Robert Lowell and The Confessional Voice (PDFDrive)

Robert Lowell and the
Confessional Voice
Studies in Modern Poetry
Peter Baker
General Editor
Vol. 18
PETER LANG
New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern
Frankfurt y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford
Paula Hayes
Robert Lowell and the

Confessional Voice
PETER LANG
New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern
Frankfurt y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hayes, Paula.
Robert Lowell and the confessional voice / Paula Hayes.
p. cm. — (Studies in modern poetry vol. 18)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Lowell, Robert, 1917–1977—Criticism and
interpretation. I. Title.
PS3523.O89Z687 811’.52—dc23 2012012639
ISBN 978-1-4331-1524-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4539-0836-5 (e-book)
ISSN 1069-4145
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Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following:

Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC: Excerpts from
COLLECTED POEMS by Robert Lowell. Copyright © 2003 by Harriet Lowell and
Sheridan Lowell. “Art and Evil” from COLLECTED PROSE by Robert Lowell.
Copyright © 1987 by Caroline Lowell, Harriet Lowell, and Sheridan Lowell.
Scattered excerpts from “East Coker” and “Burnt Norton” from “Four Quartets,” and
“The Waste Land,” “Marina,” and “Coriolan” from COLLECTED POEMS 1909–1962
by T. S. Elliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt, Inc. and renewed 1964 by T. S. Elliot,
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved.
Various extracts from The Complete Poems and Plays by T. S. Eliot

reprinted by permission of the publisher Faber and Faber, Ltd.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council of Library Resources.
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www.peterlang.com
All rights reserved.

Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.
Printed in Germany
Hayes Final_Hayes final 5/10/12 10:15 AM Page v
To my parents, my son, my husband
Those blessed creatures, plot and rhyme—

Why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
—“Epilogue,” Robert Lowell, Day by Day
Hayes Final_Hayes final 5/10/12 10:15 AM Page vi
Hayes Final_Hayes final 5/10/12 10:15 AM Page vii
Contents
1. Robert Lowell, the Puritan Past, and a World of Evil 1

2. Poetry as Confession 25
3. The Spiritual Quarrel of T.S. Eliot and Lowell 40
4. Cain and the Shadow of the Red Rock 65
5. Afflictions and Leviathans 96
6. The Impersonality of the Poet in T.S. Eliot and the Reclaiming
of the Personality of the Poet in Lowell’s Life Studies 114
7. The Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics of Walter Pater and Lowell’s
“91 Revere Street” 126
8. Flights of the Mind and the Limits of Empathy 135
Bibliography 147
Hayes Final_Hayes final 5/10/12 10:15 AM Page viii
Hayes Final_Hayes final 5/10/12 10:15 AM Page 1
chapter one
Robert Lowell, the

Puritan Past, and a
World of Evil
I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
—T.S. Eliot, Preludes
Why should a contemporary critic or the aficionado of modern poetry read an-
other book about Robert Lowell? Life Studies, revolutionary as it was in 1959 for its
break with the paradigms of high modernism, may not appear as boldly provoca-
tive fifty years after the fact. Half of a centennial has passed since the publication
of Life Studies and its introduction of the role of the “confessional poet” into the let-
tered and academic world of poetry. The reason for studying Lowell is clear. Low-
ell’s confessional poetry changed how poetry was written during the second half of
the twentieth century. Poets who write in our present century often adopt a con-
fessional mode to express a range of experiences. The confessional style of contem-
porary poets has become so commonplace that it is practically taken for granted,
and its innovativeness is often mistaken for the commonsensical function of poetry.
Today, there is such a proliferation of poetry being written in the vein of the con-
fessional that it is difficult to imagine a recent era in which the personal voice of the
poet was considered a taboo subject for poetry. But prior to Robert Lowell’s Life
2 | ROBERT LOWELL AND THE CONFESSIONAL VOICE
Studies, the intimate, autobiographical details associated with a poet’s life were con-
sidered inappropriate content for the serious, intellectual, and trained poet.
Confessional poets (past and present) are concerned with capturing the ever elu-
sive nature of experience. To really understand Lowell’s confessional poetry, the
reader must commit him or herself to a rediscovery of the early poetry, works such
as Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary’s Castle (1946). Volumes such as these
represent Lowell’s pre-confessional work; yet, the themes, motifs, and almost fa-
natical preoccupation with the formal structures of language set the stage for Low-
ell’s evolution into a confessional poet.
The link between Lowell’s early poetry and his confessional work is not an easy
connection to explain. It might seem on the surface that the early poetry has lit-
tle to do with his confessional work. Lowell’s confessional poetry has often been
understood from the perspective of the poet’s personal problems that his poems
capture—periodical descents into manic depression, divorce, recollections of a
culturally repressive childhood, the disintegration of New England narratives
concerning religion, the loss of a cultural (collective) faith in the social power of
myth to bind communities together, the effects of Cold War culture upon the
mind of the artist, and lastly the cultural and personal repercussions of a spiritual
malaise. Yet, Lowell’s earliest poetry (those works that caught the famed attention
of Allen Tate and other high modernists) seemed to entirely block out Lowell’s
personal traumas and instead concentrated almost exclusively upon the religious
culture of New England, the formalism of language, and the spiritual “wasteland”
of the modern era. Yet, at a second glance it is quite possible to find within Low-
ell’s early poetry a preoccupation with the cultural effects of the loss of myth, rit-
ual and belief.
What does Lowell’s obsession in his early poetry with the religious mindset of
New England’s Puritan past have to do with recounting the experiences of manic
depression and hospital stays that are expressed in Lowell’s later confessional mode
in Life Studies and thereafter? What connections can be made between the pre-
confessional poetry, mostly religious in content (even when it seeks to deconstruct
New England piety), and the confessional poetry that is more obviously consumed
with the exploration of self ?
A poem like “The Drunken Fisherman” (Lord Weary’s Castle) provokes the
reader to conjure images of the meaning of religious piety, as well as a vision of
Melville’s Moby-Dick, while a poem such as “Waking in Blue” (Life Studies) causes
the reader to step back and take pause at the audacity of the poet to reveal his in-
timate feelings associated with a bout of mental illness. But this is only surface
reading. The connection is discernible between Lowell’s early work with its many
religious themes and his later confessional poetry with its dissection of the auto-
biographical self. In order to grasp the connection, the poet’s psyche or mind must
ROBERT LOWELL , THE PURITAN PAST, AND A WORLD OF EVIL | 3
be considered. Deep within the consciousness of the poet are patterns or tropes
that repeat. These tropes are present in the early poetry as well as in the later con-
fessional poetry.
The academic world of poetry has valorized Lowell so much for his confessions
of personal trauma that the early poetry is in danger of being forgotten. To leave the
early poetry behind as a remnant of his evolution into a confessional poet would be
a grave error. What I hope the reader of this book will gain is an appreciation for
Lowell’s early poetry and an understanding that the confessional mode for Lowell
was an extension of himself as a poet, not a dismissmal of his previous work.
Additionally, I hope the reader will begin to perceive and consider the linkages
between Lowell’s cultural tropes and his autobiographical ones. In one sense, even
when Lowell is writing about the collective consciousness of New England he is al-
ready writing out of the mindset of a confessional thinker; for, the anxiety he senses
in the legacy of New England’s religious heritage is his own anxiety, as well. Fur-
thermore, the anxiety felt appears to Lowell as an appropriate picture of woman
and man in the modern world. There is a perception in Lowell of the collective
consciousness of New England culture, replete with its social problems and indi-
vidual sufferings.
The autobiographical self and the collective self have ways of merging, particu-
larly within the realm of art. While this book focuses on Lowell (with a degree of
attention given to Eliot as the quintessential high modern poet), it is useful to keep
in mind that other poets of the past century offer work as well that could be re-read
and interpreted as “speaking” about the convergence of the autobiographical self
with the collective self. The collective self oftentimes reflects the significance of a
geographical region; and in Lowell, we find a regional self posited. In Lowell’s po-
etry, the conception of a regional self will eventually evolve into the personality of
a confessional subject.
When we approach the poet and the man, Robert Lowell, we find in the waiting
America’s Puritan past. How was it that a twentieth-century poet, whose breadth
of career includes both world wars, the Cold War crisis, and Vietnam, bring us as
readers so near at times to a seventeenth-century Puritan ethos, and yet at other
times into the realm of nineteenth-century aesthetics similar to that of Matthew
Arnold and Walter Pater? This ability to meld the past into the modern esprit is
part of Lowell’s inheritance of high modernism.
Importantly, Lowell experienced a conversion to Catholicism. This proved to be
but one spiritual phase in the poet’s life; for, Lowell also experienced a de-conver-
sion away from the Catholic faith. And in spite of his flirtation with Catholicism,
his personality tended to reflect the Protestant concerns of a vestigial New England
Puritanism, inherited, in a sense, from his forefathers. The other phase, and the far
longer lasting of the two, was that of skepticism.
It is perhaps easy to overlook that skepticism can be classified as a spiritual con-
dition; that is, when adopted as a near permanent condition of the mind. At the
very least skepticism is an existential state, one in which many great intellectuals
have either chosen to adopt as a belief system or felt as an inescapable psychologi-
cal reality. Either way, the intellectual as skeptic can indeed be spiritual in his or her
plight of suspended belief. We need only recall the great Russian authors, Tolstoy
and Dostoevsky, to prove the case that the skeptic can be spiritual, even religious in
deed and behavior. Tolstoy was undoubtedly the greater religious believer than
Dostoevsky; but, Tolstoy wrote in his nineteenth-century opus magnum, War and
Peace, of the sentiment characteristic of the skeptic’s outlook on life and death. “You
will die—and it will all be over. You will die and find out everything—or cease ask-
ing” (Book V, chapter 1, War and Peace). In other words, the skeptic finds eventual
relief; even if that relief does not come until death, wherein the skeptic learns either
the answers to all his or her questions or discovers that there is no longer an exis-
tence from which to question. Dostoevsky described in Notes From the Underground,
the skeptic’s mind as a dangerously, malignant place—“To be acutely conscious is a
disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.” Kierkegaard also had called the state of
consciousness leading to skepticism a disease, or a “sickness-unto-death.” In this
state of mind, there is a desire for death; yet, without truly seeking the reality and
literality of death. It is only desire itself that is important in Kierkegaard’s formula
of the skeptic’s nature. For Lowell, skepticism became the way of the poet.
It was in the earliest portion of his career, and while a practicing Catholic, Low-
ell’s skepticism publically emerged. We need look no farther than his first book of
poems to recover demonstration of the fact of his skepticism. It is not a Catholic
doctrine per se that we come across in his first volume, Land of Unlikeness (1944).
Nor is a strict orthodoxy expressed in his second volume, Lord Weary’s Castle (1946).
Rather, it is a return to the colonial and Puritan foundation of New England’s his-
tory that is demonstrated in his early poetry. Taken together, Land of Unlikeness,
Lord Weary’s Castle, The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951), For the Union Dead (1956),
and Life Studies (1959) represent the first phase of Lowell’s career or the initial
canon of his work. If we examine this body of work, what we find is that in retro-
spect Lowell was indeed a spiritual poet, though skeptical believer. At the begin-
ning of his career, Lowell’s exploration of religious tropes undermined personal
faith; but, at the same time, his use of such tropes encouraged others to realize that
the malaise of the modern temperament was indeed a spiritual problem. To this ex-
tent, Lowell was in the good company of T. S. Eliot.
A comparison can be made between Lowell’s early poetry and that of the sev-
enteenth-century poet, Edward Taylor. A devout Protestant of the Puritan persua-
sion, Taylor’s poetry expressed an appreciation for the wonders of God’s handiwork
in both nature and in humankind. There is nothing particularly spectacular to Tay-
lor’s poetry that should set him apart in our minds from his contemporaries; in
fact, we find more of true poetic sensibility at times in the autobiographical reflec-
tions of Jonathan Edwards than in many of Taylor’s poems.
What is of rather stark importance in Taylor’s poetry is his reliance upon ana-
logical comparisons to reveal to his reader the bounty of God’s grace as set against
the inherently flawed nature of the human species. As the critic Roy Harvey Pearce
noted regarding the study of Taylor’s work, “The great bulk of Taylor’s poetry con-
sists in this: visions of the world of sinful men as it partakes of God and God’s
order.” Harvey went on to say that Taylor’s goal had been to “show how and
wherein that [God’s] order exists.” And so Harvey produced the conclusion that
Taylor’s technique consisted of “discovering analogies of Biblical doctrine in his
immediate and imagined surroundings: thus he is constrained everywhere to find
an earthly counterpart—however poor and dim—of that which is ineffably holy.”
If we hold an early volume of Lowell’s poetry up to that of Taylor, using the
seventeenth-century Puritan’s work as a mirror or reflection, it is quite possible to
discover the overwhelmingly colonial concern that the world exists as an ordered
place and that humanity find a seat among the infinite within that order.
Like Taylor, Lowell sought order. Unlike Taylor, Lowell’ s sense of order revealed
to him the realism of the universe as a rather inchoate mass of conflicting patterns.
On the one hand, there is the reality of evil, and yet, on the other hand, there is the
reality of benevolence to overturn evil. Where was God, though, in the midst of
these two polarities? For Taylor, God was ever-present and an assurance to the fact
that good would triumph someday in the end. For Lowell, God was a mystery, if a
tangible presence at all; and the concept of God’s presence set against humanity’s
strivings offered to Lowell a host of questions, not assured faith.
In Taylor, humanity’s depravity is overcome by the consistency of God’s grace,
so that the darker side of Puritan theology is diminished in favor of the humble
seeker’s desire to reflect God’s image. Take for example Taylor’s poem, “Let Him
Kiss Me With the Kisse of His Mouth.” This is one of the most anthologized of
any of Taylor’s poems. In the first stanza, there is a description of an unbearable de-
spair having lain seize to the speaker’s soul.
What placed in the Sun: and yet my ware,

A Cloud upon my head? an Hoodwinke blinde?
In middst of Love thou layst on mee, despare?
And not a blinke of Sunshine in my minde?
Shall Christ bestow his lovely Love on his,
And mask his face? allowing not a kiss?
Very soon thereafter, in the second stanza, the speaker indicates how his soul
wrestles with this despair, finding that Christ’s love (the meaning of the Crucifix-
ion for Taylor) is sufficient to operate like grace to alleviate the burden of the
poet’s depression.
Shall ardent love to Christ enfire the Heart?

Shall hearly love in Christ embrace the Soule?
And shall the Spiritual Eye be wholy dark,
In th’ heart of Love, as not beloved, Condole?
In th’ midst of Love’s bright Sun, and yet not see
A Beame of Love allow’d to lighten thee?
It is this love, personified as both light and as a warrior that is able to ward off for the
poet the darker measures of the soul’s plight. Love performs its work in the Puritan
poetry of Taylor. But when Lowell turns to evaluate the meaning of the Puritan
ethos, love will not have its work, so to speak. Love will instead be a distant concept.
In Lowell, the lack of love is an almost formidable barrier between the poet’s mind
and the external world. Let us look at Taylor’s sentiment regarding Christly love.
But listen, Soule, here seest thou not a Cheate.

Earth is not heaven: Faith not Vision. No,
To see the Love of Christ on thee Compleate
Would make heavens Rivers of joy, earth overflow.
This is the Vale of tears, not mount of joyes.
Some Crystal drops while here may well suffice.
In another of the most quoted and critiqued of Taylor’s poems, “Huswifery,” the
image of a loom is used to describe how God turns the soul to transform it into a
glorified form. The concept of the “Spinning Wheel” is significant; it circles and cir-
cles and performs the task of work. This work is the renewing of the poet’s vision of
his own soul. Wheels are typically used in poetry to represent non-linear time, or a
return to the past as revisited in the present; yet, in Taylor, the spinning wheel rep-
resents the repositioning of the poet’s soul into an alignment with the providential
love of God. The concept of time conceived through the image of a spinning wheel
is a dominant motif in many of Lowell’s poems also; but, in Lowell, as the wheel of
time spins it moves humanity to the brink of an apocalyptic vision, not toward that
of divine love. No doubt this difference in Lowell is the result of cultural fears felt
by his generation of writers at the outcome of the first world war and the onslaught
of a truly modern industrial age. In a mechanical age of war and simulation, it be-
comes increasingly harder to discern patterns that lead us toward love, grace, and
mercy. These ‘fruits’ get replaced instead with fears and apprehensions, and the thirst
for knowledge. First though, let’s look at Taylor’s “Huswifery.”
Make me, O Lord, thy Spinning Wheele compleate.

Thy Holy Worde my Distaff make for mee.
Make mine Affections thy Swift Flyers neate
And make my Soule thy holy Spoole to bee.
My Conversatons make to be thy Reele
And reele the yarn thereon spun of they Wheele.
In “Huswifery,” the spinning wheel leads to metaphysical understanding: “Then

cloath therewith mine Understanding, Will/Affectations, Judgment, Conscience,
Memory.” It is no wonder that Taylor is often classified with his British counter-
parts, the Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw,
Abraham Cowley, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughn, whose works all cele-
brated a rather Platonic ideal that Truth could equal Beauty and that Beauty could
be found in eternal forms.
T.S. Eliot in his essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” had claimed that “The poets of
the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed
a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. They are
simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic.” Interestingly, and by contrast, Lowell’s Pu-
ritanism follows the darker course. In Lowell, we find it is not God’s love that is ex-
pressed. What is revealed in Lowell is an ordered world possessed through and
through in every minutia of nature (both physical and human) by the contrary laws
of good and evil.
And it is the latter state, that of evil, that tends to dominate and preoccupy
Lowell’s spiritual quest in poems like “The Drunken Fisherman.” Recall, for ex-
ample, the first stanza or opening of this most famous of Lowell’s poems.
Wallowing in this bloody sty,

I cast for fish that pleased my eye
(Truly Jehovah’s bow suspends)
No pots of gold to weight its ends);
Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout
Rose to my bait. They flopped about
My canvas creel until the moth
Corrupted its unstable cloth.
In a poem such as this, the world is collapsing in upon itself. The fisherman is cast-
ing his net like a disciple, but his return is not what we might anticipate within the
perimeters of Christendom. The fisherman discovers there is violence, not mercy, in

the simple act of fishing, and the Christian metaphor of becoming “fishers of men” is
lost amidst the Ishmael-like quest for humankind to conquer, dominate, control, and
measure the earth. Success, dominance, control, and adventure—these are not Chris-
tian virtues. But they are the dark realities of the fisherman’s New England life. It is
a life without love, in the sense of agape. Moreover, in the extended sense of a divine
love sufficient to redeem the brutalities of existence we find an absence and a void.
Now, also consider for a moment the last stanza or the conclusion to “The
Drunken Fisherman.”
Is there no way to cast my hook

Out of this dynamited brook?
The Fisher’s sons must cast about
When shallow waters peter out.
I will catch Christ with a greased worm,
And when the Prince of Darkness stalks
My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . .
On water the Man-Fisher walks.
The modern world cannot imagine the Galilean fishers of men and their persever-
ance in the quest of a redemptive love; instead, the modern world tries to “catch
Christ,” or “get religion,” but fails. Meanwhile, the realism of the age underscored
that it was humanity’s enormous capacity for annihilation (not love) that was gain-
ing hold.
It should be noted that there are universals set up in several of Lowell’s early
poems. One universal is that the world is an ordered place. In the typical Lowell
poem, order gives way to alarm, hesitation, and ultimately to apocalyptic ideas. In
the standard Taylor poem, the universality of God’s design wins the day; as Pearce
observed there is in Taylor “no drama, no dialectic . . . There is just discovered evi-
dence, felt to be ready-made, God-made, logically primary and self-explanatory.”
But in Lowell, because he expresses the darker side of Puritan theology, just the op-
posite is true. In Lowell there is almost always a dialectical pull, an urgency to con-
front the opposing natural forces of good and evil. The result is doubt rather than
faith. The poet cannot rest easily upon the presumptions of God’s grace, as faith
might dictate; instead, lacking the security of faith, the poet makes himself appear
as perpetually alert to the possibilities of humanity’s inherently destructive capa-
bilities, to the end result that a negative dialectic is reached.
Lowell’s “Puritan” poems, if we may label them as such, do not offer the praise
of the faithful, as Taylor’s poems do; but, if we read Lowell as, nonetheless, operat-
ing within the general framework of his New England birthright of Puritanism, we
can easily discern the shape of a fearfully prostrate thinker. There is a cloud, and a
dark one at that, cast by most of Lowell’s early poems. The shape of that cloud is
one of an intellectual trepidation.
Take for example another of Lowell’s infamous seafaring poems, “The Quaker
Graveyard in Nantucket.”
A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket,—

The sea was still breaking violently and night
Had steamed into our north Atlantic Fleet,
when the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light
Flashed from his mated head and marble feet,
He grabbled at the net
With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs;
The corpse was bloodless, a botch of red and whites,
It’s open, starring eyes
Were lusterless dead-lights
Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk
Heavy with sand. We weight the body, close
Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came,
Where the heel-headed dogfish barks at its nose
On Ahab’s void and forehead; and the name
Is blocked in yellow chalk.
Sailors, who pitch this at the portent of the sea
Where dreadnoughts shall confess
It’s hell-bent deity
When you are powerless
To sand-bag this Atlantic bulwark, faced
By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste
In his steel scales; ask for no Orphean lute
To pluck life back. The guns of the steeled fleet
Recoiled and then repeat
The hoarse salute
The simple story of a group of Quakers drowned in the Atlantic, off of New Eng-
land shores, reveals not faith in the justice of divine providence (a hallmark tenet of
most forms of early colonial Protestantism, both Quakerism and Puritanism alike).
Instead, the narrative poem undermines the logic of the belief, and underscores in-
stead the critical observation of a spiritual skeptic. Why tell the story at all, we might
ask, if there is no faith to be recovered from the New England religious ethos? And
yet tell the story, Lowell does, and perhaps must; for there is a compulsory note to
the tone. The narrative is that of a mind seeking explanation for an event that belies
faith and yet seeking, still, for a remnant of something to believe. It is not cold athe-
ism the poem leaves us with; but that of melancholic mistrust. The sentiment is not
so far removed from that of the speaker’s point of view in Eliot’s, “The Hollow Men.”
This is the dead land

