greatest American poet of the midcentury. One need not draw invidious comparisons with other poets to make this claim. The immense variety of our poetry is part of its appeal. But no one has filled—no one has had the ambition to fill—the void left by Lowell’s death.”

David Orr’s article on “greatness” has provided those who value poetry, and who carefully evaluate contemporary poets and poems, with an opportunity to deliberate and discuss this issue, a chance for the kind of healthy exchange of ideas we should welcome. I’ve enjoyed most of the conversation I have viewed online in posts and their accompanying comments by readers, though I confess I felt disheartened when I detected personal jabs and ad hominem attacks at Orr by a couple of commentators.

Nevertheless, as the example of Robert Lowell demonstrates, reputations of contemporary poets likely will remain flexible for the foreseeable future, and any estimation of greatness today may be part of a futile exercise. Even Lowell testified to this during a Paris Review interview with Frederick Seidel in 1961. Lowell confided: “When I began writing most of the great writers were quite unpopular. They hadn’t reached the universities yet, and their circulation was small. Even Eliot wasn’t very popular then. But life seemed to be there. It seemed to be one of those periods when the lid was still being blown. The great period of blowing the lid was the time of Schönberg and Picasso and Joyce and the early Eliot, where a power came into the arts which we perhaps haven’t seen since.”

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For previous commentary about Robert Lowell on “One Poet’s Notes” and links to audio presentations of his poetry, I invite readers to visit the following posts: “Robert Lowell’s Legacy: Life Studies,” “Robert Lowell’s Voice,” “Robert Lowell: ‘New Year’s Day,’” and “Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.”