This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
Faith has to confront both life and death in order to work; and both “The Quaker
Graveyard at Nantucket” and “The Hollow Men” offer rather hallucinatory dreams
of how life, death, and faith intersect.
In a true Puritan poet like Taylor it is God’s grace that inevitably outweighs the
concerns of history. In Lowell, history becomes the counterpart to God’s grace. For
Lowell, it is history that may have the final say on the outcome of the world’s af-
fairs; for, whether it be freedom of the spirit, the self-determination of the will, the
unleashing of the subconscious with its cesspool of primordial urges, or some col-
lective form of negative social behavior, such as some variation of authoritarianism,
in the end it is the human race that determines its fate and destiny. And so because
that “reality” of the determining variants intrinsic to the genetic and psychical
make-up of the human race cannot be ignored, Lowell’s spiritual skepticism can-
not make the final call toward faith. Sheer observation of events like World War I
made faith seemingly an impossible prospect for a poet like Lowell; and yet,
though he attempted to shed the snakeskin of faith, the inner coiling of his New
England Puritan heritage would not let him go.
Stuck in that middle way of the paradoxical position of being a faithless believer, it
was Lowell’s organic conception of the universe, and the general order of things,
that “saves” Lowell’s poetry from being deconstructionist or postmodern. It would
be a mistake to in retrospect classify Lowell as belonging to either of these meta-
physical camps. Lowell’s metaphysics, though he chose the negativity (not the
positivism) inherent in Puritanism, brings him nearer to the Puritan past than it
does to our postmodern present or future. We may not encounter the optimism
that we do in a poet like Taylor, but there is still a colonial mindset at work in
Lowell’s ultimate vision.
As already noted, the early works of Lowell reflect the problem of life and death.
There is the physical plane on which these concepts are literal. In the Puritan the-
ology of colonial New England, earthly existence is filled with many dreadful woes,
each of these interpreted as foreshadowing the resurrection of the faithful. Calami-
ties were to be guarded against. The dread of their occurrences certainly filled the
mind of many a diligent colonial newcomer to the New World. In the grander
scheme of things it was thought the chosen or elect would find their equivalent for
earthly suffering. The hope of the afterlife and its freedom from the physical
bondages and hardships of this world was enough to balance the roughness of
colonial life. Survival in the New World meant perseverance, stamina of the mind
and will, not to mention an abundance of physical strength. The spirit was to re-
main tempered but tough.
In Lowell’s poetry, we find concepts comparable to the colonial belief in the
heavenly resurrection of the body and the defeat of physical death; however, the
life-in-death equation is reversed in Lowell. It is in images of life that Lowell
chooses to exhibit the poet’s power to describe death. By surveying the physical en-
vironment and the corporeality of historical events, Lowell utilizes his poetic
prowess to discover that it is death that surrounds life. And so life may not be quite
so victorious, after all; that is, not if humanity cannot learn to defeat the inner
workings of its own collective death drive. The Christian assurance felt so strongly
by the Puritans of life resurrected in the individual is absent even in the most sub-
lime of Lowell’s early poems. Instead the sting of death is felt to meticulously pen-
etrate even into the most beautiful of forms.
In a Puritan poet like Taylor, we find that he can say that death has lost its sting;
the dangers of devilish impulses, too, are laid low. We must keep in mind when
reading Lowell that although he stubbornly clings to his New England Puritan
heritage he is viewing history from a vantage point most unlike that of a poet such
as Taylor. When Taylor peers out into the openness of the New World what he
witnesses is a script written by the author of his faith; it is God who has hermeneu-
tically paved the way of the Puritan’s passage and progress. It is a quite altered hori-
zon for Lowell. The onslaught of the First World War and the consequences of the
emergence of the modern world lead Lowell to formulate the conclusion that what
he was witnessing did not bear the signature of God; but rather, the modern world
for all its rich “newness” bore the stamp of humanity’s more selfishly stubborn and
inborn tendencies toward malevolent psychologies.
The modern world and all its problems could not be accounted for by “reading”
it as a “script” penned by providential wisdom and this greatly separates the colo-
nial worldview from that of the modern. As Lowell’s poetry expresses, the human
race had to face up to its own negative capabilities and face the ugliness of what it
was producing. And yet for Lowell, the balance between beauty and ugliness, a hell
on earth and the redemption of spirit, and that of grace abounding versus the oblit-
erations of war, had to be accounted for within a schema reflecting order. The Pu-
ritan rationale that the world is necessarily an ordered place, held in tact by an
unseen hand, is not lost on Lowell. In one sense, Lowell cannot assent that a di-
vine providence is responsible as the complete shaper of history; for, he sees within
the human spirit all its capacities for terrible evils. But, he also cannot resist the
final conclusion that behind it all there is an ordered cosmos. In fact, Lowell’s early
poems progress to asking a deeply serious set of questions. Is the universe itself a
violent place? If there be cosmic violence, what to believe about the deity that made
such a universe? If the human will reflects a divine image, how is the divine to be
described? Is the divine, too, violent?
And so we return to Lowell’s skepticism of faith. How can a man be expected
to possess the peace of faith in the benevolence of God if he cannot first see the
guiding hand of beauty in the cosmos? For Lowell, what he very well may have
seen is the negative dialectic and negative capability of an ordered universe, but not
a necessarily righteous one.
If there be a God, what kind of God? Lowell circles and loops around the question
a hundred times, but never quite reaches the audacity of stooping to ask it. His
early volumes of poetry express a peculiar loathing for the religious tradition of his
ancestors, and yet also express an outright refusal to escape this past. His Puritan
ancestors had wholeheartedly accepted the belief that the benevolence of God is
compatible with a violent cosmos and the evils of the human spirit. Lowell ac-
cepted his Puritan ancestors’ unique vision of cosmic order, but he appears in much
of his early poetry to detest, if not also repute, the idea of a benevolent God as
commensurate with a violent world.
Lowell’s poems concentrate hard upon constructing the proper linguistic equiv-
alents to demonstrate cosmic order. At the same time, his poems, although locked
into the harmonious balance of the order of language, “speak” to the incommensu-
rability of a good God and an evil universe. Lowell repeats time and again this basic,
fundamental problem of theodicy. In systematic theology, reaching as far back as
Augustine and later in Aquinas, the problem of theodicy is defined as the question
of how can a good God and an evil universe co-exist if God is also omnipotent and
omniscient? Augustine and Aquinas find their versions of answers to the problem of
theodicy. Twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich described Augustine’s account of
the Church this way: “In the Augustinian interpretation of history we have a partial
identification and partial non-identification of the church with the kingdom of

God.” By positing an earthly counterpart to Heaven’s will (that of the Church), Au-
gustine was able to see the evils of history as something to be overcome by the con-
structive building of a unity of people. It was much the same idea for the colonial
Puritans and their conception of the elect. The battle between good and evil could be
fought and won by the progressive workings of the Christian community.
Lowell, unlike both Augustine and the colonial Puritans, seems to believe in a
very limited sense of the Christian community. The concept of the Church as ec-
clesia is for the most part absent in Lowell. Thus, it is up to the individual to con-
front the tides of evil. Society is not lacking from Lowell’s vision. It is just that
society is not comprised of a Godly elect nor is it synonymous with the kingdom
of God. In fact, the entirety of the Christian vision of the kingdom of God is sup-
planted in Lowell’s poetry by earthly powers and by the trappings of an ungodly
historical set of processes that have come to culminate in modernity’s angst.
It is also important to note a distinctive difference between Catholicism and
Puritanism. Tillich pointed out that within the medieval Church “the point of view
of the actual religious life [of ] the sacraments were perhaps the most important
thing in medieval church history.” Catholicism to this day comes near to ap-
proaching this aspect of medieval church history. Lowell’s poetry is replete with the
imagery of Catholicism and of medieval church history. Yet, in Lowell’s poetry it
is ultimately the Puritan emphasis upon the non-sacramental that is most impor-
tant. Within Catholicism, it is the outer, external world of the visible (and the cor-
poreal) that must be made ever-present as a figural representation of the heavenly.
By contrast, Puritanism chose to see the physical reality of the hand of God not in
sacramental rituals but within the natural and social environment. History, too, for
the Puritan was an outward, external “sign” of God’s movement in time. Thus, in
one sense, the Puritans replaced the boundaries of the physical architectural church
with the whole world. Now, the world writ large could be made sacramental. In
Lowell, his imagery bears the mark of one who has at least studied the Catholic
sacraments; yet, his imagery reaches beyond the literal walls of any cathedral to
reach toward the unseen and the invisible, and toward the social. It is this latter
move that makes him distinctly like his Puritan ancestors.
Lowell could never say like that of his contemporary T.S. Eliot that “Destiny
waits in the hand of God.” Eliot put it this way in Murder in the Cathedral,
Destiny waits in the hand of God, shaping the still unshapen:

I have seen these things in a shaft of sunlight.
Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmen
Who do, some well, some ill, planning and guessing.
Having their aims which turn in their hands in the pattern of time.
Significantly though, we must keep before us the fact that Lowell faces the
problem of theodicy as a poet and not as a theologian. When reading Lowell we are
left with a riddled, somewhat tortured soul, and a very modern predicament. The
whole of the modern temperament spanning from that generation of writers who
saw (and in some instances even participated in) World War I and then World War
II, finding expression in authors such as John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway,
William Faulkner, Virginia Wolfe, and T.S. Eliot, can perhaps be summed up in
the problem of asking and searching for a definition of what God is. It goes with-
out saying that these modernist authors did not create a concord out of their re-
spective ways of solving the troubling question.
There were few modern writers who resolved the tension of the question. T.S.
Eliot is perhaps the best example of the rare soul who found a way out of the maze
of the modern predicament. Eliot’s early career is marked by the typical doubt re-
flective of the modern condition. Yet, his later career wherein he wrote Ash Wednes-
day, Four Quartets, and his plays, including the Rock, testify to his having settled upon
a solution to the modern crisis of spirit. The critic Stephen Spendler wrote in his
book T.S. Eliot that in Eliot’s poetry we come across “two opposite things: the spir-
itually negative character of the contemporary world and the spiritually positive
character of past tradition.” And that Eliot “was obsessed with time. The past and the
modern coexist in his poetry as an imagined present of conflicting symbols to which
are attached values of spiritual life or death.” Kairos, or God’s movement in time,
helps resolve the tension of good and evil in Eliot, just as it aided the mindset of
colonial Puritans. In Lowell, we find a picture of a religious world bounded by cer-
tain deprivations: an absence of faith; an absence of love; an absence of grace; ab-
sence of the kingdom of God; and an absence of a community of believers. What is
left, then? For Lowell what is left over is an ordered cosmos reflecting a figural imag-
ination that perceives at every turn a contest between good and evil; and thus, almost
every single early poem by Lowell is a representation of this figural imagination at
work depicting the cosmic battle as moved to exist within the landscape of the mod-
ern mind. The figural imagination fit nicely within the paradigm of New Criticism.
Lowell’s career as poet spans the reign of the New Critics and their obsession
with formalism. The New Critics had emphasized that a good poet is one who holds
mastery over language. Lowell’s career also marks a turn toward the liberated view
that the poet’s sense of a personal self is both a private and public venture of self-
discovery. Lowell’s first volume, Land of Unlikeness (1944) was published in an era
in which poets had become enamored, if not seduced, by the tidiness and efficiency
of finding the linguistic equivalency for objects in the natural world.
Ezra Pound had given the maxim, practically a functioning commandment in
1935, to “make it new.” At the turn of the century (1909), a manifesto by F. T.
Marinetti had proclaimed: “the essential elements of our poetry will be courage, au-
dacity, and revolt.” If we examine only the general climate of the modernists from
the high modernists to the futurists, what we find is an atmosphere bathed in the
belief that the social, hence, artistic environment could be recreated to incorporate
a more democratic and inclusive vision as compared to what had previously been
encountered in history. It would seem in such an intellectual climate that tradition
would be overthrown and new patterns would be sought out; and, in fact, for a
number of modernist movements this was indeed the attempt and the goal.
Contradictory as it might seem there was not necessarily the intention among
high modernists that a poet should make all things completely new—ironically,
many poets found that a return to the past, embodied in tradition, could be used to
supplant or, alternatively, highlight the problems of modernity. The past could be
playfully reinvented and had to be claimed by the poet as personal genius; as Eliot,
Allen Tate and the New Critics envisioned it, the past could not be discarded in its
entirety without risking a descent into total cultural madness. A poet’s interpreta-
tion of the past became dependent upon outside, “objective” structures, such as the
exercise of a critical judgment and of language to thoughtfully measure the poet’s
experiences of the external world. No matter what, for the New Critic and the high
modernist, the internal world of the poet (the inner life) was not to supersede the
external restraints of form.
Pound had intended with his own project of Imagism to find in language a suffi-
cient paring down of words so that language could be pruned to reveal an emo-
tional equivalency to words themselves, and vice versa; language and emotion could
be grafted onto one another. While Lowell remained closer to the tradition of
Pound and Eliot, and could never be said to have ventured near the murky waters
of surrealists or futurists; nonetheless, Lowell did manage by the end of the Cold
War era to have created revolt.
And yet, Lowell’s revolution of paving the way for the confessional self to be-
come the focal point of poetry (a revolution that by the second half of the twenti-
eth century had achieved such a stronghold that the by-product of its success is
that today in the twenty-first century we are engulfed by the standard that it is in-
conceivable to write poetry without reference to the personal self ) does not out-
weigh the fact that Lowell was, like Pound and Eliot, a poet whose vision was
steeped in an understanding that it is the past that holds us captive to the present.
Without an adequate comprehension of the past (even one’s own past), the pres-
ent moment will forever be elusive, if not entirely vacuous.
We should keep in mind that when we consider Lowell we are considering a
man whose work has been catalogued according to phases of his development as
a poet. We may identify three primary breaks in his career. The first phase of
Lowell’s creativity is marked by his emergence as a religious poet, although the
terminology of “religious poet” connotes a degree of orthodoxy that Lowell found
problematic to accept. It might be more appropriate to term this phase, his emer-
gence as a spiritual poet.
This first phase is decisively characterized by Lowell’s education in becoming a
poet. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact nature of why Lowell did not flourish in-
tellectually at Harvard (as his ancestor, the poet and friend of Henry James, James
Russell Lowell had once thrived). But Lowell’s choice to leave Harvard after study-
ing there nearly two years created what was probably the most critical turn in his
attempt at transforming himself into a poet; the decision to leave Harvard and
study at Kenyon College lead him for a time to come under the tutelage of the
emerging New Critics.
In the late 1930s when he made himself the apprentice of Allen Tate and the
remnants of the Fugitive Poets (such as John Crowe Ransom, teaching at Kenyon
College), Lowell simultaneously discovered religion. In part, Tate’s Catholicism
may have appeared to Lowell as a refuge against the existential predicament of how
a highly sensitive and artistically attuned individual might find it possible to sur-
vive the ceaseless chaos that had been ushered in by modernity. Lowell’s discovery
of Tate as a friend and mentor was a double-edged sword. The very nature of Tate
and Ransom’s collaboration in the Fugitive movement (which had mostly dissolved
as a movement by the time Lowell met Tate) and the movement’s transition into
New Criticism supplied Lowell with a bulwark against accepting the speed at
which the twentieth century was offering change.
In “Visiting the Tates,” Lowell describes his mentorship with Allen Tate as a
kind of self-chosen act—that it was he who picked Tate, and not necessarily the
other way around. Whether or not that is the true version of what happened may
matter very little; for, it mostly points out Lowell’s possession of self-assurance even
in the early stages of becoming a poet. In “Visiting the Tates,” Lowell describes
how he decided to take Allen Tate up on what was most probably a half-hearted
invitation to study under him, and did so in the most fantastic of ways. Traveling
to Tate’s home in Nashville (which had become a kind of intellectual half-way
house for poets in transition) with the intention of living there, Lowell was greeted
by Tate with the casual response that there was no room in his home for Lowell to
stay. Tate suggested the only place left for a poet-guest might be the lawn, an idea
that seemed suited to Lowell’s propensity toward extremes. As a grand gesture,
Lowell pitched his tent, saying of the situation: “A few days later, I returned with
an olive Sears-Roebuck-Nashville umbrella tent. I stayed three months.”
Lowell’s association with the Fugitive Poets calls into question how Lowell
managed to tolerate the opinions, for instance, that his Kenyon professor Ransom
espoused. Lowell’s falling in (at least for a season) among the Fugitives (and their
group in the beginning tended to function like a kind of junior poet’s club) does
shed light upon Lowell’s never ending fascination with region. The theme of how
a regional sense of place may define a poet’s personality is pervasive in Lowell. The
effect of the story is that it places Lowell in control over his own artistic destiny,
and at once displays his psychological need to confront authority like a rebellious
son attempting to knock down his father. If we do not wish to read into the story
such depth, it could also demonstrate Lowell’s tenacity, and maybe even a fleeting
indicator of something of his manic temperament. At the minor level, the story
makes Lowell appear foppish, but it also puts Lowell the New Englander in the
precarious adventure of acting the part of a slightly roguish Southern gentlemen.
While Lowell eventually broke with Tate (losing a good deal of his mentor’s es-
teem with the publication of Life Studies), for the period of time that Lowell was in-
fatuated with both Tate and Ransom’s ideas, the greatest aspect of their thought he
absorbed surrounded the problem of religion and its relationship to the modern
age. Lowell’s theological perspective may have borrowed somewhat unfortunately
from Ransom’s God Without Thunder (1930) and Ransom’s earlier publication Poems
About God (1919). Even Lowell’s unusually skilled measurement of form (out of
which he constructed ironic stances about the nature of God, religion, history, myth,
family, and region) is likely to have been imparted to him by Ransom’s influence.
Ransom in one of the verses appearing in Poems About God, “Geometry,” made the
acerbic comment that “It is an easy thing to improve on God.” Similarly, Lowell’s
first two volumes of poetry, Land of Unlikeness and Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) made
the effort to improve “man” by envisaging humanity as cloaked in myth.
Lowell’s mythologizing patterns of self and society are largely traceable to Ran-
som’s argument that the modern world because of its fixation upon scientific ra-
tionalism had lost its connection to the mythical patterning of communal life.
Ransom arguing that science offered the modern world “principles” or “abstractions”
that could not lead to “concrete” ways of organizing society had said that “the Gods
are concrete, they have sensible quality, they furnish us with esthetic experience,”
and he surmised the outcome of a scientific paradigm to be the loss of communal
roots, arguing that scientific principles, “crucify our organic sensibility.” God With-
out Thunder is a terribly fallacious work, especially at the level of theory, and it seeks
to undermine the scientific temperament of the modern age with a return toward
collective myth and a retreat into regionalism; furthermore, it attempts a sociolog-
ical view of myth without recourse to accuracy. Lowell would have been better in-
formed had he drawn from actual sociologists of religion, such as Max Weber or
Emile Durkheim, or turned to the theories of Mircea Eliade or Levi-Strauss for a
survey of the function of myth in formulating a cohesive social order. We can see in
Ransom’s interpretation of the Genesis account of Cain and Abel his odd perspec-
tive on the social role of myth: “The story of Cain and Abel had to do peculiarly
with the establishment of an agricultural civilization to replace the pastoral.” Ran-
som’s reasoning, strange as it appeared, was based on his belief that in the “religion
of a people is that background of metaphysical doctrine which dictates its political econ-
omy.” It is no coincidence that in Land of Unlikeness and Lord Weary’s Castle (and
past these first volumes and extending into the whole corpus of Lowell’s work) that
Cain is used as a figural representation to explain how the human consciousness
seeks ways to revolt against authority. Most likely, Lowell’s fascination with Cain
and his use of it as a recurrent trope is traceable to Ransom’s early influence upon
Lowell; the question remains open though to what extent Lowell absorbed the po-
litical conservatism that Ransom’s retreat into regionalism symbolized.
While Lowell did not completely adhere to Ransom’s theory that myth could
be used to regenerate social bonds (presumably eroded by the encroachment of a
technological rearrangement of society) and reestablish an agrarian economy, Low-
ell did seemingly take upon himself Ransom’s belief that the “modern American
city or industrial district is certainly the most impressive transformation of natural
environment that has yet appeared on this planet [with a] ruthless domination of
nature, and the ease with which they can manage its God.” What Lowell learned
of the function of myth from Ransom was “Religion cannot dispense with Gods,
and the Gods must be quasi-natural, or frankly circumstantial. The dogma in which
we believe must have plenty of sensible quality, or quasi-historical concreteness.”
We can see this “quasi-natural,” “circumstantial,” “sensible,” “quasi-historical con-
creteness” throughout Land of Unlikeness and Lord Weary’s Castle. Lowell’s studies
under Ransom contributed to Lowell’s love of formulating a love for turning the
poetic act into a practice of mythologizing.
Robert Shafer’s Christianity and Naturalism (1926) was dedicated to the New
Humanist, Paul Elmer More, and it stated well the sentiment of the liberalism of
the New Humanists was one that recognized the possibility of humanity to dis-
cover transcendence over science without necessarily eschewing the generic con-
cepts of social progress and advancement. As Shafer wrote, “it is not merely that
man’s ways are different from nature’s ways, for man’s Amoral character not only
finds no analogy in the order of nature but is radically opposed to that order.” More
had himself written in an essay on Augustine: “Nature herself, in distributing her
rewards and penalties to the animal world, is red-handed, cruel and unconcerned.”
The liberalism of the New Humanist position was that if humanity mistook science
(founded upon naturalism) for the ultimate character of the human species, soci-
ety would be doomed. Ethics and morality had to evolve from a higher standard (if
not higher order) than a study of the natural world; neither evolutionary science
nor technological reason could offer solutions to human behavior, even if one could
offer explanations of origins such explanations would inevitably lead to an instru-
mental control over nature and society.
While Lowell was more liberal than his counterparts Tate and Ransom, he still
borrowed heavily from their agrarianism and regionalism and their perspective that
myth could anchor the individual in a society uprooted by a loss of tradition. In

“After the Surprising Conversion” in Lord Weary’s Castle, Lowell mythologizes how
the individual lost adrift the chaos of modernity suffers something greater than a
mere feeling of angst, but suffers a feeling of abandonment—“At Jehovah’s
nod/Satan seemed more let loose amongst us: God/Abandoned us to Satan, and he
pressed/Us hard, until we thought we could not rest,” creating the effect that “Till we
had done with life./Content was gone.” The lines parallel the story of Job, but also
draw heavily from Ransom’s argument that science and technology could be likened
in a mythological way to a destructive demiurge. Tradition and God merged into
one image in Lowell’s lines. The result was that the hope of “contentment” has passed.
Without offering too much of a digression, it is useful to recall that the collec-
tive vision of the Fugitive Poets was reactionary for its resistance against a scien-
tific, rationalist, or technologically driven worldview. Offering a call for the lettered
men of the twentieth century to return to a life of agrarianism, Tate and others had
focused their attention on what Louise Cowan in The Southern Critics described as
the hope for “the reunion of fragmented man, so that thought and feeling, imagi-
nation and memory, piety and creativity could coexist once more in the human
frame,” and “developed their world picture, or paradigm, from a faithful attention
to the poetic act, finding in it the proper norms for human action, given form by
the entire course of Western Civilization, incarnate for the last time, as it seemed,
in the South.” Cowan described Ransom’s theoretical position about the poet’s
ability to exercise irony as “a transcendent attitude, the position of equilibrium, at-
tained by man as his ideal construct is modified by the experience of fallen nature”
and that “the vantage point of irony, then, the complexities in man’s experience of
the world can be reconciled.”
If there is dominant mode defining Lowell’s Land of Unlikeness and Lord Weary’s
Castle, it is irony. But again Lowell, in spite of his borrowing from the agrarian
New Critics, did not arrive at the same set of conclusions. Lowell’s use of an ironic
mode does not bring us any closer to reconciliation between universal human na-
ture and the specifics of society and culture. In fact, Lowell does not resolve the
tension between the individual and the externality of the social world through “a
reunion of fragmented man.” Almost always, Lowell finds such unification utterly
impossible. This is why Lowell’s use of religion leads us in a direction different from
that conceived of by Tate and Ransom; for, his poems in Land of Unlikeness and
Lord Weary’s Castle do not uphold the orthodoxy of Christianity, but instead lead
away from it. Religion becomes in the early poems a vehicle by which the mind or
the psyche might be explored for existential implications, and these are for Lowell
spiritual implications.
In 1993 the social historian Donald L. Dorman in Revolt of the Provinces de-
scribed the movement of agrarianism in the first half of the twentieth century as a
movement that far extended the Fugitive Poets. In Dorman’s estimation, agrarian-
ism represented a larger spectrum of authors (and painters) who perceived region
as more important than technology, myth as superior to rationalism, and the exis-
tential predicament of the individual as superior to the discovery of the scientific
origins of the species—“In practical terms, the exploration, cultivation, and preser-
vation of a regional culture became the vocation of the individual artist or intellec-
tual.” To this extent, Lowell’s early poems oddly parallel agrarianism; yet, as
Lowell’s poems demonstrate not all participants within some version of agrarian-
ism necessarily represented conservative ideological views, racial or otherwise.
To the degree that Lowell’s first phase of poetry was tied to the mentorship of
the Fugitive Poets turned New Critics, he seems to have made ample use of their
view that in order to secure the human experience within the modern world and to
prevent the individual from being cut loose of his or her social origins (that might
provide some internal feeling of security), it was up to the classically trained poet
to forge an aesthetic vision that could counter modernity’s overextension of rational
inquiry. As Muriel Rukeyser so keenly observed in The Life of Poetry (1949), and in
direct opposition to the New Critic’s position, she observed that “We cannot iso-
late the causal factors of a society and its culture without their relationships; and in
our culture, with its demand for permanent patterns, we see a complicated danger.”
Lowell’s earliest poetry fought against the New Critical assumption that the poem
could exist isolated from its social implications. Lowell’s exploration of region and
place engaged questions of how culture shapes the human psyche and how mytho-
logical patterns become nonsensical without recourse to history.
There is a great deal of ambiguity that marks the first phase of Lowell’s work. In
his first three volumes, Lowell establishes himself as a poet who deems region or
place as an inescapable factor of writing. And yet he manages to utilize region in such
a way so as to avoid becoming a regional poet in the conservative sense of the term
(the way that Tate and Ransom had). It would be misleading to consider Lowell an
agrarian poet; but, he did manage despite being a New Englander to have picked up
certain aspects of the movement. For example, Lowell’s appropriation of the South-
ern grotesque as a means of conceptualizing theology may have initially stemmed
from Tate and Ransom’s influence and from their concerns with agrarianism and re-
gionalism. But in Lowell, his way of presenting religion brings him nearer to
Faulkner and Flannery O’Conner than to Tate and Ransom; however, we cannot rule
out the possibility that the time Lowell spent in the South with Tate increased his ex-
posure to the idea found so pervasively in Southern fiction that God as a figural rep-
resentation or as a signifier of metaphysical meaning could be expressed through the
paradigm of aesthetic violence. And, that such violence could actually be sublime.
The second phase of Lowell’s career centers upon one particular volume of po-
etry, Life Studies (1959). The majority of contemporary scholarship focuses on this
aspect of Lowell’s work, perceiving in it his legacy. Steven Gould Axelrod referred
to it this way: “in the ‘Life Studies’ sequence, Lowell freed himself from the style
of Allen Tate, Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, and his own earlier texts.” It was Lowell’s ul-
timate overthrow of the father-son relationship inherent in his relationship with
his mentors.
While the New Critics themselves were not a particularly favorable lot given
their antiquated views on race, science, and reason, Lowell’s association with them
should not taint the whole of the interpretation of his early poetry. Lowell’s first
three volumes stand on their own merit as brilliant displays of irony and for their
linguistic focus; if read as expressions of existentialism they are quite fulfilling
works. Furthermore, there is a rhetorical dilemma that runs throughout his first
phase—how is the psyche to be confronted in both existential and spiritual terms?
Lowell’s solution was to conceptualize the psyche as spiritual entity, and to appro-
priate secular existentialism as a response to spiritual philosophy. This does not
mean that Lowell had settled upon a theological stance (or even multiple stances).
Lowell as spiritual poet was decisively heterodoxical in his faith.
This second phase, the emergence of Lowell’s confessional mode, is character-
ized by Lowell’s radical departure from his previous role as the spiritual poet. Low-
ell, perhaps taking cues from the poet Randall Jarrell (who also broke from the
hegemony and tyranny of the Kenyon poets and New Criticism), moved his work
in a number of non-spiritual directions by finding other explanations for the mod-
ern crisis of the self ’s relationship to external reality. Drawing upon the lessons
learned from his devastating struggle with bouts of manic depression and his sub-
sequent hospitalizations, Lowell turned toward the psychoanalytic. But as I will
discuss momentarily, Lowell’s use of psychoanalysis remained mostly hedged by a
purely artistic question—and this question was how as a technique could a version
of psychoanalysis be used to produce aesthetic affects in poetry?
This assertion implies a counter-intuitive reading of Life Studies, particularly “91
Revere Street.” It would seem, to the extent Lowell chose to apply psychoanalysis
to shape the autobiographical material he incorporated into the volume that his in-
tention must have been to find a reductive explanation for the poet’s suffering. It is
virtually impossible to engage the psychological portions of Life Studies without re-
course to a basic understanding of the Freudian implications; yet, uncovering a
solution to the tension existing between artist and society (or poet and world) is
not the ultimate design of the poetic sequences comprising Life Studies.
William Hocking, in a work published the same year as Land of Unlikeness ob-
served in Science and the Idea of God (1944), “It is neither desirable nor possible to
confess all things to men; it is least of all desirable to display one’s sentiments be-
fore a gaze which is nothing but-scientific, from which exposure they can only
emerge denatured, because pure science is indifferent to sentiment.” Hocking had
taken up the question of whether the patient-psychologist relationship could ever

produce an authentic level of trust, but without revealing the inner life to be but a
sham. Hocking wisely noted, “Secrecy is, in fact, a normal part of life,” and so the
individual should guard his or her secrets unless actual trust could be gained. In
Hocking’s opinion psychoanalysis was built upon the illusory belief that sincere
intimacy between the patient and psychologist could be attained. However, actual
emotional intimacy implies a degree of reciprocation. Such reciprocation cannot
really be achieved between patient and therapist; thus, in Hocking’s view a patient
could suffer more harm than good—“When one realizes that he has confessed to
the wrong persons under the wrong circumstances, a new shame enters his life ...
Thus maladroit confession lays the basis for a new disease.” Hocking uses a rather
shocking analogy of the patient prostituting the self before the psychoanalyst, not-
ing that the patient has been essentially duped into believing that someone cares.
It is a recognition of this fact which has led some psychoanalysts to intro-

duce an intermediate step of procedure, that of winning the love of the pa-
tient in order to secure his confidence, the stage of ‘fixation.’ The ‘patient
then becomes bound to the physician by the act of confession,’ and must
later be released, since the ‘fixation’ is for a professional purpose only. Upon
which it is hardly necessary to remark that unless attachment is sincere, it
is a polite form of prostitution; and that confidences won by this device
belong to the destructive type of confession.
If we ask how Hocking’s theory applies to Lowell, there is a reversal that occurs
in Life Studies of the standard patient-psychoanalyst relationship. It is the poet who
becomes psychoanalyst to himself, but only on the pretense that the reader cares
about the condition of the poet. The validity (if not meaning) of a confessional
poem becomes vapid without erecting this sense of artificial intimacy between poet
and reader. Lowell is highly self-aware of the artifice constructed, and so his ver-
sion of the confessional mode makes no attempt to betray the factual man behind
the mask. Instead the goal becomes to present a new mask for the man once the old
masks crumble.
In spite of the ingenuity of the technique, one also wonders if this phase of
Lowell’s career would have achieved the status it reached had it not been for two
influences—the critic M.L. Rosenthal’s commentary upon Life Studies and the ex-
tension of the confessional mode in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia
Plath. While the psychoanalytic as a means of producing an aesthetic quality (an
illusion, almost) of bearing the soul’s wounds publicly is a central feature of Life
Studies, there are two other aspects of it that are of equal significance. One, the po-
etic sequences form a relationship to Walter Pater’s aesthetic of placing the per-
sonality of the artist as a centrally binding force of the text; and, two, the connec-
tion in Lowell’s work with that of Randall Jarrell lead him in a direction of loos-
ening the grip of finding a classical and objective approximation in language to
express sentiment, emotion, and experience.
Life Studies is not only a psychological study of the poet’s fragmented mind; to
the degree that Freudian dimensions are present in the work they intersect with the
telling of a larger story, that of a vision of the poet as a young man, or of the birth
of the poetic consciousness, and of the aesthetic education of the poet. Akin to
Walter Pater’s aesthetic method in Imaginary Portraits of locating the emergence of
artistic sensibility within the perimeters of childhood experience, Life Studies traces
the origins of the poet’s discovery of his own aesthetic disposition.
The third phase which comes after Life Studies is marked by the political re-
sponsibility Lowell felt as consequence of engaging a more pragmatic approach (in
developing praxis and not merely theoria) to the problems of culture and history. If
we pause and remind ourselves of the political climate of 1944 (the year of Lowell’s
first publication), America was one year away from testing its invention of nuclear
weaponry in New Mexico and from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The great intellec-
tual project of modernism was nearing its collapse. By the time Lowell published
his second work, Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), with the dropping of the atomic bomb
America and the West at large had in a technical sense entered into a postmodern
age, even if many poets were reluctant to carry this next wave of intellectual
thought to its full conclusions (and even if Lowell never became a postmodern
thinker or poet). Considering the topics that Lowell felt compelled to write about
in his prose essays—the range includes Ford Maddox Ford, I.A. Richards, Yvor
Winters, Hawthorne, Dylan Thomas, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Robert Penn War-
ren, and T.S. Eliot—it is somewhat surprising that Lowell managed to the degree
that he did to break out of the New Critical paradigm.
But by the end of his career, poetry had become for Lowell in and of itself a
threshold for approaching the political. Lowell turned his attention toward ecology,
Civil Rights, and labor rights in For the Union Dead (1964), often to the effect of
combining the three concerns. Land of Unlikeness and Lord Weary’s Castle were at-
tempts at retelling certain typically expected American narratives (expected at the
height of high modernism), mythologized to express the existential and the psy-
chical self. For the Union Dead, however, ventured to create a different or newer
context for American narratives, one that tried to break, at least partially, from
foundational myths. In this third phase of Lowell’s career, the confessional mode
is expanded; furthermore, the linguistic structure of his work is changed to reflect
a greater influence of poets like Daniel Schwartz, John Berryman, Charles Olson,
Jarrell and Roethke. The oedipal problem remains perpetually present in poems
like “Fall 1961” (For the Union Dead) wherein Lowell says,
A father’s no shield
for his child.
We are like a fog wild
spiders crying together,
But without tears.
In Lowell’s early poetry, we humans are spiders, but differently. In “Mr. Edwards
and the Spider” (Lord Weary’s Castle), it is God and not autonomous nature that re-
duces humanity to such simple terms:
A very little thing, a little worm,

Or hourglass-blazoned spider, it is said,
Can kill a tiger. Will the dead
Hold up his mirror and affirm
To the four winds the smell
And flash of his authority? It’s well
If God who holds you to the pit of hell,
Much as one holds a spider, will destroy,
Baffle and dissipate your soul. As a small boy
On Windsor Marsh, I saw the spider die

When thrown into the bowels of fierce fire:
There’s no long struggle, no desire
To get up on its feet and fly—
If we consider the two poems collectively, the biological father, the interpolation of
father images into the psyche, and God become a three-in-one conflation in the
poet’s mind, each representative of the constrictions of authority. In “Leviathan” he
called all forms of authority (conceived as extensions of the father-complex) an
“octopus.” The metaphor seemed appropriate enough to Lowell, allowing him to
describe how a life can squeeze out of a soul. Much of Lowell’s political poetry re-
mained at root an attempt to throw off the shackles of fatherly oppression.
chapter two
Poetry as Confession
In a short review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, “Poetry as Confession,” written

for the Nation in 1959, the literary critic M.L. Rosenthal forever changed the di-
rection of modern poetry. It is doubtful that Rosenthal could have foreseen just
how successful his coinage of the term “confessional poetry” would later prove to
be, but the effect was in its own way earth shattering. Rosenthal opened with a
passing reference to Emily Dickinson’s comment that poetry, once it becomes pub-
lic and is read by an audience, becomes “the auction of the mind.” There is always
the chance a reader will misperceive a poet’s intentions, and consequently the poet
will be transformed into distortion. Too, the nod to Dickinson acknowledged the
cornerstone of the autobiographical element in American poetry.
In the American tradition of autobiographical presence following Dickinson,
the effect of autobiography is to purge the self of its ruinations, including emo-
tions such as fear and disquietude. Autobiographical presence could also perform,
as it did in the case of Whitman, a purging of the poet’s hypersensitivity. In the au-
tobiographical presence of Dickinson and Whitman, we are not allowed to come
too close to the self. The place of the self is sacred for its mystery and out of that
mystery it confesses by making known its existence. It is in that mystery that the
depth of the self may be felt; yet, for those poets, the self may never be touched di-
rectly. To do so would be a violation, a transgression.
While the Nation article zeroed in on the tradition of autobiographical pres-
ence in American poetry, Rosenthal also tried to weigh this tradition with the
modern writing of confessional poetry. Taking into account not just the American
history of an autobiographical “I,” he made a comparison with the British Roman-
tics. As a result of the comparison, he interpreted the rise of confessional poetry as
a sign of a chasm that had developed between the modern poet and the Roman-
tics: “We are now far from the great Romantics who, it is true, spoke directly of
their emotions but did not give the game away even to themselves” and that “The
use of poetry for the most naked kind of confession grows apace in our day.” Lost
from the Romantics were the circuitous revelations of self. The modern confes-
sional poet seemed to provide a front seat view of the poet’s personality.
Rosenthal’s description of modern confessional poetry as “naked” was no doubt
a reflection of poets such as Karl Shapiro and Allen Ginsberg who each preceded
Lowell’s transition into a confessional mode. There were other precursors to Low-
ell, such as the Black Mountain Poets. Charles Olson and his Projectivist Move-
ment, along with John Berryman and Randall Jarrell’s experimentation with form,
worked as counterweights to the reign of the New Critics and high modernism.
And, W.D. Snodgrass published Heart’s Needle (1959) at roughly the same time as
Lowell’s publication of Life Studies, which much like Life Studies discussed the
problems and effects of mental illness and cultural and social repression.
Years after the publication of Life Studies and the success it achieved, Lowell re-
marked in an interview with Ian Hamilton that of the numerous literary critics
dotting the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century it was Randall Jarrell
who had emerged as a guidepost for a “confessional poet.” Lowell described his
connection to Jarrell in this way:
We both began in the age of the New Critics. They are a little maligned, I
think, though we both grew too roughed to remain disciples. The first had
artistic genius; Winters, Blackmur, Kenneth Burke, Allen Tate . . . even
Hart Crane wrote thoughtful New Criticism in letters. That age had
passed; its last spirit was Randall.
We might pause and ask what was the “last spirit” Randall possessed? And, how do
aspects of his poetic technique help to shed light upon Lowell? We find part of the
answer in Lowell’s eulogy of Jarrell, wherein he highlighted a central component of
the poet’s work: “Most of the poems are dramatic monologues . . . Their themes, re-
peated with endless variations, are solitude.” Lowell goes on to enumerate those
variations in Jarrell’s work: “the solitude of the unmarried, the solitude of the mar-
ried, the love, strife, dependency, and indifference of man and woman.” All the
while as Lowell explains, this solitude is rooted within the psychical formations of
the adult mind as it spins further and further away from the initial stages of con-
sciousness in childhood. Lowell puts his finger on the origins of the poet’s solitude
POETRY AS CONFESSION | 27
when he says of Jarrell’s work that it was concerned with “how mortals age, and
brood over their lost and raw childhood, only recapturable in memory and imagi-
nation.” It is important to remind ourselves of a few characteristics of Jarrell’s work
in order to grasp the influence upon Lowell’s progression into a confessional mode.
In Jarrell’s “The Orient Express,” the self is fractured into an autobiographical “I”
but also named as an autonomous and universal self—“One looks from the
train/Almost as one looked as a child.” The adult must comfort, though, the mem-
ory of the child’s confusion—“What I see still seems to me plain,/I am safe; but at
evening/As the lands darken, a questioning/Precariousness comes over everything.”
The poet’s encroaching mental illness becomes a nocturnal descent, and so every-
thing is cloaked in apathy and distraction—“I saw that the world/That had seemed
to me the plain/Gray mask if all that was strange/Behind it—of all that was—was
all/But it beyond belief.” The poet drenched in his illness cannot reconstitute his
adult self in the shape of his remembrances of childhood; for, if he could the world
might not darken and change in a flash of the mind’s swings of mood.
One thinks, “Behind everything

An unforced joy, an unwilling
Sadness (a willing sadness, a forced joy)
Moves changelessly”; one looks from the train
And there is something, the same thing
Behind everything: all these little villages,
A passing woman, a field of grain,
The man who says goodbye to his wife—
The train moves on passing from one moment of life to the next, but the search
for a reality that might exist behind these moments (that might have some perma-
nency) and so provide a transcendent value cannot be found. The poet’s only hope
to finding a meaning behind the transitory nature of his own slow, limping
thoughts is to recover the child in order to cure the adult. But the poet cannot do
this. In “The Refugees,” this hope is destroyed as “The child in the ripped mask.”
“The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” probably the most critiqued of Jarrell’s
poems that deal with the theme of solitude as it overlaps with other issues of anx-
iety and illness, calls the mind a “cage,” and again the poet is made into a passive
observer of life rather than an active participant—“The world goes by my cage and
never seem me.” The poet remains locked into the past, despairingly crying out for
some force outside of the mind to intercede to release the poet to the present—
“You see what I am: change me, change me!” In “The Player Piano,” the problem of
solitude takes on the cast and hues of region, as the poet tells of traveling to a pan-
cake house in east Mississippi and showing a nameless waitress photographs of a
grandson and parents, youthful and lost; but, the poet is imprisoned in his solitude
for the memory of these relationships and has only the permanency of the pictures.
He is, after all, “Going home—Home to the hotel.”
If the problem of how a poet is to reconcile his adult condition with his child-
hood seems at first trifling, for Lowell it was not; it forms a major component of
Lowell’s preoccupation with the autobiographical self in Life Studies. Perhaps
through his reading of Jarrell, Lowell in time found something that he could not
find within Tate and Ransom’s ideologies—the means of manipulating the psyche
to recover the past in a way that could escape the myths of regionalism. Further-
more he said of Jarrell’s reflection on the topic of solitude and its relationship to the
poet’s remembrances of childhood experience, that if we look for models within the
tradition of the Romantic or meditative poet we discover in “Rilke and
Wordsworth, a governing and transcendent vision.” Apart from representing mere
sentimentality, “For shallower creatures, recollections of childhood and youth are
drenched in a mist of plaintive pathos, or even bathos, but for Jarrell this was the
divine glimpse, lifelong to be lived with, painfully and tenderly relived, trans-
formed, matured—man with and against woman, child with and against adult.”
Lowell’s vocabulary in his commentary on Jarrell is intriguing and deliberate;
for, his choice of the words “pathos” and “bathos” tell us that for him the poetic
process is far from a simple emotional release or that of a mere catharsis of the
dreamlike remnants within the mind of the child’s imagination. Neither is the po-
etic process a comedy of errors at relaying the anecdotal; the confessional element
requires something greater. As Lowell’s attraction to Jarrell’s ability to incorporate
a quality of solitude into poetry attests, the poetic process that moves us nearer to
confession is one arising from a complex psychological cathexis.
In Freudian terms, a cathexis is the overlapping of an intense emotional energy
with an objective part of reality; as the libidinal energies of the mind find outlets
for expression so hosts of associations linking the internal reality of the psychical
self with the external reality of a concrete world are made. What Lowell inter-
preted within Jarrell’s poetry (and which is a hallmark tenet of Life Studies) was a
means of representing the way that libidinal energies arising in childhood become
grafted onto the objective world of parents and siblings. More so, the connection
between libidinal childhood energies and the external world forms a psychical
cathexis with the literalness and concreteness of home, place, and region.
It is a dynamic process that Lowell’s theory of Jarrell explains and that Life Stud-
ies embodies—the movement of the poet as youth toward maturation, and through
this movement all the feelings of ambiguity surrounding the poet’s constant at-
tempts to thwart, subordinate, repress, or even sublimate libidinal drives (presum-
ably these drives are in excess because of the poet’s more finely attuned sensibility
that has become directed toward his surroundings or toward his environment).
As the poet progresses into a state of maturation, his personal mental health
and stability depend upon how well he managed his childhood libidinal instincts.
If the poet is able to successfully merge his sense of a libidinal self with that of rec-
ognizing a holistic presence of others, the difficulty of negotiating love and affec-
tion are overcome. But if the poet is incapable of overriding other psychological
complexes (such as the oedipal complex) that interfere with a successful transfor-
mation of the childhood libido into adult relationships, so the poet finds himself
living in a condition of solitude, or perhaps even worse a series of disastrous per-
sonal relationships.
Freud described the problem of the oedipal complex in this way—a psychical
situation arising as a secondary, not a primary condition, of childhood. In the pri-
mary or first stages of a child’s development, parental figures are not the direct ob-
ject of the child’s libidinal energies. And here, the concept of libidinal energies
should be understood as something other than more mere sexual energies; the li-
bido in its earliest development are those images of self and self-love (the making
of oneself into the primary object of interest) out of which the ego later develops.
If the second stage of the child’s development wherein parental figures do become
the object of the child’s libidinal interests should go awry for one reason or an-
other, the outcome will be that the parental figures should become detrimentally
interpolated into the child’s conception of his or her own ego. Instead of the child
forming a healthy ego wherein the self is understood to stand apart from the
parental figures and to operate according to self-propitiated libidinal energies, the
child’s ego will develop erroneous feelings of inadequacy from having conflated
parental figures as objects of identity within the ego. James Dickey in a poem
“Dover: Believing in Kings,” accurately translated into images the Freudian dy-
namic of how a child will interpolate parental figures into the ego structure. Dickey
gave the metaphor of a son who has consumed his father’s identity, but to the con-
sequence that the son’s identity is called into question: “My father’s body in my
heart/Like a buried candle danced.” Freud put it like this in An Autobiographical
Study where he attempted to deconstruct his own childhood psychical develop-
ments in order to arrive at a theory of ego formation.
In the Oedipal complex the libido was seen to be attached to the image of
the parental figures. But earlier there was a period in which there were no
such objects. There followed from this fact the concept (of fundamental
importance for the libido theory) of a state in which the subject’s libido
filled his own ego and had that for its object. This state could be called nar-
cissism or self-love. A moment’s reflection showed that this state never
completely ceases. All through the subject’s life his ego remains the great
reservoir of his libido, from which object-cathexes are sent out and into
which the libido is constantly being transformed into object-libido, and

vice versa. An excellent instance of the length in which this transformation
can go is afforded by the state of being in love, whether in a sexual or sub-
limated manner, which goes so far as involving a sacrifice of the self.
Translating Lowell’s fascination with Jarrell’s exploration of the theme of soli-

tude into Freudian terms is useful. Solitude as a condition of being (and not just a
consequence of circumstances beyond one’s control) is similar to the psychological
condition of the melancholic. Freud conjectured that the melancholic shared a cer-
tain likeness to the narcissist, but that neither should be viewed as entirely nega-
tive—“Narcissism in this sense would not be a perversion, but the libidinal
complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which
may justifiably be attributed to every living creature.” In Lowell’s confessional stage
we find that solitude is an overriding theme, but that the solitude has combined
with both a narcissistic and melancholic psychopathology, conditions stemming
from Lowell’s precarious relationship to his parents. As Life Studies expresses, the
result carried over into Lowell’s adult life and his marital relationship, creating a
psychical block from giving or accepting love. When the child’s ego does not over-
come the oedipal complex correctly, the outcome is that the broader categories of
adult affection become thwarted and deferred attempts at resituating the ego
against libidinal impulses, to the effect that the childhood ego will perpetually re-
assert itself by creating contexts and situations in adult life through which the ego
might try to satisfactorily resolve its oedipal issues.
This is in fact a primary tension that runs throughout Life Studies—how the
poet comes to terms with the formative stages of observation and sentiment, both
of which are so necessary for aesthetic achievement. Life Studies is an expression of
Wordsworth’s ideal in “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold” that “The Child is
Father of the Man/I could wish my days to be/Bound each to each by natural
piety.” And yet, there is little of what we might call “natural piety” in Life Studies.
Neither does the religious poetry of Lowell embrace the transcendental hope that
a return to a natural condition is possible. The sense of a recovery comes about in
Life Studies by asserting a return to the womb and the desire to rediscover a
mother’s love that remained essentially deferred. There also in Life Studies is the
secondary hope of finding a father’s love; yet, this hope could be considered lost in
the text, as only a sense of a father’s emotional absence is made known.
The result of the repressed need for a father’s love works itself out in “91 Revere
Street” in the poet’s anger and in a banality or vulgarity that finds it way at times into
the long, narrative poem; and, while Lowell recognizes his mother’s emasculating
acts toward his father, he in fact in the text repeats his mother’s hostility toward his
father. In the end this only brings the poet closer to identifying with his mother. In
the Nation article, Rosenthal observed how “91 Revere Street” functioned as “essen-
tially a public discrediting of [Lowell’s] father’s manliness and character, as well as
the family and social milieu of his childhood.” The oepidal problems in “91 Revere
Street” take on cultural significance, as Lowell’s father becomes an image for mas-
culinity or the process of de-masculinization in a Cold War context. Life Studies
noted that post-war culture had become complicated. As Lowell put it: “I used to sit
through the Sunday dinners absorbing cold and anxiety from the table. I imagined
myself hemmed in by our new, inherited Victorian Myers furniture.” The incom-
mensurability of the father-son relationship repeats the misery of the father-mother
relationship, and the two together emerge in the poet’s mind as measures of what
Cold War American society’s failure to offer any real nurturing. The specificities of
growing up in New England within a family that seemed to constantly oscillate in
social status only exacerbated Lowell’s awareness of the tenuousness of American
values. Partly of the Boston Brahmins of the region, but slipping in clout and econ-
omy, the tension in the Lowell household circled around themes of military prestige
and codes of honor, while on the other hand, bourgeois décor. Lowell’s mother, a
woman capable of enormously frantic worry seemed to care about “Sheffield silver-
plate urns, more precious than solid sterling” but not as much about helping her
husband secure a healthy self-image. Of course, the silver-plated urns were not the
Grecian urns of Keats; these were “peeling,” revealing the lack of stability in the
Lowell household. And yet, Lowell decisively shows more affection for his mother
in his poems compared to what he ever manages to pour forth toward his father.
Life Studies represents a breaking point in his career more than a break with the
past. On the one hand, if we are to read the work as a psychological study, it is a self-
conscious regression into the past and an attempt to find a way back to irretrievable
parts of the psyche. As such, the work sets the stage for the self-explanation of the
poet’s inability to find love. Each of the prominent women in Lowell’s life—Jean
Stafford, Elisabeth Hardwick, Caroline Blackwood, even Elizabeth Bishop—are si-
multaneously great triumphs and failures more than epic love stories. Steven Gould
Axelrod linked Lowell’s poems about family and parents to Roethke’s innovations
of a similar kind: “The Roethke-Lowell poem of severance from the parent embod-
ies the poet’s declaration of independence from the precursor. It often inaugurates
the poet’s major phase.” Roethke had, for instance, already begun unraveling how
the figure of a father or father-image can affect the psychical life of a poet; we need
only recall The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948) or his poem “I Cry, Love! Love”
taken from Praise to an End, where he attempts to find a way out of the past by a
route other than that of the rational. The mind’s compulsion to seek love—identity,
self-acceptance, and the acceptance given as a law and a commandment by a father-
figure—is primal and irrational. As Roethke says, “Reason? That dreary shed” is in-
sufficient to allow the poet to transcend the origins of its painful need.
Lowell’s “91 Revere Street” mimics the psychoanalytic technique of personal re-
gression wherein the patient attempts to locate the locus or loci of his or her mental
disturbances by allowing the mind to successively move backwards in time until the
psychical site of trauma has been identified, searched, and healed; yet, the text also
deviates from this method by evoking a strong aesthetic dimension not contained in
actual psychoanalysis. Herein is one of the great misconceptions and confusions sur-
rounding confessional poetry and its purpose. As Walter Kirn quipped: “Lowell’s
poems proved that if writing is a form of therapy, it’s a uniquely unsuccessful one, at
least in medical terms, and that insights into the larger human predicament don’t
guarantee their author a good night’s sleep, a stable marriage or a dignified passing.”
This is because the actual goal in Life Studies was not to produce a sound mind
for the poet, but to allow for the freedom of the poet to realize that within the
strife and drama of his own life he could lay claim to both waste and beauty. We
should perhaps begin to recognize that the confessional mode Lowell “invented” is
essentially an aesthetic mode. Contained in one of Lowell’s late works, The Dolphin,
the poem “Doubt” (part two of it, “Pointing the Horns of the Dilemma”) clearly
lays out the anguish of solitude, but also presents it as a necessary part of the poet’s
attempt to bathe the world in fresh starts—“From the dismay of my old work to
the blank/new—water-torture of vacillation!” It is difficult, to say the least, to
cleanse and purge the world of its social errors and to offer a corrective when the
poet himself is locked inside the past to a degree that it marks him as impotent to
change himself and his own life. In that poem Lowell wrote,
The true snakepit isn’t monodrama Medasu,

the gorgon arousing the serpents in her hair;
it’s a room to walk with no one else, to walk,
take thought, unthink the thought and listen for nothing:
“She loves me too much to have my welfare at heart . . .”
Despite the oversimplified style (a radical departure in the use of language from
Lowell’s early poetry), what is expressed is the poet’s desire to turn away from for-
mer attempts of mythologizing the self and to look instead at the reality of cir-
cumstances. The sense of solitude is overwhelming and the poet’s only recourse at
comforting his overactive mind—the singular thought of a woman’s love—be-
comes twisted like the serpents in Medusa’s hair. The twist comes about because
love for the poet is always signified as an absence, not a presence, so that (we might
infer) he has driven the woman away from the room and now he must walk it alone
with only the internalized image of her. The woman’s absence (now functioning as
a presence helping to fill the solitude) functions like a chard of glass in the poet’s
psyche. He is completely incapable of accepting the fact of her love, rejecting the
love for an alternative that cannot save him or serve him well. She must love him
too much, if she loves him at all, which is to say she does not love him enough in
the right way. The oedipal issues of Life Studies remained unresolved in the late
work, so that the poems of The Dolphin (1973) and For Lizzie and Harriet (1973)
only repeat the Freudian patterns.
Rosenthal had worried over this one aspect of the modern confessional poet
perhaps more than other traits the movement presumably carried—“the giving
away of the game.” Or, in other words Rosenthal feared that Lowell’s confessional
mode in spite of his incorporation of the Romantic placement of the self at the
center of the poem negated the Romantic’s tendency to mask the self. It was the
revelation of the poet’s intentions toward himself and others that separated the
modern confessional poet from the roots of Dickinson, Whitman, and the Ro-
mantics. In the 1959 Nation article Rosenthal wrote of the Romantics, “They found,
instead, cosmic equations and symbols,” of the nature of “transcendental reconcil-
iations with ‘this lime-tree bower my prison,’ titanic melancholia in the course of
which, merging his sense of tragic fatality with the evocations of the nightingale’s
song, the poet lost his personal complaint in the universal forlornness.” Too, Rosen-
thal observed, “Later Whitman took American poetry to the very edge of the con-
fessional in the Calamus poems and in the quivering avowal of his helplessness
before the seductions of ‘blind loving wrestling touch, sheath’d hooded sharp-
tooth’d touch.’” And linking Eliot and Pound through their use of symbolism with
the Romantic tradition he asserted that “under the influence of the Symbolists,
Eliot and Pound brought us into the forbidden realm itself, yet even in their works
a certain indirection masks the poet’s actual face and psyche from greedy eyes.” But
in each of these instances—Whitman, the Romantic tradition, Eliot and Pound—
the self is revealed only covertly.
In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot’s theory of the “impersonality of
the poet” describes the psyche as an inescapable presence for the artist, but maturity
requires the sacrificial recasting of the psyche into a sublimation. Eliot proclaimed
that the transmutation of the psyche into the creation of poetry could satisfy the
goal of bringing the reader into a higher place of consciousness; that is, into the
realm of art and art’s own values. And for Eliot, art’s values carried a prerogative of
bringing both the poet and the reader into contact with transcendent truths. To par-
aphrase Eliot in “The Perfect Critic,” the poet’s task is to touch the level of a divine
intelligence and to create an aesthetic order of beauty; it is as Eliot calls it the amor
intellectualis Dei. Eliot’s dictum for the poet is reminiscent of Plato’s spurious dia-
logue the Ion, wherein the poet and artist are named as oracles who mediate knowl-
edge of the eternal forms. Such a transcendent epistemological function assigned to
poetry holds the poet to a rather singular position of depicting the self through veils
and veils of aesthetic objectification. The greatest violation of Lowell’s confessional
stage was that it created a poetic mode that was in direct opposition of this view that
the poet must be a universal oracle for an “emotionless aesthetic.”
Rosenthal would come to revise his opinion about Life Studies; initially in the
Nation his assessment tended to uphold Eliot’s pronouncement that the poet must
sacrificially extinguish his personality by creating an art form that sublimated the
realities of the inner life. Rosenthal noted, “It will be clear that my first impression
while reading Life Studies was that it is impure art, magnificently stated but un-
pleasantly egocentric . . . Since its self-therapeutic motive is so obvious and persist-
ent, something of this impression sticks all the way.” The most disconcerting part
of the remark is the use of the phrase impure art. It is reminiscent of Eliot’s com-
ment in “The Perfect Critic”—“The sentimental person, in whom a work of art
arouses all sorts of emotions,” if these emotions are not transformed into an aes-
thetic object remain as “accidents of the personal association,” churning out in the
end “an incomplete artist.”
Rosenthal in his initial assessment of Lowell’s confessional stage observed that
“speaker is unequivocally himself, and it is hard not to think of Life Studies as a se-
ries of personal confidences, rather shameful that one is honor-bound not to re-
veal.” But Rosenthal also recognized that there was a problem in classifying Life
Studies as a work of confessions. The fact that Life Studies is divided into four parts
and that these parts are not written equally in terms of tone or linguistic style leaves
the reader with the task of reconciling the sections. Rosenthal attempted the rec-
onciliation in this way: “Furthermore, Life Studies is not merely a collection of small
moment-by-moment victories over hysteria and self-concealment.” He adds, “It is
also a beautifully articulated poetic sequence. I say, ‘articulated,’ but the impact of
the sequence is of four intensifying waves of movement that smash at the reader’s
feelings and break repeatedly over the mind.” Rosenthal commented in the Nation
article that Lowell was “not wrong in looking at the culture through the window
of psychological breakdown.” Rosenthal accepted Lowell’s struggle with manic de-
pression as a useful paradigm for framing the problems of modernity.
If we believe there is no artifice in confessional poetry, we are buying into a lie
and have been duped by a false conception of what the term confessional truly
means. We need only examine with an openness and depth of understanding Low-
ell’s simple question he asks privately and rhetorically about the New Englander
Thoreau—“Poetry: was he cowed by the artificial nature of it?” This opinion that
the confessional mode could be used to express either stark madness and/or the
confidential aspects of the poet’s life inaugurated a fallacy at the very moment
when confessional poetry was emerging as a new poetic form. The fallacy was that
confessional poetry ought to deal with certain tropes, such as the poet’s private in-
sanity or that language and form could, if the occasion called for it, be sacrificed at
the expense of writing the autobiographical into a poem.
Years after writing the Nation article, Rosenthal reflected that his coinage of the
term confessional poetry may have done more harm than good. The floodgates
opened after the publication of Life Studies for poets to write in way that seemed
to almost exclusively center around the emotive qualities of the poem, and often
the nature of the emotive consisted of some form of either private or social rage. At
the very least, the expression of discontent was no longer disguised. The experi-
ment with the concealment of modern restlessness had come to end with the ex-
citable assurance that the confessional poem could confront head on the course
that the twentieth century had taken. This belief was not necessarily a negative. It
paved the way for poetry to overturn the paradigm of the New Critics.
In the Nation article, Rosenthal had disavowed the connection of confessional
poetry to the Romantics; however, in The New Poets he greatly modified that ear-
lier position. There in The New Poets he wrote, “In a larger, more impersonal con-
text, these poems seemed to me one culmination of the Romantic and modern
tendency to place the literal Self more and more at the center of the poem.” Rosen-
thal also wrote that certain effects of Life Studies had at first failed to receive proper
attention: “The mixture of love and loathing, humor and horror, had the impact of
a purely personal release, and the softer and more genial notes in the book went
mostly unnoticed at first.” In The New Poets, Rosenthal tried to give a justification
for why he had chosen the term confessional poetry: “Lowell had not published a
book for eight years before Life Studies appeared, and so the term ‘confessional’
served also to distinguish the new work from the earlier and at the same time to
suggest that everything before had been largely a preparation.” It is also vital to re-
member that Lowell’s particular style of confessional poetry did not reflect the
same style of the confessional poets to appear in the generations after; nor, did
Lowell’s style truly compare to other confessionals writing within his generation.
In the interview with Ian Hamilton, Lowell referred to his technique in Life
Studies and thereafter in The Union Dead and Near the Ocean simply as “realism.”
And indeed realism does seem to be an appropriate term to describe the switch in
Lowell’s technique between what is exemplified in his first three volumes—Land
of Unlikeness, Lord Weary’s Castle, and The Mills of the Kavanaughs—and what we
come across in Life Studies.
In Life Studies, I caught real memories in a fairly gentle style. It’s not meant
to be extremity. I agree with the critics who say it is artificially composed. I
have been through mania and depression; Life Studies is about neither.
Mania is sickness for one’s friends, depression for one’s self. Both are chem-
ical. In depression, one wakes, is happy for about two minutes, probably
less, and fades into the dread of the day. Nothing will happen, but you know
twelve hours will pass before you are back in bed and sheltering your con-
sciousness in dreams, or nothing. It isn’t danger; it’s not an accomplishment.

I don’t think it a visitation of the angels but a weakening in the blood. In
Life Studies, I wrote about my marriage and parents; I didn’t see them as
desperate—though life must be askew. When I wrote, most good Ameri-
can poetry was a symbol hanging like a gun in an armory. Many felt this.
Lowell’s comment to Hamilton captured well the problem that had emerged:
the fallacy that the confessional poet might glory in madness; it also demonstrated
that there were other meditative concerns besides madness to be gleaned from Life
Studies, such as the metaphysical contemplation of the role of memory and time as
they serve the poet. As Lowell said elsewhere in his interview with Hamilton, “de-
pression is no gift from the Muse.” And indeed it is not. Or at least if it is, the
Muse is more like a Mephistopheles, demanding a ransom in return.
We need only think of the confessional poets Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Daniel
Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, and John Berryman to be reminded that some Muses, in
the end, received their ransom, leaving only the soul of the poet on the page as a re-
minder of what was sacrificed. If Lowell perceived his dissection of family patterns
of neurosis as “gentle” and non-extreme, what Life Studies launched was far less
gentle. The confessional movement or confessional school of poets that proceeded
from Lowell’s gentle example took the blows of their mental troughs and highs to
places beyond reason. Yet, we should remind ourselves that there was always a de-
gree of something that might be called the rational within Lowell’s poetry, confes-
sional or otherwise.
Lowell’s realism was revolutionary enough to push forward while revisiting the
past. Like Gertrude Stein’s playful use of autobiography and her lively description
of realism as a condition of being that everyone experiences everyday, so Lowell
reinvented the purpose of autobiography within the scope of modernism. It be-
came a matter of discovering ways of meshing an autobiographical presence with
the ironies of the aesthete, alongside the highs and lows of what the aesthetic had
difficulty pervading—reality.
Lowell wrote in an essay on T.S. Eliot that for Eliot there was only the single trope
renewed and recycled, time and again:
All the poems have one hero, the Laforguean Prufrock, and depict one
journey, from frivolity and hell to somewhere in purgatory, with one man
walking, one figure drawn of heavy black lines, slightly narrow, slightly car-
icatured, always in motion. A destination is reached, whether it is the one
intended or not.
Lowell, too, tended to “depict one journey,” and this was the journey of place. It was
not a hero, or a successful protagonist, or one particular persona; but, in Lowell’s
poetry there is a “figure drawn.” That figure is New England made incarnate
through the mythology of its culture. For Lowell, archetypes came to represent
how a culture’s body of knowledge could weave itself into the collective psyche of
generations. Before Lowell entered into his confessional stage, he labored to ex-
press the importance of personality. For Lowell, the personality of a singular indi-
vidual is always creative and generative; and, as his poems tell us, he believed a
sense of personality emerges out of social environment. Without a sense of place,
there is no person. The “heavy black lines, slightly narrow” expand in Lowell’s vi-
sion, and there is motion. The motion is created out of a titanic history and the per-
sonal lives that bend, tug and clash. Sometimes the weight of the heavy lines of
New England seem to take the apparition of Lowell himself, and elsewhere the
lines settle to reshape national narratives of identity.
Lowell in his essay “New England and Further” observed “the myth of the New
Englander really comes into being in the nineteenth century” with Hawthorne and
Emerson, each of radically different temperaments. In spite of their both carrying
the force of personalities and dispositions that resisted agreement with the psychi-
cal attunement of the Puritan heritage, “both were anti-Puritans, conscious and
deliberate about it, yet sure they had inherited the essence.” He says of them, “But
these new men struck their English contemporaries as men of a different species”
and that, furthermore, “they strike us as men of a different species, far more
haunted, twisted, inspired, and refined by a Puritan character than any of their an-
cestors or predecessors.”
Wherever the lines fall they cast a heavy shadow. Lowell was no Manichean.
His ghosts wore the disguise of the physical. But through his ghosts, he saw the
signs of something spiritual everywhere. The long-standing question is how should
we chose to interpret the nature of what Lowell deemed as the spiritual. Return-
ing to what he wrote of Thoreau, he perceived within the poet’s vision a clarity that
was rarely possible for a New Englander to achieve—“Thoreau, no Christian, and
unaware of any quarrel with God, is the New England saint; no other had his res-
onance, freshness of mind, his stern spontaneity.”
If Thoreau is the model, in one sense Eliot is the counter-model; and yet, Low-
ell held much more in common with Eliot for the simple fact that Lowell never
quite overcame his quarrel with New England’s religiosity or with his own Puritan
disposition. It was as though a cultural meme of Puritanism had lodged itself semi-
permanently within Lowell’s mind. He wrote of Eliot, “Christian contemplation
intertwined with the poet’s struggle with words. The two themes pursue one an-
other like Dante’s wrestlers, walking about, pluming themselves, and then standing
off, as if too close” and that, additionally, “they are reflections—and two of a kind
under the disguise of their opposition.” And yet, if we move too far away from the
tension between the wars of the soul, the war of the mind with its cultural past,
then the “genius” of the New England poet is likely to disappear altogether from
us and evaporate into the spirit it at times perceives to exist.
One of Lowell’s final comments upon Eliot makes it clear that the poet’s worth
lay in a condition of angst and psychical warring of mind against external condi-
tioning and reality, and sufficiently seems to describe Lowell’s own vision of the
ideal poet as one living in a perpetual strife created out of self-surrender to an ex-
istential solitude. If there is spirit, it is an attunement to walking against the grain
of culture and society, which generally means in the end to walk alone, even while
in the company of tradition and it’s past. Lowell’s comment upon Eliot was this—
“It seems strange, almost one of Eliot’s practical jokes, that this solitary, ascetic,
mystical poem should have found its outcome in his happy marriage with a happy
young wife.” This was certainly a feat that Lowell never personally accomplished as
his near disastrous marriages to Jean Stafford and Elizabeth Hardwick testify. In
the same comment, Lowell summed up by saying, “Randall Jarrell said that Eliot,
when young, must have been cruel and paranoid—this the genius—then became
such a good man he had no need to write any longer.”
In Christianity, Lowell perceived the splintering of the self and the dualism of
the psyche. In the essay, “Epics,” Lowell tried to reason his way through Milton’s
Paradise Regained through a series of small questions. There he observed, “In Para-
dise Regained, a diminished Satan, maybe himself in disguise, makes all the bril-
liant speeches. Christ is only a rocky, immobile Puritan breakwater—the voice of
denial? Which voice rings true? Are both schizoid anti-selves of one person?”
One plausible view is that the spiritual is inseparable from the everyday world. It
is that portion of life that is activity. The spirit is generative. In Near the Ocean, one
of Lowell’s post-confessional works, in the poem “Fourth of July in Maine,” against
the scene of summer night, “thumbtacks rattle from the white maps,” “icy plates,”
and “one/Joan Baez on the gramophone” there is God. It seems that even in the
most unlikely of places, Lowell could not escape the signifier, even if the great sig-
nifier had slipped away and eroded. Amid the waning, the ultimate signifier of the
modernists, God, had not entirely disappeared. He might have become “only a veg-
etarian God” because only such a God in what had been spawned from generative
and causal patterns of life and history “could look on them and call them good.”
Far off that time of gentleness,

when man, still licensed to increase,
unfallen and unmated, heard
only the uncreated Word—
when God the Logos still had wit
to hide his bloody hands, and sit

in silence, while his peace was sung.
Then the universe was young.
When the existence of the singular person intersects with the common and or-
dinary, there in the mix we begin to approach what Lowell perceived as the spirit
of life. As he wrote in “The Crucifix,” a poem that was first published in Land of
Unlikeness but that also appeared in Lord Weary’s Castle,
I picked at an old bone on two crossed sticks

And found, to Via et Vita et Veritas
A stray dog’s signpost is a crucifix.
chapter three
The Spiritual Quarrel of

T.S. Eliot and Lowell
We live in a hard and cracked world.

—Robert Lowell, “Art and Evil”
The religious focus of Robert Lowell is not to be undervalued. Lowell placed re-
ligion as an open question, one that he repeatedly worked through and explored
as an undeniable reality of the place of his birth, New England. But keeping reli-
gion as an ‘open’ question does not necessarily mean accepting the belief system
associated with it. His first wife Jean Stafford said of him that he was “a Puritan
at heart.” But he was also such an ironist that faith was to him a matter of suspi-
cion. Whether Lowell “remained a Puritan at heart” as Stafford believed he had,
no one can say. What can be said is that Lowell held a spiritual quarrel with the
place of New England, its theology, and with his own mentors, T.S. Eliot and
Allen Tate.
It is with T.S. Eliot, none of whose works bear the label of confessional, that the
classical concepts of the soul, concepts resembling those of Plato and Augustine,
are explicit and manifest. It is without exaggeration that it may be said that no
other known poet of the twentieth century believed with such fervor in the onto-
logical existence of the soul and of God. During the time when Eliot set about to
write Murder in the Cathedral for the 1935 Canterbury Festival, he was said to have
remarked how daily he walked in fear of his own spiritual digress. Literally, he
THE SPIRITUAL QUARREL OF T. S . ELIOT AND LOWELL | 41
feared for his soul. This internal working of spiritual torment upon the mind is ex-
pressed in Murder in the Cathedral in the crystalline passage,
Shall the Son of Man be born again in the litter of

scorn?
For us, the poor, there is no action,
But only to wait and to witness.
The lines indicate a vital component of Eliot’s religious worldview; if the spirit suf-
fers, and surely it will, action in this world will only further entangle the soul with
the concerns of this world. The way to alleviate a suffering soul is eschew action,
that is to avoid trying to ‘save’ oneself and to allow the mind to transform into a con-
templative observer of the phenomenal, transient life. The suffering soul is a “wit-
ness” to history and to the cycle of time; but the soul that wishes to resolve the crisis
of theodicy can only “witness” the causes of history. The suffering soul remains aloof
from intertwining itself with the forces of history and it so it must embrace a degree
of historical and social impotency. The suffering soul accepts history as a ravaging
force. And the concept of time as a vehicle for transcendent truth emerges.
Yet, the variety of fear Eliot associated with the soul’s fate, a mixture of dread
and spiritual terror, are reminiscent of Calvinistic doctrine and are not directly as-
certainable through the intellectual systems of Plato and Augustine. This level of
detachment, so characteristic of Eliot’s system of thought and underlying so much
of his poetry, finds its counterparts in Plato, Augustine, even Aquinas, and certainly
in F.H. Bradley. In Aquinas, there is a burning away of the soul’s desire so that the
soul may be made pure and reformed, to in turn join the human soul to the burn-
ing, annihilating love of God; but, Eliot takes the view further than Aquinas,
bringing the theology back around to meet an American Calvinism. In Eliot, the
burning away of the soul’s passions produces the result that reason gets ‘burned’ up
alongside passion. Lacking from Eliot’s theological perspective is the concept of joy
or blissful harmony with the divine, and this marks him dialectically as a negative
mystic. Eliot’s spiritual temperament reminds one of Carl Jung’s commentaries on
the predicament of Job’s suffering. In Answer to Job, Jung writes of Job’s consterna-
tion, reaching into the interior of the story of Job to pull out the psychological feel-
ing Job’s experience represents. Job’s condition, that of the spiritual victim, is for
Jung an archetypal image of the sort of personality (and ‘soul’) that stands in fear
of divine presence. Jung, referring to Yahweh’s reply to Job ( Job 40: 4-5), notes,
“And indeed, in the immediate presence of the infinite power of creation, this is the
only possible answer for a witness who is still trembling in every limb with the ter-
ror of almost total annihilation.” In Job and Eliot we see what Rudolph Otto called
the reaction to the mysterium tremendum.
The goal in Eliot’s theology is to find the way to step outside phenomenal exis-
tence and time; and, once one finds this path to stand outside history (to manage
a transcendent vantage) so one truly becomes the “witness” of history’s atrocities.
But, to delve back into the wheel of existence and to participate, to “act,” once more
in historical time, only reverses the process of the soul’s redemption; the soul would
once again find itself ensnared by passions, motivations, intentions, and the con-
tradictions inherent to each of these. As Eliot writes in Four Quartets (“Burnt Nor-
ton”), “to be conscious is not to be in time.” If sensory perceptions are what the
individual seeks, time is the only realm in which the empirical and the romantic
can be amply supplied.
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,

The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draught church at smoke fall
Be remembered; involved in past and future.
Only through time can time be conquered.
For Eliot, the phenomenal, transient world is the place of pure possibility. Four
Quartets searches out a ‘place’ wherein all possibilities are harbored as existent, as
having been preserved in a state of perpetual being, or coming-into-being. Like
Kierkegaard who can say in A Sickness Unto Death, “Yet everything is possible in
possibility,” so Eliot wants to say of the rose-garden (a trope that he uses else-
where besides Four Quartets, and that as a trope always represents a moment of
unclaimed possibility). The only pure moment of time, the transcendent ‘place’ of
time, is to find a retreat from past and future and from memory. Only outside the
senses, can the pure moment of time be reached; this for Eliot is the ‘place’ of pure
knowledge, as well as recovery for the experiences engendered through the senses
and historical time.
For Eliot, time’s redemption resides in the possibility that time is transcendent,
and, therefore, is a preserver of experience. Time, in other words, can do what the
memory cannot. The memory can only conjure an illusory relationship to the past;
but, the memory cannot make the past real. The most memory can do in its recon-
struction of the past is to create a kind of mental simulacra, hollow and imprecise
in relationship to experiences of the past. The memory can in a more positive way
render an idealization of the past, thereby purifying the past of its errors; but, this
idealization, nonetheless, rings false compared to the initial experience of the past.
Only in the mind of God can time actually be restored, so that the past is experi-
enced fully as the present; the past is present always in the mind of God and even
the future is made present, too, so that all of human experience through history is
transcendentally preserved as occurring simultaneously in the process of an eternal
construction of a present moment. All things are now. Or, as Eliot writes in “Tradi-
tion and the Individual,” the poet is to live in the presence of the past.
In the Quartets, Eliot is intent upon salvaging the pure moment of possibility
from the dread and negative excitement that produces the missed fulfillment of
what pure possibility offers. Kierkegaard writes of the condition of the existential
dread, “The individual pursues with melancholic love one of dread’s possibilities,
which in the end takes him away from himself, so he perishes in the dread, or per-
ishes in what it was he was in dread of perishing in.” Eliot’s Quartets set about to
depart from existential dread of the kind Prufrock had represented by asserting a
theological solution to the problem of dread. If the mind of God preserves all on-
tological being, including the phenomenal world’s coming-into-being, so it stands
to reason that even missed opportunities are preserved in their purity for having ex-
isted once as possibility. This philosopher’s God delivers Eliot’s perceptions in Four
Quartets from the dilemma of the individual psyche drowning in its own fear of
having not seized the opportunities the phenomenal world presented it with it. In
the Quartets, the speaker is so often gripped with fear he is unable to make the
necessary decisions to act, but the regret of not acting lingers. To overcome and es-
cape the painfulness of regretting lost opportunities, Eliot uses the stance of tran-
scendence. For Eliot, the mind of God preserves ideal forms, a belief similar to
Alfred North Whitehead’s in the Adventure of Ideas: “Appearance is a simplification
of Reality, reducing it to a foreground of enduring individuals and to a background
of un-discriminated occasions.” The mind of God holds both appearance, phe-
nomenal becoming, together with reality, the possibility of becoming. This is an
idea that Eliot encountered in his study of F.H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality.
Borrowing from Henri Bergson, Eliot came to conceive of the philosophic ways
human memory preserves in the duration of time unlimited possibility. Aquinas had
written of God’s nature, “Since God is absolutely perfect he comprehends in him-
self the perfections . . .” Eliot uses a sentiment of like kind to indicate that in God
all the perfections of possibility are held together in pure form.
In his personal life Eliot seemingly continued to suffer from a fear of God.
Eliot’s sources, philosophical and theological, tend to resolve the problem of the
fear of God either through affirmation of faith or through some definition of
agape. This is where Eliot’s application of his sources fall short; he could not rid
himself in his daily habits of some experience of the pilgrim’s suffering heart. There
is not a place in the neo-Hegelian idealism of F.H. Bradley for the intense self-
loathing and spiritual trepidation Eliot personally suffered in his mind. God is not
torridly tearing away at the heart; yet in Eliot’s mind, God was ravishing. God is
timeless and immutable in Augustine’s Confessions, as he is in Eliot’s Four Quartets.
Augustine depicts a God of sufficient compassion so that the theologian may write
of a reciprocal union of mystical love shared between his mind and the mind of
God. In the Confession’s Augustine is able to write that the love of God is both ab-
stract and concrete, both universal and particular. Augustine is capable of resolving
the philosophical tensions.
But what do I love when I love my God? Not material beauty or beauty of
a temporal order; not the brilliance of earthly light, so welcome to our eyes;
not the sweet melody of harmony and song; not the fragrance of flowers,
perfumes, and spices; not manna or honey; not limbs such as the body de-
lights to embrace. It is not these that I love when I love my God. And yet,
when I love him, it is true that I love a light of a certain kind, a voice, a per-
fume, a food, an embrace; but they are of the kind that I love in my inner
self, when all these function by means of my senses.
In the last of the Four Quartets, Eliot’s distinction from an Augustinian outlook is
subtle, but lucid. Here, in Augustine, the beauty of physicality is praised; God is
looked for within the sensual experience of the world. Eliot’s theology refracted
through his poetry leaves us with just the opposite of Augustine’s description of the
bountiful physical plenitude of God; Eliot’s poetically refracted theology leaves us
instead with a God in hiding. Some of the difference no doubt arises due to the
span of history, in the difference of eras between Augustine and Eliot.
The sufferance of the world wars clouds Eliot’s mysticism; the God of the twen-
tieth century becomes an absent God, the lost signifier. Eliot during World War II
served as a “watcher” in London as an air raid warden. While in general air raid
wardens were responsible for a variety of tasks, it seems that Eliot’s participation
was among the least dangerous of the jobs to be held, and that his period of watch-
ing occurring in 1944, after the Germans had already been pushed back to the east.
Eliot’s participation in the war was almost anticlimactic. It occurred in a rather
ghostly phase of the war, near the war’s end.
When England entered the war in 1939 an instruction was sent out known as the
“blackout,” asking that electricity and energy be conserved. The purpose of the
blackouts was to make it more difficult and hazardous for the German planes to fly
over England. The London blackouts form a historical backdrop to the otherwise
theological and philosophical imagery in the Quartets. Not only were lights turned
out, including street lamps lighting the way of bridges, but it was requested that
household windows be covered with black cloth or paper. We can only imagine how
the scene would have struck Eliot. The urbanity captured in The Waste Land was
turning literally dark with the effects of the Second World War. To Eliot’s spiritu-
ally suffering mind, London’s air raid darkness becomes a kind of incarnation of the
interior darkness, the “dark night of the soul.” The passivity of historical suffering
discoverable in Murder in the Cathedral is also externalized in Eliot’s contribution to
the war effort, his nighttime watching as an air raid warden. All he could do was sit
on a rooftop and wait for judgment to fleet across a midnight sky and light it up. In
a literal sense, darkness was preferable to light, as darkness meant security. Light
meant bombs, “Now the light falls across the open field” (East Coker). Too the
movement of bombings presents itself as “shaking” and destruction in “East Coker.”
Houses rise and fall, crumble, or extended,

Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pain
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
Still, against this historical positioning Eliot engages the lost signifier of the war
generations, the missing God.
Eliot was an enthusiastic supporter of the French existentialist philosopher Si-
mone Weil. She noted in Waiting For God, “It does not rest with the soul to believe
in the reality of God if God does not reveal with reality.” If God chooses to hide,
God hides. Weil’s comment presents something of a Jewish belief in the mysticism
of God, but it also presents a Jewish belief that God at times chooses to veil his
presence from a community; and that when this happens suffering becomes an af-
fliction. Some Jewish mystics and scholars resolved the problem of God’s hiding
similar to the solution offered by Martin Buber’s Ich und du, that God’s game of
hide-and-seek is a method by which reciprocity is to be arrived at between God’s
ultimate interiority/otherness and the individual seeker’s personality. Again Eliot
accepts the theological principle of God’s hiding, but does not find the reciprocity
between God and humanity to be an exact solution to the problem of God’s ab-
sence. Eliot’s solution worked out in the Quartets is for the soul to find stillness and
an extinguishment of personality. Even Eliot’s request that no biographies be writ-
ten of him indicates a deep-seated desire to rid the self of personality and to empty
out the details of one’s actual life.
It is most likely fair to believe that Eliot never truly found a solution to the in-
tense burdening angst he experienced. Because Eliot never resolved the crisis of
God as it existed for him within his mind, it might be with reasonable expectation
that Eliot should write as a mystic, but a peculiar mystic, one without sufficient
conception of divine love. Only when love is submerged into the annihilating di-
vine, do all things become reconciled; it is a static peace Eliot’s vision seeks. But is
it God’s love that Eliot’s vision seeks, too?
Because Eliot’s vision of God lacks the quality of love (love as defined by most
recognizable forms), he would need turn to Saint John of the Cross and the “dark
night of the soul” to find models of how to conceive of the agonizing self and to un-
cover equivalents for the spiritual anguish he personally felt. The burning agony of
the tortured soul that would haunt Eliot throughout the middle and late phases of
his career has its intellectual predecessors, to be sure, such as Kierkegaard; but even
Kierkegaard had a sense of humor (we need only turn to Kierkegaard’s tome writ-
ten on the subject of irony, his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to gain a sense of
the levity in Kierkegaard). One wonders how much humor Eliot entertained by
the time of the Four Quartets; for his sense of irony, so present and dominating as
a force in Prufrock and The Waste Land, a sense of irony that he had borrowed from
Jules LaForgue and from reading Arthur Symon’s work on the Symbolists, is seem-
ingly drained dry and non-evident in the Four Quartets and the plays. Although
Quartets in one sense was Eliot’s attempt to locate the well springs of wisdom, all
usual routes to wisdom he discarded—knowledge, experience, old age, society’s
constructions, the joy of life’s dance.
At best, only a limited value

In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been.
All extremes and the middle having been rejected, there is only extinguishment
left. Echoing Dante’s opening to the Inferno, Eliot rejects in the Quartets, too, the
way of the “middle.” In Dante we find the lines,
When I had journeyed half of life’s way,

I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray
In “East Coker,” Eliot writes,
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way

But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,

Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
The houses are all gone under the sea.
The dancers are all gone under the hill.
In the end, he settled on a blank definition of wisdom as humility. What is humil-

ity, though we should ask? Is humility the final falling away of personality, the
stripping bare of all attachments? If so, it is a very Eastern, non-Western answer.
Lowell shared with Eliot the same spiritual past, that of New England. The spir-
itual mortification of a mind turning upon itself, like a snake swallowing its own
tail, haunted Lowell beyond his brief phase of Catholicism and long after he left
the literal dimensions of religion behind. The spiritual mortification of the over-
wrought becomes the psychological mortification exhibited in Life Studies.
Lowell suffered watching the decline of his family’s social status, while Eliot’s
rank among the Brahmins was never really endangered. Lowell’s heritage was
prominent, it is true, but the waning of his family’s elitism and his father’s bungled
attempts to hold onto a bourgeois lifestyle that for the most part suited mainly
Lowell’s mother (and not his father), affected Lowell aversely. In spite of the petty
bourgeois status his father had managed to bring the family name down to, still
Lowell inherited a certain regional clout, however minor, in part from the two
other poets in his lineage—Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell. Henry James
had praised James Russell Lowell for being a better poet than Whitman. Of course,
we must keep in mind that Henry James initially expressed a grave discontent for
Whitman’s Drum Taps (although, Henry James’ view of Drum Taps did soften a bit
over the course of years). Henry James’ personal friendship with James Russell
Lowell, by all accounts a very penetrating intellectual friendship, lent a kind of
marginally perpetual status to the Lowell family name. While Eliot’s quarrel with
a New England heritage centered over his family’s liberalism and their soft atti-
tudes toward theological questions, in Lowell the quarrel with New England piv-
ots around his distaste for the harshness of the Puritan and Calvinistic past that
cloaked the region. In Land of Unlikeness and Lord Weary’s Castle, Lowell observes
with complaint the Puritan past of his forebears, pointing out with great sarcasm
if human depravity is real so it was that the Puritans proved the point all too well.
Similarly, the “visible darkness” Lowell speaks about in “Art and Evil” is the in-
visible darkness that Lowell’s New England predecessors hunted down so rapa-
ciously in art; Melville, Hawthorne, Eliot, even the optimist Emerson had at times
fallen upon it. And while it may have only scant been recognized by Emerson,
Whitman certainly found the likeness of this “visible darkness” speaking to him
through inchoate nature in the Calamus poems. In Lowell, the Puritan past is
blurred with a general New England religiosity.
In “At a Bible House,” the picture is of a Mennonite place of worship, with its
austerities and cold theology. The language in the poem is deliberately sparse com-
pared to Lowell’s syntax throughout the rest of the volume of Lord Weary’s Castle;
the brevity of lines and the scaled down language of the poem provides a mimick-
ing or imitation of Mennonite lifestyle. While the poem attacks the theology, its
focus is concentrated on the culture produced out of theology; and, to this extent,
the poem is typical of Lowell’s maneuverings thematically in Land of Unlikeness
and Lord Weary’s Castle. Prior to Life Studies, Lowell is preoccupied with how the-
ologies engender cultural diseases of the soul, making the mind warp. In Lowell’s
estimation, the past of New England theologies—Puritan, Mennonite, or other-
wise—produced distorted cultural visions.
In “At a Bible House,” Lowell’s use of language looks ahead to what he will
write post-Life Studies in Imitations and Day by Day; and, in the uniqueness of
this one poem, so different it is from Lowell’s general style, the poem echoes
Amy Lowell’s “A Meeting House-Hill.” It is the nearest approximation we have
in Lowell’s early poetry of a lyric. “At a Bible House” demonstrates six deep-
seated aspects of Lowell’s religious poetry prior to Life Studies: hypocrisy; revolt;
institutional religion as artifice; genealogy; moral and/or metaphysical dualism;
natural unification.
At a Bible House
Where smoking is forbidden
By the Prophet’s law,
I saw you wiry, bed-ridden,
Gone in the kidneys; raw
Onions and a louse
Twitched on the sheet before
The palsy of your white
Stubble—a Mennonite
Or die-hard Doukabor,
God-rooted, hard. You spoke
Whistling gristle-words
Half inaudible
To us: of raw-boned birds

Migrating from the smoke
Of Cities, of a gull
Perched on the redwood
Thrusting short awl-shaped leaves:
Three hundred feet of love
Where the Pacific heaves
The tap-root—wise above
Man’s wisdom with food
Squeezed from three thousand years’
Standing. It is all
A moment. The trees
Grow earthward: neither good
Nor evil, hopes nor fears,
Repulsion nor desire,
Earth, water, air or fire
Will serve to stay the fall.
The elements of hypocrisy the poem represent are obvious; the law presumably
sanctioned by divine authority is really nothing more than a social more, a health
restriction at best. While the Mennonite has upheld the divine law of not smok-
ing, the poem is ambiguous enough to imply he indulged in heavy bouts of drink-
ing, causing his kidneys to shut down. Nonetheless, a degree of rebellion (revolt)
exists in the Mennonite, just as the propensity to rebel against some code, re-
striction, or law exists in some point in time for every individual. One divine law
cannot cover another law, and thus the system of giving and keeping “the
Prophet’s law” goes on and on. The fact that the law is a “Prophet’s law” gives it
divine authority, but it also points to its being unnatural; it is the law of the orig-
inator of the Mennonite community, the community’s law unto itself. One man,
this “die-hard Doukabor,” cannot observe all the aspects of every law the com-
munity has erected, and so his trying leads merely to his becoming “hard” in per-
sonality, tough-minded and severe, but it cannot ‘save’ him from the human
condition.
In this poem as in other early poems of Lowell, religious hypocrisy equates to a
life taken out of its natural context and the mind becoming misshapen to fit the
needs of the religious community’s law. It is important to note that when Lowell
attacks, if indeed ‘attack’ really is the right word to capture his intent, the heritage
of New England religiosities, he does not confront personal, individual questions
of faith. His demonstration against New England religiosities is always aimed at
religious communities and/or historical institutions of religion. For Lowell, the his-
tory of New England’s religious communities seems to stand in for artifice. A dis-
tinction between nature and artifice is to be made; artifice is any human construc-
tion that produces a negative effect on humanity. Lowell’s examination of New
England religious sentiments leads us to a definition of artifice, those human con-
structions that in turn destroy humanity, one way or another, either physically, spir-
itually, emotionally, or mentally. The point is exhibited through the connection that
is drawn in the poem between the dying Mennonite, reduced to “gristle,” and the
gulls, “raw-boned,” that try to migrate away from the pollution of the city. Urban
modernization and its complete antithesis expressed by a Mennonite community
(and that community’s commitment to eschew all forms of technology) are ex-
treme conditions to endure. The extremes are unhealthy and produce no good effect
upon “man” or “gull.” Thus, it is not only religious preoccupations that can distort
the natural purposes of humanity, secularized urban modernity likewise destroys;
far worse, modernity destroys not just humanity but nature, as well.
The moral or metaphysical dualism in the poem is set up by the contrast be-
tween the Mennonite’s unnatural community and the search for “wisdom” and
“love” within nature. The redwood and the “tap-root” are emblems of wisdom; les-
sons to be learned as the Mennonite lay dying. As in Faulkner, nature’s non-per-
sonalized wisdom is used as a tool to uproot the foolishness of the morally
hard-headed. The genealogy of humanity’s instincts—its “tap-root”—is what hu-
manity has created as knowledge of its survival and so it is “squeezed from three
thousand years.” Here, Lowell uproots the idea of an Adamic curse by supplanting
it with a genealogy of survival; this genealogical knowledge does not necessarily
destroy any concepts of an Adamic curse. The irony resides in the fact that it is
through this struggle with nature that the impersonality of nature proves to be a
source of wisdom. The dying Mennonite’s genealogy, all that he inherited from the
entire history of the human race and its survival within nature, should be the real
source of wisdom for the man as he approaches his death. His “three thousand
year” genealogy also makes it impossible for him to obey completely any social
community or religious law; his genealogy is the source of his rebellion and revolt.
If he could not rebel in life, the implication in the poem is that he is revolting now;
for, death is the ultimate revolt against life, a revolt no social code can keep prevent.
To take it a step further, the human condition is a condition of revolt. Humanity
unfolds and lives within its revolt. We are wrapped in revolt like moths wrapped in
cocoons. Lowell’s resolution to the metaphysical dualism is to create in the last
lines a reconciliation of opposite through a return to nature.
The trees
Grow earthward: neither good
Nor evil, hopes nor fears,
Repulsion nor desire,

Earth, water, air or fire
Will serve to stay the fall.
There is a strong degree of renunciation in these lines of Lowell; but we must ask
what kind of renunciation is it? What is being renounced? The lines remind one of
Eliot’s search in Four Quartets (“Burnt Norton”) for the “still point,” the fixed “cen-
ter,” the place of the unmoving and the site where the annihilation of desire could
at last be attained.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor
towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
And while this similarity is valid and should be recognized, there is one crucial dis-
tinction in Lowell’s reconciliation of dualism. Lowell returns to nature; the point
of the eradication is a place beyond society, beyond culture, and beyond history.
But, it is not a place beyond nature. For Eliot, the “still point” and the “center” stand
outside of nature; the “still point” is abstract, non-corporeal, and most likely for
Eliot it is God.
In Lowell it is different; the place of assurance cannot be found outside what
humans experience or know; we are cordoned off by the boundaries of nature in
Lowell. It is society we should escape, but we cannot escape being a natural man
or woman. Before there was society, there was nature. And, if society should ever be
removed from us and we are stripped bare of its customs, attitudes, and encultura-
tion, it would be to a place of nature we would return. Analogous to what we dis-
cover in Rousseau’s Emile, humanity is divided according to two states or
conditions: the natural and the social. For Lowell, as in Rousseau, it is the act of
having to enter into a social binding with others that deprives us of our natural in-
stincts, and hence our natural wisdom.
In Eliot’s Quartets, nature is a place of temptation. Nature for Eliot is that place
where we are confronted with impressions and our senses; and, for Eliot he did not
see how it was possible to escape desire until one could escape natural impressions
and escape from the senses. For Lowell, the senses do not represent our greatest
danger; and, if nature provides us with impressions, all the better. As Lowell un-
derstands the human puzzle, the graver dangers lurk within the corners of the so-
cial, within artifice; it is out of the construction of artifice that the individual
becomes prey to false virtues and vice. But equally significant, Lowell like Eliot
could not find a place for the concept of love within his poetic structure of the rec-
onciliation of opposites.
Tillich once remarked, “love and knowledge transcend ourselves and go to the
other beings. Love participates in the eternal; this is its own eternity,” and that for
these reasons “the soul has trans-temporal dimensions.” Lowell and Eliot conceive
of souls that find routes to knowledge, but these routes run through dark places
where love cannot be found. Four Quartets (“East Coker”) spells out this absence as,
“O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,/The vacant interstellar spaces,/the va-
cant into the vacant.” For Eliot, urbanity may be fashionable, but it leads to spiri-
tual devastation.
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,

The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into to the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
Lowell’s method of addressing the ubiquity of human suffering is unique. Lowell

prefers depicting a range of portraits of social classes through history. In Lowell’s
portraits we find a variety of elevated figures, heroes, demi-gods, warriors, soldiers,
troubadours that are raised from the dust of history to retell the lesson of human
disaster. Cumulatively, Lowell’s portraits create an aura of a wasteland, as they re-
peat the idea of the fall of humanity. Lowell’s portraits leave us with the feeling no
one is immune to a tragic existence, just as Eliot’s “East Coker” reinforces the im-
pression no one is exempt from the “dark night of the soul.”
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on
darkness,
Lowell’s portraits, like Eliot’s “East Coker,” give the human race an air of theatri-
cality and the dramatic. In Eliot, a solitary soul is interchangeable in the Quartets
with the meaningless of the mob, of mass existence. Despite this interchange-
ability the solitary soul can still be heard, beating like a “rumble of wings,” but the
movement is futile and self-entrapping, “hollow.” Why God should be conceived
as such darkness—God as the lights dimming in a theater, the soul’s migration as
a scene change—the answers are in the mystics of St. John of the Cross, St. Ig-
natius. Equally accurate is that paradoxically the mystery of Eliot’s “darkness” of

the soul’s existence has its parallels in the existential atheism of Camus, Sartre,
and Becket.
Lowell’s quarrel with Eliot was not a literal one, but psychological. Metaphori-
cally, Eliot was representative of New England for Lowell. It is the kind of quarrel
between mentors and apprentices, between spiritual fathers and sons. Lowell suf-
fered to overcome what Harold Bloom has called the “agon” or “anxiety of influ-
ence.” He suffered it both with Eliot and Allen Tate. In an entry Lowell makes
(wherein he tries to recapture the psychological swirl of emotions he felt the day
Eliot died), there appears to be only admiration and genuine sorrow. He writes in
“T.S. Eliot,” “I wept when T.S. Eliot died, and yet I keep putting off writing about
him . . . His influence is everywhere inescapable, and nowhere readily usable.” It was
not only genius that Lowell discerned in Eliot; it was the peculiarity of how Eliot’s
genius came wrapped up inside the problems of original sin, depravation, and with-
ering souls. These were not popular topics even in Eliot’s day.
The affinity Lowell felt in connection to the problem of theodicy, of the poet
turned theologian’s attempt to reconcile the nature of evil and its ontology along-
side that of a benevolent deity and the soul’s ontology, is a theme that runs from
Lowell’s first collection of poems, Land of Unlikeness through the third, The Mills of
the Kavanuaghs, and continues until he decides to publicize as poetry details of his
personal battle with manic depression in Life Studies, at which time he seemingly
opts for a purely psychological answer to his own suffering and maladies. Although,
even the assertion that Lowell opted for a psychological rationale of his problems
in Life Studies is a position that should be qualified.
Just a few years prior to the publication of Life Studies in 1959, in 1955-56 Low-
ell undertakes a prose analysis of the problem of evil, and in this prose essay he ex-
plores a number of avenues that cannot be identified as purely psychological. It is
remarkably apparent the way that Lowell struggles with the possibility that evil
may be not a metaphor or even an outgrowth of a physiological problem, such as
chemical imbalances in the brain (as Lowell’s own manic depression exemplified);
evil could not be explained away through behaviorism, but had to be considered as
an ontological possibility in his prose piece, “Art and Evil.”
Yet, here is where the inexplicable paradox of Lowell’s transition from the reli-
gious symbolism in Land of Unlikeness and The Mills of the Kavanaughs toward the
personal facticity of Life Studies and his work thereafter is to be discovered. Dur-
ing the transition between The Mills of the Kavanaughs and Life Studies, there is for
Lowell an exceedingly important process of the demystification of art’s symbolically
religious power coupled with a turn toward the psychological power of art to de-
scribe the human character; however, these elements Lowell left un-reconciled as
he evolved a Stoic vision of history and politics.
In “Art and Evil,” Lowell begins by making reference to the condition of the
twentieth century, plagued as it was by historical mayhem. He describes history as
earthly, noting the effect of two world wars and the onslaught of the Cold War as
producing material consequences, saying, “the earth’s surface seems to have sagged
and cracked” under the weight of “Hitler, Stalin’s purges, Buchenwald, the atomic
bomb, the threat of nuclear war.” There is more than a dose of Manichaeism to
Lowell’s assessment of the material realism of modernity. As Lowell wrote, “Today
we are all looking for darkness visible, and we know that a realistic awe of evil is a
might valuable thing for the writer to have.” In his essays, Lowell points to a his-
tory of pessimism in literature, noting that for the moderns “our literary models at
first were the most violent Elizabethan tragedians, the French poetes audits.” He
discusses the rediscovery of the “classics,” naming Shakespeare and Tennyson, but
arguing that the value these classics held for the modern writer was to hunt out the
“wolfish” and the “grotesque.”
In “Art and Evil,” Lowell cites Eliot’s After Strange Gods (1933) for its passage on
original sin, noting how Eliot’s “tone had the somewhat tearful, somewhat rising
note of a true preacher.” The passage from After Strange Gods is the famous one in
which Eliot declares that “Evil” with a capital “E” can enter into any arena of
human thought, including literature, calling evil synonymous with the doctrine of
“Original Sin,” and in turn, naming “Original Sin” as a “very real and tremendous
thing.” Lowell’s response to Eliot’s literary doctrine of original sin is captured in
the following lines from “Art and Evil.”
And now, in 1956, we are older than the Eliot of 1933; we are older than the
aged eagle himself; Original Sin has lost is shine for us; we no longer pos-
sess that simple faith, that straightforward sophistication, and that angry
bounce that allowed T.S. Eliot to call Original Sin tremendous.
If original sin had lost its zeal for the modern writer, what was the cause of evil and
how could the modern writer seek to explain it? Lowell approaches the subject by
way of reference to a cosmological explanation.
Now, one of the hopeful characteristics of our human nature is that we

cannot even put up with evil for long, unless it is made exciting, and we
cannot put up with excitement unless it is true. All parties agree on this,
but from there on, the approach is classical or romantic. The romantic ap-
proach is that man is the victim of the gods; this is on the whole the posi-
tion of Greek classical drama, a position which the imagination will never
quite disown. The classical approach is man’s abuse of God’s love; this is the
position, on the whole, of Plato and the world’s religions, a position they
can never quite get rid of. Both sides call on Christ. Here I am tempted to
overreach myself and address you for a half minute as a theologian and
Christian apologist. I would like to say that I see being as made up of hi-
erarchical elements: nature, man, society, the angels perhaps, and God. We
see each element from time to time as good, indifferent, or bad, as black,
white, or gray. The war of God and creation, of classicist and romantic goes
on forever. What is special about Christ is that he takes both sides at once.
Cleanth Brooks In the Hidden God once remarked, “The genuine artist presum-
ably undertakes to set forth some vision of life—some imaginative apprehension of
it which he hopes will engage our imagination.” Brooks names the source of an
artist’s vision as “intuition.” Lowell’s vision and intuition in “Art and Evil” is one
that cannot be taken literally; for, there is no evidence Lowell intended his cos-
mology as literal, nor his version of Christ to exist as more than metaphor. Still,
Lowell’s metaphorical Christ reflects the high modernists’ preoccupation with pre-
senting a Christian artistic weltanschauung as a tragic mode.
Reinhold Niebuhr, the Protestant theologian whose career spanned the World
Wars into the Cold War era, noted in his first volume of the The Nature and Destiny
of Man (1941), the resemblance the modern Christian’s worldview shared with that
of its classical Greek predecessors. Lowell’s remarks about the relationship between
the gods of antiquity and the moderns’ approach to eternal questions in literature
closely approaches Niebuhr’s espousal that modern Christians had created a theol-
ogy reverberating with a classical tragic mode. In Niebhur’s comments given below,
what constitutes art as a principle or driving force can take one of two directions: art
and the artist can affirm social order or it can challenge the social order, perhaps
even wreaking havoc upon it. Niebhur, writing as a theologian, separates a Greek
worldview from a Christian worldview; within his distinction he assigns to the
Greek weltanschauung art as a stabilizer of social arrangements. It is the Christian
weltanschauung he believes that through art upsets and overturns social arrange-
ments. We must ask why and how Niebhur would have arrived at this conclusion.
The conflict in Greek tragedy is, in short between Gods, between Zeus and
Dionysus; and not between God and the devil, nor between spirit and mat-
ter. The spirit of man expressed itself in his vital energies as well as in the har-
monizing force of mind; and while the latter, as the rational principle of
order, is the more ultimate (here the dramatists remain typically Greek) there
can be creativity in human affairs only at the price of disturbing this order.
So Niebhur’s distinction of the two artistic weltanschauungs hinges upon the idea
of conflict.
If conflict occurs only within the pantheon of gods, as in Greek tragedies, the
role of humanity and more particularly the role of the individual is to conform to
the laws of the divine (and of society). Art would teach this lesson of conformity;
the conflict being external to the individual (existing between the great powers of
the gods), with external conflicts inflicted upon the individual in the guise of fate
or as Aristotle would point out in the guise of hamartia (an accident, a mistake).
The result is that the individual is being driven to a place of acceptance of one’s lot
in life. The greatest of tragedies upheld the view, generally speaking, that the in-
dividual, who forgets that he or she is at the mercy of the gods and their whims,
or at the mercy of fate and its machinations, and mistakenly believes to be self-
governing, will experience a great blow. The individual who falsely believes that he
can wield power over the gods, fate, or external circumstances is brought low to a
place of punishment for the overreach of human will. As Niebuhr says, “Thus life
is at war with itself, according to Greek tragedy.” But he adds to that statement,
“There is no solution, or only a tragic solution for the conflict between the vitali-
ties of life and the principle of measure. Zeus remains God.” The conclusion is
that the individual is doomed to fight against omnipotence, only to naturally lose
the battle.
Niebuhr’s point is that with the advent of Christianity what we have introduced
into social thought is a dualism: mind versus body, spirit versus empiricism, good
versus evil, a benevolent deity versus the unruly. The monotheism of Christianity
against the polytheism of Greek thought resituates the site of a metaphysical an-
tagonism. The strife of good and evil warring with one another in the Christian
weltanschauung is invested within the spirit, the soul, the mind.
And, the strife forever reenacted in Christian history between God and the devil
presents a paradigm that artists did not miss: the archetypal fight between an ad-
versary, a rebel seeking to overthrow and overturn a “father.” Against the Greek
weltanschauung, in the Christian, an adversary is given worldly authority, along
with the dominance of worldly evil and this is then pitted against spiritual refuge.
In the Christian weltanschauung, the focus shifts toward the individual’s dueling
wills. The shift is toward the individual as the repository of impulses, conformity
and rebellion. The individual as Augustine argued in The City of God holds two wills.
Or, to repeat what I have already quoted from Lowell, against the Greek paradigm,
now “Christ takes both sides at once.”
Lowell extends the image of Christ covering “both sides at once” to a concept
of villain. The monotheistic struggle of God (good) opposed by an adversary (evil)
is expressed as the image of the individual who seeks to break free of societal au-
thority in order to shape destiny (rather than accepting fate). Whether the attempt
to break free is realized, and regardless of success, it is the nature of the struggle
that Lowell finds important.
In “Art and Evil,” Lowell lists a series of literary figures he deems exemplary of the
concept of the individual’s revolt against God and/or society; it is in the action of re-
belling that the anti-hero discovers that he has a will and the freedom of that will. It
is in the act of rebelling also that the anti-hero ascertains an idea of self-awareness.
For Lowell, Rimbaud, Milton, George Eliot, Virgil, Dickens, Goethe, and Shake-
speare each represent the interior battle of consciousness to know itself as a destiny
and as a will. The way consciousness comes to recognize itself, to know itself, is
through struggle; in this sense, Lowell and Hegel are in agreement. It is Rimbaud
and Milton’s constructions of Satan and what Lowell calls the “manipulators” in
Goethe (Mephistopheles) and Shakespeare (Iago), along with the Biblical figure of
Cain that form Lowell’s canon of anti-heroes. In an almost interchangeable sense,
Lowell uses the terms “villain,” “manipulator” and “criminal” to indicate the role of
the anti-hero in literature. Yet oddly, Lowell breaks with Christian orthodoxy and
places Christ within the same canon as the “villains.” In “Art and Evil,” Lowell ar-
ticulates his heterodoxy by arguing that Christ, like the villains of literature, can
metaphorically come to represent the place of consciousness’ struggle with itself.
Heroes of this sort are admired by all who want either to ruin or to reform
the world. The criminal is called Cain, but he has other names which often
suit him better. He is called Lucifer, Prometheus, Orestes, Christ, and each
name stands for a different reality. According to orthodoxy theology, Christ
is God, he is God the Son, so at peace with God the Father that the Love
that unites them is itself God. Now theological formulas may not seem to
signify much to us, all that has been said about the Three persons in one
Substance may strike us as childishly unromantic. What I want to say here
is that Three persons in one Substance is the strongest imaginable way of
stating that there is no celestial strife, no tyrant father, no son in revolt, no
mutual incomprehension in heaven, and no new order. The Gospel story,
far from being the story of revolt, is not even the story of a reconciliation.
In this passage, let us start with Lowell’s most audacious comment: that there is no
“reconciliation” in the Gospel story. Reading the Gospel as literature, Lowell sin-
gles out two primary images: an archetypal image of a father and that of an arche-
typal image of a son. The remainder of Lowell’s archetypes fall into place after
identifying the archetypal battle between father and son. The villain, the manipu-
lator, the criminal each are types of the son, but only if we understand that psy-
chologically and emotionally the son is always in perpetual revolt against the father.
The birth of tragedy is the birth of new ideas. The revolt of the son against the
father, too, generates new life. For this reason, Lowell can interpret all of the fig-
ures he names as sons in coups against an old order, desirous of bringing in a new
order. To some extent the fact that Lowell sees a father-son antagonism as the fun-
damental trope underlying humanity’s development, and as the one essential trope
of “classical” literature, as well as in the course of modernity’s relationship to the
historical, places Lowell’s vision in a camp with that of Freud.
In Totem and Taboo Freud attempts to take the early “discovery” of totemism (as a
religious practice in a select number of indigenous communities) as a means of dis-
covering the history or the evolution of human consciousness. Reasoning backwards
(by using a methodology of reductionism) to arrive at a primal moment, Freud con-
cludes that totemic rituals as containing the seed of all religion, the seed of the Oedi-
pal complex, as well as the seed for all of civilization’s patterns of social organization.
Freud’s theory of the primal moment that germinated civilization is fascinating for
what it contains: the primacy of father-son aggression. Totem and Taboo is a story of
the sons’ collective drive to patricide. By destroying the father, the sons can take pos-
session of what the father had before possessed—in an animalistic way—women and
territory. Freud reasons, the sons’ guilt over patricide leads the sons to swear a re-
membrance to the father in the association of a totemic animal and, hence, there was
the birth of totemic worship. Moreover, the move away from the literal destruction of
the father marks the rise of a metaphorical relationship of the sons to a collective mem-
ory of both their aggressive drive toward patricide and the manifestation of the guilt
they feel in association to this drive. As Freud argued, though societies became more
advanced and social stratums more differentiated, a primal race memory remained.
The whole point of Totem and Taboo is that this primal race memory becomes
both simultaneously repressed in the Oedipal complex while also manifested as a
projected wish to overthrow the father or father surrogates, such as law. Freud rea-
soned that this race memory as living in the collective consciousness of a social
order created the metaphorical relationship of antagonism of sons to fathers, and
that the subject has engaged the imagination of civilization’s development. Fur-
thermore this primal race memory Freud argued was the seat of the guilt produced
out of the father-son antagonism.
While Lowell’s attempt to reckon with the father-son conflict may not coincide
exactly with Freud’s Totem and Taboo, still for Lowell the conflict is located so cen-
trally to the existence of the male and to concepts of masculinity that it forms the
metaphorical root of all of literature’s examples of the human spirit’s desire for re-
volt. This revolt may take on the characteristics of a sublimated desire to possess ex-
istential freedom. Lowell’s “Art and Evil” depicts the spiritual and psychological
inner drive of the father-son conflict. Lowell most clearly expresses the father-son
battle in his commentary upon Goethe’s Faust.
In Goethe’s Faust, that perhaps greatest of education books, the endless di-
alogue between Faust and Mephistopheles tells a father-and-son story,
where Faust—young, passionate, poetic, selfish, and blind—is forever hav-

ing to talk to his almost Hegelian antithesis, middle-aged, apathetic, prosy,
clear-headed, and clear-sighted Mephistopheles—who has the virtue of
being more interested in his victim than in himself.
“Art and Evil” expressed Lowell’s heterodox theological views, but it also stead-
fastly proclaimed the belief that the artist after World War II lacked the option of
hiding unless he or she wanted to appear blind to the atrocities of the modern world.
Eliot had helped construct the belief that the artist possessed a moral responsibility
to use art to deal with the problems of modernity. In The Sacred Wood in his essay,
“Dante,” Eliot remarks on the “disgusting” in Dante. Noting the affinity of certain
ideas between Sophocles and Dante, Eliot was able to universalize the work of the
tragedians so as to create a formula of the modern poet’s responsibilities:
The contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting, by an artist, is the

necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward the pursuit of beauty.
But not all succeed as did Dante in expressing the complete scale from
negative to positive. The negative is more importunate. The structure of
emotions, for which the allegory is the necessary scaffold, is complete from
the most sensuous to the most intellectual and the most spiritual.
Lowell in “Art and Evil” deems it an essential component of the modern author
to take into account this mode of pessimism or cynicism. It even seems to be the
case that Lowell believes the adoption of such cynicism to be the outgrowth of the
modern writer’s responsibility toward humanity and the social order; it is up to the
modern writer to point out to humanity its shortcomings. This is not to say that it
is necessarily the modern writer’s responsibility to direct humanity to ways of cor-
recting itself; rather, the role of the modern writer, Lowell indicates, is to inces-
santly remind society of the problem of evil, and that more to the truth of the
matter, modern society has constructed innovative ways of endangering the entire
human species.
The modern writer is to highlight the problem of evil as it exists and to act as a
prophet reminding individual societies of the variations of evil that have been cre-
ated. In asserting the role of the modern author to point out amorally the place of
evil in art and life, and in noting the classical predecessors of genius who accom-
plished this task and set the mold for the modern author, Lowell (whether inten-
tionally or unconsciously we cannot be sure) borrows from T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition
and the Individual Talent.” “Art and Evil” connects Eliot’s spiritual views and
Lowell’s opinion that the modern individual writer’s struggle is with depicting a re-
alism of historical violence.
If we take what Eliot espouses in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and we
hold it up to Lowell’s “Art and Evil,” what we see is that both attempt to position
the individual modern writer within a framework of the classics. For Eliot, the
writer is to find his ‘space’ of creativity within the classical models of genius; the
writer individually can neither escape the influence of these templates, nor can he
survive without them. The writer’s task, if such a writer wants to himself ascend to
the level of genius, is to take the materials from his individually personal experience
and transform that material into a universal image. The transmutation of experi-
ences onto the plane of the universal is what will make the experience become art.
When this transmutation is lacking, the work of art ceases to house the meaning
it should contain; the result is that the poet has failed to situate himself within the
templates of genius he had trusted himself to follow. There is renewal within Eliot’s
system, wherein tradition is not static, but a living system of communion between
the classical and the modern mind.
Poetic tradition as a living tradition is to restore itself perpetually by creating in-
novations; but, the poet who seeks to exist and write outside the circle of tradition
is, for Eliot, no poet at all. Out of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” two tenets
enter into the rhetoric of high modernism: the objective correlative and the im-
personality of the poet. These two tenets function so forcefully within the circle of
high modernist poetry that these beliefs/guidelines remain essentially fixed until
the publication of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies.
The question of the success of Eliot’s own poetry in relationship to epitomiz-
ing these characteristics is partially called into question by Lowell’s reading of
Eliot. Lowell’s essay, “T.S. Eliot,” addresses the autobiographical element present
in Four Quartets. Lowell applies the terminology of a “quasi-autobiographical tes-
timony,” one that is revelatory of the “experience of union with God, or rather, its
imperfect approximation in this life” to Four Quartets. It is clear that Lowell is
searching in the model of Eliot for the aspect of the confessional, and finds in
Four Quartets a pattern of confessional poetry. Yet, the confessional in Eliot is in-
direct, imprecise, and mediated through a language seeking abstraction. Lowell
sees operative in Eliot a confessional mode: “Four Quartets is a composite of the
symbolic, the didactic, and the confessional.” In Lowell’s Life Studies, Eliot’s indi-
rect confessional mode is agonistically overturned for the invention of a new con-
fessional mode, one that will play upon the immediacy of language; the shadow of
the father is superseded. There is an intimacy and directness of experience, raw
and unfiltered in Life Studies that is absent in Eliot. As Lowell writes, “My own
feeling is that union with God is somewhere in sight in all poetry, though it is usu-
ally rudimentary and misunderstood.”
In Lowell’s appraisal of Eliot’s confessional mode he recognizes the mysticism
inherent in it. The question is how Lowell believes the mysticism of poetry is to be
achieved. Interestingly, in Lowell’s misprision of Four Quartets he calls the poem an

example of Catholicism (Eliot was an Anglican, recall). Lowell articulates his im-
pression of Quartets by saying, “It is probably the most powerful religious poem of
the twentieth century, and certainly the most remarkable and ambitious expression
of Catholic mysticism in English.”
Lowell reads Rimbaud as an example of an autobiographical or confessional
mode. In “Art and Evil,” Lowell’s passage on Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell is illumi-
nating. Lowell calls A Season in Hell, “a symbolic autobiography, a confession,” but
more it is “a series of delirious visions, and also a piece of experimental writing.” In
keeping with the theme of “Art and Evil” as a meditation upon father-son conflict,
Lowell interprets A Season in Hell in the same light of this conflict: “Rimbaud
seems to be reading over the stories of all the world’s scapegoats, and in each case
saying, ‘No, this is too simple, this doesn’t fit me.’” Too, in keeping with the theme
of “Art and Evil,” Lowell says, “Here is Rimbaud as Cain, who says, ‘While still
quite a child I used to admire the incurable convict on whom the prison doors were
always shutting.’” Lowell observes in Rimbaud a technique of combining the
“criminal” with the “saint,” and confession with urbanity. Prior to Life Studies, Low-
ell already in “A Bible House,” combined urbanity with the simplicity of religion.
Lowell calls Rimbaud a “Wandering Jew, a victim driven across the face of the
earth.” He says of Rimbaud that he “is a kind of Barbassas cursing the Pharisees,”
but likewise “Rimbaud is the repentant sinner.” Important to the development of
Lowell’s concept of how to use the confessional mode the notions of repentance
and penitence do not occur in the mode as a way of concluding the confession. Of
Rimbaud the repentance is, Lowell says, “not permanently” intact in A Season in
Hell, nor does the condition of being repentant occur as resolution; in Rimbaud, re-
pentance is “not as a climax” to the poem. In the following passage, Lowell ob-
serves the contradiction in Rimbaud:
Boy, poet, magician, tramp, tough, explorer of the Orient—half of Rimbaud

always seems to be running headlong to knock his brains out, the other half
is a shrewd, commonsensical, businesslike person—someone much like his
mother, that proud, respectable peasant woman who went on running farm
and family after being abandoned by her drifting husband, the soldier. De-
fiant, humble, practical, terrified, foolhardy: Rimbaud is always picking on
himself to find new ways of running in the same direction.
One wonders if this is not the image Lowell constructs for himself in his confes-
sional writing: Life Studies tends to repeat Rimbaud’s trope of the confessant artist
as a dandy, a trope invented in Baudelaire and which has its prototype earlier in
the eighteenth century in Diderot.
It is not obvious if Lowell interprets Eliot’s confessional mode as a synthesis

between autobiography and religious mysticism, or if Lowell separates these two
aspects of Quartets. After all, Lowell did tend to place religious mysticism in a cat-
egory with that of autobiographical poetry. To Lowell, Rimbaud’s A Season of Hell
“is the work of a religious and ignited man,” and he called it both confession and a
“symbolic autobiography.”
If the poet was to escape the trap of impersonality, a new language had to be in-
vented and used. Lowell notes that while Eliot’s use in Quartets of “quotations have
other functions beside the capture of a richer and more inspired texture than the
poet could sustain on his own,” ultimately the reserved and ceremonial language
“argue for the continuity of artistic tradition, and make for a semblance of anonymity,
so that even the most confessional passages appear impersonal” (emphasis mine). There
are autobiographical occasions that stand behind sections of the Quartets: the sec-
ond war, Eliot’s experience as an air raid warden, and decisions he had to make
surrounding the two main women in Eliot’s life (prior to Valerie née Fletcher), his
first wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood and his long-time Platonic love, Emily Hale.
The year that Hitler rolled into Poland, Eliot made the decision to sign the pa-
pers to commit Vivienne Haigh-Wood to a mental asylum. She remained there for
the duration of her life. The second decision Eliot faced around the time of the
Quartets was what to do with Emily Hale. She had served since near the beginning
of his marriage to Vivienne as a muse and as a receptacle for the parts of his de-
meanor that were most incompatible with Vivienne. The reserve, the rigid humor,
the New England past, the families that prepared their children to attend upper
crust schools as bluebloods, even the understanding that love could or preferably
should be Platonic rather than physical, all of this represented what he held in
common with Emily Hale.
But all commonalities aside, Emily Hale as a woman with a woman’s patience
had “passively waited” for Eliot, much like the old peasants waiting in Murder in the
Cathedral for Thomas à Becket’s return. Emily Hale had waited for Eliot’s love
from 1927 to 1957, hoping Eliot’s love would turn to something other than the
merely Platonic. The last of the good, but bittersweet, time between Eliot and
Emily Hale is captured in the infamous rose garden scene in the Quartets, as that
which could have been externalized but was not. The reasons for the failure of the
externalization of the love shared between Eliot and Emily are not known. As one
of Eliot’s biographers, Lyndall Gordon notes, over a thousand letters were shared
between Eliot and Emily Hale. A thousand letters! But that she should figure in the
Quartets (and perhaps even in “Ash-Wednesday”) as an abstraction says more of
Eliot than it does Emily Hale’s womanhood.
Thus, Lowell is right in one sense to see behind the veil of impersonality to the
autobiographical dimensions of the Quartets; there is in addition to the spiritual, a
sense of an emotional autobiography that accrues in sketches. Lowell is equally

correct that in the Quartets the life has been burned out and we are left only with
the intimations of its burning having once been. Though a transmuted emotional
tinge is present, the windings of a spiritual confessant override the unspeakable
emotions. To this end, we might term both Eliot’s Quartets and Rimbaud’s A Sea-
son in Hell as “spiritual autobiographies,” following Simone Weil’s usage of the
phrase. Weil wrote in her spiritual autobiography, Waiting for God, “For instance I
never allowed myself to think of a future state, but I always believed that the instant
of death is the center and object of life.” If we take Weil’s meaning, Eliot’s Quar-
tets and Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell each gives us examples of those who believe
that death is the “center.” As Rimbaud writes in A Season in Hell, “There are mo-
ments when I forget the abjection to which I have fallen.” For Eliot, it is because
God may impersonalize the personality in this moment, and for Rimbaud, it is
harder to say, for his theological predilections are mostly cast as memories and the
experiential. There are moments though in A Season in Hell, such as the one, here,
where Rimbaud and Eliot speak to a strange, similar longing.
My soul eternal,
Redeem your promise,
In spite of the night alone
And the day on fire.
But it seems fair to gauge Rimbaud’s as arguing something like what Simone de
Beuvoir quoted Montaigne as saying, that out of all of nature humans alone, “We
build toward death.” Or, as Vladimir says in Becket’s Waiting for Godot, “there
comes a point when humanity must realize simply ‘time has stopped.’”
Lowell observing the way the Quartets fulfill Eliot’s description in “Tradition
and the Individual Talent” of what the perfect poem should be, calls “Four Quar-
tets something of a community product.” The ceremonial language, ritualistic tone,
and tradition would have to be dispensed with to forge a new confessional mode,
one that could express the personality of the poet and the emotional pitfalls of the
poet’s actual, human existence. Life Studies executes just this. It relieves the strain
of ceremonial language, provides an escape hatch for the poet to exist outside the
formalist/high modernist trap of impersonality, and it demonstrates post-Eliot the
poet as “human, all too human,” to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche.
In The Sacred Wood Eliot had argued in “The Perfect Critic” that art should not
entertain the “accidents of personal association.” Eliot in “The Perfect Critic”
claims that while one may “use art, in fact, as the outlet for the egotism” that “Aris-
totle had none of the impure desires to satisfy in whatever sphere of interest, he
looked solely and steadfastly at the object.” Using Aristotle’s theory of the objec-
tive structure of drama and tragedy, Eliot draws the conclusion that the objective
nature of art is to create through the medium of language the intellectual equiva-
lent of an “analysis of sensation,” perfecting this “analysis” until it reaches “the point
of principle and definition. The objective side of the work of art Eliot argued is a
process of pruning down, of making language an equivalent to the emotional, but
in a pure way, so that the “impurity” of the artist’s individual egotism is internalized
and repressed by the universal, non-individualistic measurements of the art form.
In “The Perfect Critic” Eliot evoked a second ghost, Hegel, writing that with
Hegel we have an example of “prodigious exponent of emotional systematization,”
and a thinker who believed in “dealing with his emotions as if they were definite ob-
jects which had aroused those emotions.” Eliot in a way misinterprets Hegel’s ideal-
ism by claiming that Hegel’s “followers have as a rule taken for granted that words
have definite meanings, overlooking the tendency of words to become indefinite
emotions.” But the point Eliot is making is that the artist, the poet, like the philoso-
pher is to create analytically, rather than egotistically. In Eliot’s view it is the imma-
ture artist who has failed to build a sufficient repertoire of words to restructure definite
impressions received and intuited from the sensory/empirical world as “indefinite
emotions” (emphasis mine). The poet is held up in “The Perfect Critic” as the conveyor
of an abstract analytic logic, as an expresser of rationalism applied to the emotional
quality of life communicated universally; for, Eliot quotes another as saying, “poetry
is the most highly organized form of intellectual activity.” The “Perfect Critic” stresses
the “scientific” aspects of poetry’s “organization.” Underlying Eliot’s discussion of the
ideal critic is the more important ideal of the poet as a figure of unlimited analytic ca-
pabilities, an individual who can “organize” life for those others who are more com-
monly bound to their passions and persuaded according to their sentiments.
In Life Studies the mind is left to mull over its own torment. The lack of religious
symbolism in Life Studies only highlights the mind’s incessant production of pain;
and it seems likely that one way of interpreting such personal misery as Lowell
wrote about in Life Studies is to understand it as the retention of a New England
Calvinist mind. Both Lowell and Eliot, despite their respective conversions to An-
glicanism and Catholicism, could not outrun the religious atmosphere of New
England and its habitual way of causing the mind to feed upon itself. Such an at-
mosphere was the bread and butter Eliot and Lowell ate.
Lowell’s Life Studies opens the flood gate for the return of the ego to the work
of art—the very thing perhaps that Eliot had dreaded and worked so hard to guard
poetry against. Before Lowell could find his voice in the immediacy of an inti-
mately personal language in Life Studies, first he had to finish working through his
spiritual quarrel with New England, if indeed he ever did complete this spiritual
quarrel. Before he could make his “confessions,” the son had to overturn the fathers.
chapter four
Cain and the Shadow of

the Red Rock
The “hard and cracked world” Lowell had described in 1957 in “Art and Evil,” he
had already written about for over a decade, beginning with Land of Unlikeness
(1944). Allen Tate had highly praised Land of Unlikeness for two traits the collec-
tion carried: the formalism of style and the parallel between the modern experience
and Christian tragedy. Tate called the book a fulfillment of Eliot’s “prediction that
we should soon see a return to the formal and even intricate metres and stanzas.”
Also, Tate had detected from the beginning of Lowell’s career another aspect. In
the introduction to Land of Unlikeness, Tate gave the following commentary.
On the other hand, certain shorter poems, like “A Suicidal Nightmare” and
“Death from Cancer,” are richer in immediate experience than the expli-
cated religious poems; they are more dramatic, the references being per-
sonal and historical and the symbolism less willed and explicit.
What Tate perceived and foresaw was the jarring style Lowell would advance in
Life Studies. “A Suicidal Nightmare” captures something of the essence of the men-
tal illness Lowell would deal with for the remainder of his life.
Nonetheless, Lowell uses “A Suicidal Nightmare” to introduce his long-running
trope of Cain. Lowell by the time of “Art and Evil” had come to conceive of the
trope of Cain as a way of representing how consciousness births creativity through
social revolt. Lowell uses Cain as a figural embodiment of the freedom of the
human will. Because Lowell used the figure of Cain as an archetypal image of con-
sciousness, it is appropriate to refer to a remark by Jung concerning the nature of
archetypes and their function. In Man and His Symbols, Jung argued “forgotten
ideas have not ceased to exist. Although they cannot be reproduced at will, they are
present in a subliminal state—just beyond the threshold of recall—from which
they can rise again spontaneously at any time.”
In and of itself, there is nothing remarkable in Cain as an archetypal represen-
tation of consciousness. It is not even the most novel or clever one that Lowell
could have chosen. But the importance of the symbol can only really be evaluated
when we consider that in his pre-confessional poetry Lowell recognized the prob-
lem of how a poet should confront the psychological. At the forefront of the psy-
che, Lowell seemed to believe, is the need for the individual to find a way to revolt
against his environment and social world.
Occasionally in poems such as the imitation of Rilke’s “The Shako,” Lowell split
the trope of Cain into its counterpart, that of Abel. The result of the split trope is
that he can use the figures of Cain and Abel to represent (in a way comparable to
the Jungian idea of the shadow) the two sides of our psychical existence. Human-
ity suffers for its universal manifestation of the desire for an individual ego and
self-willed differentiation from social law, but the individual also suffers from los-
ing his or her place of orientation within the collective social element.
Taken together a condition of affliction arises out of it. We are at once Cain and
Abel, at once Shiva and Vishnu, the selfish and the upright, the destroyer and the
preserver; every psyche contains both impulses. These two sides of humanity we
might rightly name as a universal paradox felt within the human psyche. The Jun-
gian psychologist Robert A. Johnson in Owning Your Own Shadow, notes of para-
dox, “We hate paradox since it is so painful getting there, but it is a very direct
experience of a reality beyond our usual frame of reference and yields some of the
greatest insights” and that paradox “forces us beyond ourselves and destroys naïve
and inadequate adaptations.” Or to put it more poetically, as Roethke writes in his
Notebooks, “My other self has gone away.”
In his employment of the symbol of Cain, Lowell found a way to represent the
psyche’s confrontation with self-knowledge. The existentialist psychologist Erich
Fromm once commented “at the common core” of our humanity it is that we “must
strive to recognize the truth and can be fully human only to the extent to which”
we become “independent and free, an end” in ourselves “and not the means of any
other person’s purposes.” But Fromm added, if one “has no love, he is an empty
shell even if he were all power, wealth, and intelligence. Man must know the dif-
ference between good and evil, he must learn to listen to the voice of his conscience
and to be able to follow it.” As Lowell’s poetry tells us, we often ignore and silence
the “voice of conscience,” which is self-knowledge. By slighting this inner voice, the
CAIN AND THE SHADOW OF THE RED ROCK | 67
line between good and evil is blurred, and so the ultimate intelligence of discern-
ing between good and evil is not reached. It is the conflict between the “voice of the
conscience” and the ever shifting lines of good and evil that have ruled the march
of history. To this extent, Lowell framed the problems of modernity within the
scope of an archetypal limitation of the psyche. The crucial root of the modern
world’s specific ways of enacting cruelty was part of a longer history of the devel-
opment of the human consciousness as it manifests a collective and individual con-
science, and the ability to silence that conscience.
The poet Robert Pinksy described in Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry
how certain tropes function in literature. There he referred to what he called a
“commonplace trope,” that which is used to represent the “stripping [of ] the
human animal of its cultural armature.” Pinsky argues that any trope that reduces
the human model down to its bare, raw nature apart from culture has “traditionally
[been] deployed to emphasize redeeming human qualities, such as the capacity for
reason, free will, or civilization.” In other words, by removing all social restraints, as
well as social benefits, the human model is shown to possess certain innate traits.
Any trope that deals unequivocally with the human paradigm in its reduction, as
Lowell’s use of Cain exemplifies, functions to reveal the frightfulness of the mind’s
privations. It is as Pinsky says, “To be thrown back ‘forever’ on oneself alone sug-
gests a degree of mobility, a freedom from constraint and dependence, that is po-
tentially exhilarating as well as deranging: a liberation, as well as void.”
Lowell had remarked in “Art and Evil” that Cain represented a sense of human
villainy. But his use of the symbol teeters upon approaching a level of taboo. As
Ernst Cassirer once observed, “The essence of taboo is that without consulting
experience it pronounces a priori certain things to be dangerous.” The danger ex-
emplified by Cain is that of overthrowing the social dimension of oneself, so that
what is revealed is a sense of exile, a condition of permanent wandering, and a
fundamental propensity toward erring. Lowell did not accept Eliot and Tate’s lit-
eral adherence to the religious concept of original sin. Yet, Lowell did construct
a close parallel to the concept of original sin. Lowell does not espouse a theolog-
ical belief in human depravity, but he does make great use in Land of Unlikeness
of a very near, existential, approximation: the mutinous wanderer condemned as
one who creates his own journey, a journey that leads to psychological hell and
self-damnation. If Lowell’s early poetry contained a definition of human deprav-
ity, the definition might quite naturally reveal that the loss of the self is the ulti-
mate privation.
In “A Suicidal Nightmare,” as a figural representation Cain stands in for “the
maimed man” who wrestles with his “gutless heart.” Lowell’s Cain is not the Cain
of the Old Testament, but the modern individual driven mad by an unidentifiable
cause. To rebel against modernity, the poem seems to “prophesy” to use Lowell’s
word, is to push so far against the grain that the only rational outcome becomes
madness. Echoing in a slight way Blake’s “The Tiger,” Lowell’s poem builds upon
the idea that there is design in evil. In Lowell, evil’s design is not the result of God
or creation; rather, the design is contained as a pattern woven out of history, human
genealogy, and the mind’s self-destructive tendencies. The condition of evil men-
tioned in “A Suicidal Nightmare,” is not theological; it is surrealistically aggressive.
Tonight and crouching in your jungle-bed,

O tiger of the gutless heart, you spied
The maimed man stooping with his bag;
And there was none to help. Cat, you saw red,
And like a grinning sphinx, you prophesied
Cain’s nine and outcast lives are in the bag.
A Jungian shadow of the psyche (the mind’s double of itself ) hides within; this
doppelganger is “crouching” and “gutless.” The double side of consciousness stays
squirreled away in a “bag,” until Cain, the figure of revolt, wins the battle against
the better part of the psyche and gains sway.
Cain is a gateway in the poem for Lowell to move into portraying the mind’s
manifestations of mental illness. The poem speaks brilliantly of a feverish excite-
ment that has run low to the point where one’s own mind becomes a drag:
“‘Brother, I fattened a caged beast on blood/And knowledge had let the cat out of
the bag.’” And, it is the kind of psychological trough that will come to characterize
all of the “hospital” or mental institution poems of the confessional poets after the
publication of Life Studies (1959). “A Suicidal Nightmare” is a prototype of Lowell’s
“Waking in the Blue,” “Home After Three Months Away,” and “Skunk Hour,” as
well as Snodgrass‘s “The Operation.” “A Suicidal Nightmare” represents that por-
tion of the psyche bent upon a determination to purge itself out of its own exis-
tence. As such, “Skunk Hour” prefigures all of the poems in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel,
those that she feverishly penned in the dull, blue hours of morning in the months
just before she enacted her last brutal self-drama.
Land of Unlikeness’ “A Suicidal Nightmare’s” connection with Life Studies’
“Skunk Hour” is unmistakable. The second stanza of “A Suicidal Nightmare” is
voyeuristic, as the function of memory is transformed into an eye by which the
speaker is “watching” or purveying his surroundings.
Watching the man, I spun my borrowed car

Into the bog. I’d left the traveled road
And crashed into a lower bog;
And that was why the catapulting fur,
A wooly lava of abstractions, flowed

Over my memory’s inflated bag.
But, the voyeurism is an important manifestation of the mind’s breakdown. The

mind (in a process of detaching from a sense of self ) in turn attaches to other things
and transforms reality into a world of objects but without recognizing the subse-
quent need for emotional fulfillment. The outcome is expected; the voyeuristic at-
tempt to straighten out the mind’s breakdown fails, and the speaker is left with the
knowledge in both “A Suicidal Nightmare” and “Skunk Hour” with failure.
The last stanza of “Skunk Hour” (Life Studies) expresses an acceptance that the
poet’s mind is malfunctioning.
One dark night,

my Tudor Ford Climbed the hill’s skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town . . .
My mind’s not right.
Dismissing too quickly the poetic command of the “personal and historical” surg-
ing through “A Suicidal Nightmare” and “Death from Cancer,” Tate mainly paid at-
tention to Lowell’s Catholicism and aesthetic formalism. Elsewhere in the
introduction to Land of Unlikeness Tate had written, “whether we like his Catholi-
cism or not, there is at least a memory of the spiritual dignity of man, now sacrificed
to mere secularization and a craving for mechanical order.” A closer reading of Low-
ell’s early work should have revealed that Lowell’s Christian convictions were loosely
knit together (in the orthodox sense of conviction); a point that Tate seemed to fail
to realize. “Death from Cancer” is from a longer poem in the collection, “In Mem-
ory of Arthur Winslow.” There, the religious and historical imagery is present, but
the figure of Christ is transmuted into the ancient Cheron. Christ does not come to
deliver Arthur Winslow, but to take him into death, “Beyond Charles River to the
Acheron/Where the wide waters and their voyager are one.” The poem unlike the
more overtly religious poems in Land of Unlikeness subordinates the religious sym-
bols to images associated more directly with Arthur Winslow’s life: the “Boston
Basin shells,” “Union Boat Club’s wharf,” “the Public Gardens” and its “bread-
stuffed ducks” populated with “mid-Sunday Irish.” It is to the humanity of Arthur
Winslow’s life that the poem speaks, in spite of the classical and religious overtones.
Part of the depiction of this humanity is contained in Lowell’s use of localism;
for, it is not only the mind and its psychological problems that Lowell’s early po-
etry addresses, but how the mind is cast by the landscape of place. The localism
that helps shape “In Memory of Arthur Winslow” is apparent in part II, “Dunbar-
ton.” There, the reader rides with Lowell to the funeral site after Arthur Winslow
has died from cancer or “wrestling with the crab/Whose claws drop flesh on your
serge yatching-blouse.” “Dunbarton” reenacts the movement of the funeral proces-
sion, and the tone echoes that of Dickinson. As Lowell draws the circumference of
Arthur Winslow’s life, making it smaller and smaller, the effect is much like that of
Dickinson’s meditation upon death. Dickinson writes,
I went to heaven,—
’T was a small town,
Lit with a ruby,
Lathed with down.
Why or how localism can actually lessen death’s sting is a question to ask. Unfor-
tunately, such a question remains only at an unanswerable level. Lowell observes
the localism of Arthur Winslow’s life in the lines,
The stones are yellow and the grass is grey

When we ride you to the Dunbarton Hill
In a mortician’s Packard limousine;
The dozen Winslows and the Starks half fill
The granite plot and the dwarfed pines go green
As an aside, Lowell identifies the limousine as a “Packard” just as in Life Studies he

names each of the types of cars his father bought and drove. When Lowell recounts
the cars, including the “Packard limousine,” there is a snicker and a sneer behind
the recounting, in a vein reminiscent of Eliot’s “Prufrock,” wherein the eternal foot-
man holds the coattails and snickers. Lowell as the observer of Arthur Winslow’s
final car ride, and his family crammed into the “Packard,” takes on the air of a fam-
ily out for a standard Sunday ride.
Lowell’s attitude as he observes the event (observing even while participating)
is also reminiscent of Dickinson’s lines, “Pompless no life can pass away;/The lowli-
est career/To the same pageant wends its way.” The localism of the scene in Low-
ell’s poem connects Arthur Winslow to Dunbarton, but it also connects him
historically to the Mayflower Compact and the Pilgrims.
When the great year of the little yeoman come

Bringing the Mayflower Compact and the faith
That made the Pilgrim Makers take a lathe
To point their wooden steeples lest the Word be dumb.
Lowell sees in Arthur Winslow’s death a circle, wrapping around men who serve
like pillars to the New England community eventually leading to the hollowness of
the religious promise for resurrection.
“Arthur, no one living has reached

Dunbarton. Are only poor relations left
To hold an empty bag of pine-cones?” Cleft,
Broken down boulders sprawl out where our fathers preached.
Just as the “Pilgrim Makers” sailed to find a new world, so Winslow sails past the
“Charles River to the Acheron.” There is no belief in actual resurrection and Low-
ell’s inability to find comfort in the transcendent theologies of New England leaves
him as the speaker of the poem emotionally vacant: “O fearful Witnesses, your day
is done:/The minister, Kingsolving, waves your ghosts/To the shades, evergreen, the
pilgrim’s home.”
New England is haunted by the many notches on the circle of life and jour-
ney, but its theology could not prevent Winslow’s death, and these notches on
the circle of life and journey are similiar to what we find in Eliot’s Four Quartets.
“Death from Cancer” is framed against successive Easters, “This Easter, Arthur
Winslow, less than dead,” contrasts (in part three of the poem) with, “This Easter,
Arthur Winslow, five years gone.” The poem ends in part IV, “A Prayer for My
Grandfather to Our Lady,” by turning to the image of the Virgin Mary. But
within this image, Lowell’s Catholicism moves in the direction of establishing a
monstrosity.
Mother, for these three hundred years or more

Neither our clippers nor our slavers reached
The haven of your peace in this Bay State:
Neither my father nor his father. Beached
On these dry flats of fishy real estate,
O Mother, I implore
Your scorched, blue thunderbreasts of love to pour
Buckets of blessings on my burning head
Until I rise like Lazarus from the dead:
Lavabis nos et super nivem dealbabor.
Mary becomes a symbol of the atrocities humanity commits in the name of higher
values, as Bay State is revealed in the poem to exist as a place of brutality wherein
common survival and colonial exploitation intersect one another. The locality of
New England and its religious myth as a “haven” for the godly is overturned by the
realism of commercial enterprise; buying and selling, getting and having, owner-
ship and possession turns the offer of heavenly love upside down.
At most, the figure of Mary can only offer a false hope or a hypocritical stance
about an unrealizable love. It is back to the figure of Cain that Lowell turns to
evoke the baser drives of annihilation; but, such drives toward this kind of self-de-
feat never completely wipe out humanity. “On the Eve of the Feast of the Immac-
ulate Conception” uses the trope of Cain as a reminder of the universality of
violence; for “six thousand years” the unavoidable consequences of evil have
“drummed” through life and the violence has come to find its place in “ears.” Rene
Girard’s term “generative violence” fits well Lowell’s image of Cain. Generative vi-
olence (as opposed to other kinds of violence) gives birth to systems of meaning
and social constructions, rather than operating decadently or gratuitously. Gener-
ative violence destroys in such a manner so that either a cycle of existence may con-
tinue or so that something new may arise. “On the Eve of the Feast of the
Immaculate Conception” positions a universal pattern of violence and posits this
pattern as a phenomenological component of every human life. We find in Low-
ell’s poem, “On the Eve of the Immaculate Conception,” examples of generative vi-
olence comparable to the level of paradox created in Seneca’s tragedies. In Seneca,
rationality is used to demonstrate that violence arises out of generations and fol-
lows the pattern of genealogy. In both Seneca and Lowell, violence is contained by
the “wheel” of time, while also existing as a disease or contagion that spreads. It is
a universal characteristic of history that violence exists, but always against specific
people that violence is waged. Though historical violence can be extrapolated to
abstract levels, it is important to never lose sight of the fact that the abstractions
dissolve and fall away in consideration of the fact that individual people have suf-
fered from historical violence.
Bring me tonight no axe to grind

On wheels of the Utopian mind:
Six thousand years
Cain’s blood has drummed into my ears,
Shall I wring plums from Plato’s bush
When Burma’s and Bizette’s dead
Must puff and push
Blood into bread?
“On the Eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception” does not fixate upon
ancient symbols alone. Antiquity is placed beside the modern; Eisenhower is
placed beside “the Hun” and “Roman kneel.” The ancient measurements for vio-
lence are still the most effective ones for understanding—“To lick the dust from
Mars’ bootheel/Like foppish bloodhounds; yet you sleep/Out our distemper’s evil
day.” Christ, too, becomes an ancient symbol in the poem; he offers “bread and
beauty,” but the gift seems to be costly, as Lowell ties “soldiers,” the “Mother of
God,” and Christ together as three representations united in the confrontation of
keeping “Mars’ bootheel” at bay. The poem leaves as ambiguous what role Mary
and Christ really play in the cycles of history’s destructions and advancements; but,
the indication is that through them peace cannot be reached, at least not at the
level of the societal and the historical.
As in part IV of “Death from Cancer,” where the speaker beseeches “the
scorched, blue thunderbreasts of love to pour/Buckets of blessings on my burning
head,” the call to Mary is vile, ugly. The love of Mary is a “burly love”; she holds out
the promise of a redemptive harmony, but, the promise is left unfulfilled as “the big
wars,” still wage on. The result is that Mary is ironically turned into a false prophet.
Mother of God, whose burly love

Turns swords to plowshares, come, improve
On the big wars
And make this holiday with Mars
Your Feast Day, while Bellona’s bluff
Courage or call it what you please
Plays blind man’s buff
Through virtue’s knees.
Lowell uses the active tense of the word “turn.” The Mother of God “Turns,” indi-
cating that her presence is situated in a moment structured as an eternal “now.” It
is inside the dimension of time as a force of immediacy that the phrase “swords to
ploughshares” conveys an act of ushering in a golden age, that of “Utopia’s mind.”
Yet, other elements contained in the lines deny the reality of such an event.
The reduction of the whole business to a dangerous (though real) game of “blind
man’s bluff ” demonstrates Lowell’s conception of the modern, spiritual wasteland,
one quite remarkably similar to that of Eliot’s. Mary has become the “belle” and
“belly” of “soldiers” who “mind . . . well.” Mary’s image becomes melded with that of
an authoritarian personality, as wars require totalitarian ideologies in order to suc-
ceed. The poem sums up by positioning violence within a never ending cycle.
Over the seas and far away

They feast the fair and bloody day
When mankind’s Mother,
Jesus’ Mother, like another
Nimrod danced on Satan’s head.
The old Snake lopes to his shelled hole;

Man eats the Dead
From pole to pole.
Repeatedly Lowell singles out the figure of Christ in Land of Unlikeness. While
the institution of Christianity is mentioned, for example in the lines of “Concord,”
where Lowell places “The belfry of the Unitarian Church” in relation to other land-
marks in the town of Concord; nonetheless, the church is presented as one site
among other historic sites. Unitarian theology by denying the primacy of original
sin is too weak to reckon with the problem of violence in human nature: “This
Church is Concord, where the Emersons/Washed out the blood-clots on my Mas-
ter’s robe.” It is not that Lowell wishes to advance the notion of original sin; as al-
ready mentioned he had for the most part disavowed himself of that belief.
The belfry of the Unitarian Church

Rings out the Hanging Jesus. Crucifix,
How can your whited spindling arms transfix
Mammon’s unbridled industry, the lurch
For forms to harness Heraclitus’ stream!
There is a tendency in Lowell’s poems to remove centuries of an acculturated fem-

inization of the image of Christ. Weak cultural images are replaced by a description
of Christ as robust. Emerson’s “good Concord” has denied the wheel of time that
churns out violence, nor can the Emersonian version of Christianity solve the prob-
lem of historical violence. More to the point, Lowell seems to strongly indicate that
modern versions of Christianity have become too weak and watered down to com-
bat the problem of evil as witnessed with the First World War. Yet, at the same time,
oddly for a poem that relies so much on Christian imagery, nowhere does the poem
recognize Christ as the answer to the wheel of history. Instead, Christ is presented
as a significant trope confirming a violent reality; as such, the image of Christ points
to Lowell’s belief in the imperfect condition of human nature. The liberal optimism
of Emerson—its collective hope that humanity will triumph over its own negative
drives—is shown in the poem to represent a dangerous ideology. The danger lies in
ignoring the reality of the psychological condition underpinning history, one of de-
structive tendencies. Lowell’s Christ is not Emerson’s, but neither is it Tate’s
Catholicism or even Eliot’s version of Christianity. An emblem of a devastating gyre
of time, Lowell’s Christ is Stoic and belongs in the company of Seneca’s tragedies.
“Children of Light” repeats the trope of Cain to demonstrate the grotesque
point that humanity’s genealogy is constructed upon carnage, wherein light turns
to waste.
Our Fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones

And fenced their gardens with the Redman’s bones;
Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland,
Pilgrims un-houseled by Geneva night,
You planted here the Serpent’s seeds of light;
And here the pivoting searchlights probe to shock
The riotous glass houses built on rock,
And candles gutter in a hall of mirrors,
And light is where the ancient blood of Cain
Is burning, burning the unburied grain.
To return to the problem of how Lowell embedded his early poetry with the sig-
nificance of the psychological, it would be easy to miss how such lines as these can
express the life of the psyche. But if we keep in mind that Lowell’s trope of Cain
functioned in a way to symbolize the stage of the psyche in revolt from society, the
lines may be interpreted as denoting how psychological violence emerges out of cul-
ture. The references to culture in the poem are primarily negations. It is history that
provides the real source of the irony, though. Those escaping religious persecution,
those “pilgrims un-housed by Geneva night,” in turn enacted their own atrocities of
genocide against the Native Americans. The “bread” of life is replaced by the “Red-
man’s bones,” and so generational violence hems in the development of the New
England mind. The psychological in Lowell is left as inseparable from history.
There is also contained in Lowell’s verse a strong parallel to Eliot’s The Waste Land.
The metaphysical distance between Lowell and Eliot indicate aspects in which
they each contributed to high modernism. Lowell’s metaphysical system centered
primarily around the concept of existential revolt; whereas, in Eliot the nature of
time and the memory (as transcendent faculties of the mind) outweigh the human
need to define one’s individuality. It might seem at first a minor point, but the
image of a “rock” repeated so often that it, too, becomes a trope in Lowell’s poetry
provides us with an intersection with Eliot’s metaphysics. The “riotous glass houses
built on rock” are only one example of Lowell’s reliance upon the image of a rock;
it figures throughout his poetry in numerous ways.
Eliot introduces the trope of the rock as an emblem for tradition in The Waste
Land. And throughout the entirety of his poetic career Eliot never exhausts the
trope. It appears time and again, culminating in a most dispassionate way in his
pageant play, The Rock. The substructure of the play reveals Saint Peter and the al-
lusion to Matthew that “upon this rock I will build my church.” Eliot by no means
concentrates upon this allusion singularly. Peter is a foundation for the literality of
the church and the concreteness of tradition; but, he is also the martyred one. In
the play, the violence of the actual historical martyrdom of Peter is effaced by the
purification of time caused by the suffering of Peter. Eliot’s point is that only
within the consciousness of God can this type of effacement occur; but, on the
temporal-spatial plane events and their consequences are irreversible.
In The Waste Land Eliot inaugurates his use of the trope of the rock with refer-
ence to “stony rubbish,” the heap of the modern world’s spiritual waste. The trope
moves into the “shadow under this red rock,” indicating some semblance of spiri-
tual hope or preservation. And finally, the trope ends in a reference to the
ephemeral nature of humanity indicated by the “fear in a handful of dust.”
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at the morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
The stanza exquisitely deals with the concern of mortality. It is important to

note that the lines do not give us an argument for belief in immortality. Eliot’s se-
ries of negations—the dead tree, lack of water, a dry stone, silence pouring forth
from the water’s lack—each confirm that humans do indeed construct their lives
out of their awareness of transience. If we turn to one of Eliot’s sources, recount-
ing the prophet Ezekiel, we find the “rock” is a place of “blood” and warfare, of vi-
olent justice avenged against those who have no knowledge of God. In Ezekiel 24:
6-8 we find the following passage,
Therefore thus says the Lord God:

Woe to the bloody city,
To the poet whose scum is not gone from it!
Bring it out piece by piece,
On which no lot has fallen.
For her blood is in her midst;
She set it on top of a rock:
She did not pour it on the

ground,
To cover it with dust.
That it may raise up fury
and take vengeance,
I have set her blood on top of a
rock,
That it may not be covered.
As a symbol, Eliot uses the symbolism of “the son of man” as a way of expressing
the need for each generation to acknowledge its collective debt to those who came
before it. The rock, its shadow and the redness of that shadow, merge with the
image of the son of man offering an antithesis to mortality.
More importantly, in the passage from Ezekiel we find that the city and the poet
each hold the keys to the responsibility of the bloodshed, though the nature of the
responsibility of each is different. We are told the city (as representative of the col-
lective social order) has brought havoc upon itself; but, it is the poet’s job to act as
a prophet and to offer restoration. It is the poet who is to bring what is left of the
city to a renewed place, but because the city is in ruins the poet must accept the task
to do so “piece by piece.” We are to infer that it will take time to rebuild. Through
the hands of the poet (acting as prophet), time is transformed into a healer. The
height of the rock or even its lowness (whichever way we may choose to envision
the rock) is comparable to the city’s waste. The city may crumble, whereas the rock
will resist all crumbling. Against the rock human despair is broken, and so the poet
must bring the people of the city out of their brokenness. When there is broken-
ness in the heart the process of repair is also carried out only “piece by piece.”
The Waste Land ’s infernal city, London, “under the brown fog of a winter
drawn,” leads us to the Fire Sermon. In Eliot’s Fire Sermon, there the infernal
city has turned back in time away from its structure as a metropolis and away from
its modern trappings. In its place, we are given a picture of an ancient city, not me-
dieval, yet pre-modern. We are to imagine the city in the Fire Sermon as the po-
tential cradle of civilization and as such a birthplace of humanity’s cravings,
containing both its strengths and weaknesses. The city is still London, but this
London has been transported into a realm of time past and the symbols of bro-
kenness become apparent there: “The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of
leaf/Clutch and sink into the wet bank.” This infernal city carries sway until the
final, fifth portion of The Waste Land where we come across once more the trope
of the rock. There in “What the Thunder Said” this trope culminates in the extin-
guishment of individual suffering by recourse to personal enlightenment. First,
the rock is lost and must be found.
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
In the passage from Ezekiel, there is the figure of a woman who takes her condi-
tion of brokenness and that of her city and its people and repositions her thoughts
upon a place of stability, that of the rock. There on the rock the dust and the blood-
shed mingle. In Eliot’s passage from the Fire Sermon, the rock is juxtaposed with
the image of water. In ancient myths, fluids play an important role in the evocation
of change and transformation; there is a lack of water. The rock does not represent
refuge as it will shortly afterward in the Fire Sermon, but instead it signifies there
being no place or source from which the water could spring forth. So in the dry-
ness there is only an echo in the place of stillness.
Much of Eliot’s poetry engages the speculative (and stillness represents this
quality of mind), but here the stillness is empty. The stillness of the place without
the rock and the water does lead to the passages of spiritual development; but, the
rock holds an illusory quality. It seems as though there is no progress and that the
place of dryness is a place of defeat; yet, the place of dryness is merely a season. At
the place of the rock there are no obvious or outward signs to make one believe that
there will be progress. Later in the Fire Sermon we see Eliot demonstrating the
place of enlightenment as a point of stillness. The rock becomes the sign of refuge.
Only the rock gives shelter, solace. Yet, the nature of the refuge is paradoxical. There
is great discomfort; it is not an easy place to rest. There is no nourishment and re-
freshment. It remains a place of no water.
Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

Swear is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
The stanza repeats the earlier set of negations. In addition to attention being drawn
to the lack of water, other elements are central. Fire represents the purgation of the
self when the final spark of the ego is cast out as darkness against a more powerful
and overwhelming light.
The lines give the intimation of a mystical pursuit, but the mystical moment can
be achieved only through the cessation of all thoughts. Eliot’s use of Eastern reli-
gions breaks through in the line, “Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think.” The
rock may be Christ. But if it is, the rock also calls forth the image of a place of men-
tal clarity and absolute certitude wherein doubts have been defeated and illusions
shattered. Collectively in Eastern traditions, there is the belief that when the mind
halts its incessant business of thinking, the mind is able to dislodge itself from the
ego constructions of self. It is at that moment the mind becomes pure conscious-
ness and is able to connect with the larger supra-consciousness of the universe. Just
as all thought is ceased in order to form a union with the universe, so action is re-
nounced. At the point of certainty and mystical union, there is no further need for
action: “Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit.”
Returning to Lowell’s poem, “Christmas in Black Rock” (included in his second
volume, Lord Weary’s Castle) there he highlights certain images of “red,” the “rock,”
and “shadow” that form foundational tropes in The Waste Land.
Christ God’s red shadow hangs upon the wall

The dead leaf ’s echo on these hours
Whose burden spindles to no breath at all;
Hard at our heels the huntress moonlight towers
And the green needles bristle at the glass
Tiers of defense-plants where the treadmills night
Churns up Long Island Sound with piston-fist.
Tonight, my child, the lifeless leaves will mass,
Heaving and heaping, as the swivel-led light
Burns on the bell-spar in the fruitless mist.
Does Lowell’s use of these fundamental tropes—the rock and the red shadow—
signify concerns of mortality, consciousness, mysticism, and transcendence, as they
do in Eliot? Lowell like Eliot focuses upon images of deadness. For Eliot, deadness
is cast by a “dead tree” that “gives no shelter.” With Lowell, we find the similar
image of “the dead leaf ’s echo on these hours.” Lowell’s usage, however, is more
concrete and precise than what we come across in Eliot. Missing from Lowell is the
level of abstraction we come across in Eliot. Thomas Howard in The Night is Far
Spent provides the comment that “there is no such thing as an abstract poem” be-
cause “it does not matter how far into the ether or the psyche we wish to penetrate:
our poem depends entirely upon the success with which we evoke the concrete.”
But the fact is, some poems do operate more abstractly than others. And the test
of determining whether a poem may be rightly called abstract is whether the
poem’s images are intended to transport the reader to a transcendent set of ideas.
Given this, Eliot is an abstract poet in a way that Lowell never is for us. Even when
Lowell takes up religious symbols that could lead in the direction of transcendence,
he deliberately opts out of that transcendence. Lowell flips the value system of
Eliot: in Eliot the concrete leads to a Platonic realm of ideals, but in Lowell ideals
lead us back to a more concrete world.
The Waste Land speaks of the cessation of thought and action, but Lowell’s poem
takes us in a different direction. Lowell’s lines indicate that action can never be re-
linquished due to the fact that history is inescapable, and in an obvious sense his-
tory is built upon the linkages of actions. The “treadmills” at night that “churn up
Long Island Sound with piston-fist” are as weighty in the poem as Christ’s red
shadow. This rather equal weight given to the two images (if in fact it is not the case
that Long Island takes on the greater weight) provides indication that it is the cul-
tural and not the spiritual that more greatly matters for Lowell. Christ’s red
shadow makes no sound. The strong feeling is given off from Lowell’s poem that
just as history cannot be evaded, so the everyday world of social existence is what
compels our immediate attention, and even our long-range attention. Lowell’s pas-
sage forces the question upon us: is the immortal to be found and how can it over-
shadow the finite needs of labor, music, and survival? Evelyn Underhill in Practical
Mysticism has suggested, “Clearly, the abolition of discursive thought is not to ab-
solve you from the obligations of industry.”
In Lowell, pragmatics of life is never abandoned for the project of abstract re-
flection; to do so would be to place the horse before the cart. Whatever else ought
to come out of the mind’s flight toward contemplation of ideal forms, it should be
a practical knowledge of how to live better. If philosophy cannot teach us how to
live our lives in the improvement of self and others, it lacks the wisdom it professes
to teach. For Lowell, the point seems to be that an abstract Christ or an abstract set
of religious rituals becomes meaningless for a world mired in practical needs and a
humanity geared toward practical measurements of action. Death enters surely
when action stops; the second stanza of “Colloquy at Black Rock” conveys the self-
drive toward life as being of greater importance than transcendence. The burlesque
bustle of the lower classes of the Polish night workers drown out the sounds of the
“Christ Child” with their sounds of energetic need to express life. Industrial labor
is linked to the necrophilia of the modern society—it’s death drive toward collec-
tive extinction of the human spirit—but the lower class workers find a way of over-
coming it through the exuberance of sound. There is no meditative silence, here,
linked with Christ. Here in Lowell’s poem, the whole cycle of life and death—its
raucous perpetuation—is the meaning of the Christ event.
Christ Child, your lips are lean and evergreen

Tonight in Black Rock, and the moon
Sidles outside into the needle-screen
And strikes the hand that feeds you with a spoon
Tonight, as drunken Polish night-shifts walk
Over the causeway and their juke-box booms
Hosannah in excelsis Domino.
Tonight, my child, the foot-loose hallows stalk
Us down in the blind alleys of our rooms;
By the mined root the leaves will overflow.
Lowell concentrates so heavily upon the concrete that the image of Christ be-
comes fused with the other images of the environment. Christ does not stand
apart or radiate beyond the pale of the social, but instead takes on the appearance
of the surroundings. Christ is “evergreen” but also incarnate in the unlikely, in the
Polish night-shift walkers. In the third and final stanza, Christ and time become
one. But the nature of time is cruel, unkind and far from the heavenly. Lowell’s
image of time is bitter and harkens us back to an earlier stage of the earth’s exis-
tence, an age of ice wherein the human race meant very little. New England’s
Black Rock shore frozen over in the December pangs of ravaging cold seems a tri-
fle bit unwelcoming to usher in the baby Christ. Humankind’s concerns are those
of survival and fear, anxiety and persecution. These are the remnants of the human
psyche, primal and almost animalistic that meet and intersect with the Christ
event in the poem.
December, old leech, has leafed through Autumn’s store

Where Poland has unleashed its dogs
To bay the moon upon the Black Rock shore:
Under our windows, on the rotten logs
The moonbeam, bobbing like an apple, snags
The undertow. O Christ, the spiraling years
Slither with child and manger to a ball
Of ice; and what is man? We tear our rags

To hand the Furies by their itching ears,
And the green needles nails us to the wall.
Like Eliot’s Prufrock, the failed prophet and communicator wants to have
“squeezed the universe into a ball/To roll it toward an overwhelming question,” so
Lowell’s Christ is a picture of time rolled into this ball. And similar to Eliot, Low-
ell reworks the old question, what is man? With Lowell, Christ is submerged into
the ancient past so that the spring of rejuvenation is a hope that destroys us rather
than a reality that makes us. We are shut in by the green.
The counterpart to “Christmas at Black Rock” is Lowell’s “Colloquy in Black
Rock.” It is a rare moment that we come across the mystical in Lowell, whereas in
Eliot we are frequently treading upon the mystical. Yet, the last stanza of “Collo-
quy in Black Rock” bears out in the image of the kingfisher a degree of immanence
rare in Lowell’s poetry.
Christ walks on the black water. In Black Mud

Darts the kingfisher. On Corpus Christi, heart,
Over the drum-beat of St. Stephen’s choir
I hear him, Stupor Mundi, and the mud
Flies from his hunching wings and beak—my heart,
The blue kingfisher dives on you in fire.
In Eliot’s landscape sketch, “Cape Ann,” the quickness with which spiritual en-
lightenment may come merges with an ecstatic vision of nature. And Eliot’s lan-
guage of the “dance,” an image that pervades Four Quartets, links the cycle of
birth-death-rebirth with that of the patterning of the mendicant’s ascent-descent-
ascent toward God.
O quick quick quick, quick hear the song-sparrow,

Swamp-sparrow, fox-sparrow, vesper-sparro
At dawn and dusk. Follow the dance
Of the goldfinch at noon. Leave to chance
The Blackburnian warbler, the shy one. Hail
With shrill whistle the note of the quail, the bob-white
Dodging by bay-bush. Follow the feet
Of the walker, the water-thrush. Follow the flight
Of the dancing arrow, the purple martin. Greet
In silence the bullbat. All are delectable. Sweet sweet sweet
But resign this land at the end, resign it
To its true owner, the tough one, the sea-gull.

The palaver is finished.
Here, region and place, emblems of humanity’s rootedness in time, become means
of reaching an aporia of God. Language fails as communication is made complete
once the totality of a vision of God is achieved—so, the “palaver,” or noisy chatter
of the day and circumstance “is finished,” in a way that recalls Christ giving up the
ghost. In Eliot’s Four Quartets, the culmination of the spiritual quest is the purga-
tion of all desires, actions, ego, and self. The image of God given at the end of “Burnt
Norton” is that of a God who burns away with fire the negative ways of the self:
“When the tongues of flame are in-folded/Into the crowned knot of fire/And the
fire and the rose are one.” The sentiment echoes Rilke in The Book of Monastic Life,
I love you more than the flame

that limits the world
to the circle it illumines
and excludes all the rest.
In Rilke we see that love and flame become limits of reason, and so it is that the
language of metaphor surrounds the conception of God so that the world is said to
be circumscribed by a divine, cleansing fire.
But there is another similarity between “Burnt Norton” and Lowell’s passage. At
the beginning of part IV of “Burnt Norton,” there we find an image of descent,
important to the path of mystical knowledge.
The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
In Lowell’s passage, the descent is accomplished by the blue kingfisher that

launches into the mud. Just as the dove is an important symbol in Eliot, the blue
kingfisher holds a unique distinction in Lowell’s poem. In order to grasp fully the
concreteness, it is helpful to consider the habits of the actual bird. If a person is
lucky enough to behold a blue kingfisher, it is a magnificent sight. There is a grace
and poise to the bird’s shape, but it is the movement of the bird that catches the
eye. The pattern of the blue kingfisher’s movement is brisk and attentive as it
swoops down with its beak to catch its prey of fish. It is a water bird and so Lowell’s
choice of it as a symbol evokes the concept of place, to location, even as the symbol
is used to signify a mystical descent of the mind.
In the last line of Lowell’s poem, the blue kingfisher “dives on” the speaker’s
“heart” so that the poem crescendos to a point of ecstatic reflection. A blue king-
fisher, after it has swooned over a body of water searching for what it might catch
for the day, will zero in on its prey by bending its body into an arc. We should
imagine the bird’s body bent into an arc with its wings extended both backward
and upward. The image of the kingfisher as a figural representation of the mysti-
cal appears in both Lowell and Eliot. In “Burnt Norton,” the kingfisher follows a
list of associations connected to nature—the sunflower, the clematis, the tendril,
and the spray.
The passage below opens with clear and obvious indicators of the mendicant’s
path—the time and the bell. These symbols from “Burnt Norton” are opposites of
one another, though, and should be understood as divergent ways of achieving an
ascent toward God. Time is a boundary, a means of hemming in reality and expe-
rience. To step outside of time is remit the need for boundaries and categories.
Epistemology or knowledge in the general sense requires processes of blocking off
experience, chalking it into compartments of the mind. The bell signifies more than
the Church or a religious path toward ascent. There is the implication of what the
bell produces; literally—sound! The distractions of aural input, inescapable in the
modern world, are confining and register meanings in the mind so as to stir the
senses and drive the faculties of the mind toward recognition and activity.
If it were possible to stop all sounds, what would we be left with? Eliot’s answer
is that beneath the aural we can recover degrees of contemplative silence.
The concept that the poem lays forth is not that different from what James H.
Leuba in The Psychology of Christian Mysticism describes—in his discussion of one
particular variety of Christian mysticism known as quietism, the goal becomes reach-
ing “moral perfection through passivity.” He notes for many a historical mystic, “the
superior method of communication in silence.” The terminology, however, is mislead-
ing. Passivity when taken in the context of mysticism does not entail simple inactiv-
ity, but a manifestation of surrender. It seems oxymoronic—how does the surrender
of one’s will also constitute a manifestation? The confusion arises when the will is
conflated with volition or acting as a responsible, ethical agent in the world.
To follow Eliot’s imagery, there must be a confrontation of the self by transcen-
dent truth; the divine must interrupt and shake off the layers of thought and mem-
ory the mind has built over time. When this happens the self becomes like a snake
sloughing its own skin; although, the metaphor is more appropriate to Lowell’s vi-
olent mystical imagery. But if we turn to the following passage in “Burnt Norton,”
there Eliot presents the path of the poet as a longing for quietude.
Time and bell have buried the day,

The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
The still point of the turning world.
The clematis, a climbing vine, with its offshoots, its spray and tendril, its rather sin-
gular flowering, speak to the desire for a bending to occur, but begs the question
what is it that is to bend? The poet’s question is a reflection of what he believes to
be the soul’s desire for a force outside of itself to break in and intersect the mind’s
conceptualizations of reality.
The imagery in the passage conveys this desire in terms of nature, but the idea of
an external physicality reaching from the outside of the poet’s very being and twin-
ing itself around the soul likely points to something beyond literal nature. For Eliot,
only that which is God can bend toward humanity, nothing else in our experiences
of the external world hold the capacity. Meister Eckhart once described the way the
pursuant finds God as completely internally driven: “Wherein lies this true divine
possession, this real God-getting? This real God-getting is a mental process, an
inner turning of the mind and will towards God, not in one fixed and definite idea.”
Furthermore, “it would be impossible for nature to hold it in the mind or at least ex-
tremely difficult . . .” This is what occurs at the level of Eliot’s imagery—nature is
rendered “incapable” and insufficient of reflecting God. We might surmise the con-
stant decay, rotting, eroding, washing away, birth, death, and rebirth of nature be-
come inadequate symbols to point toward the fullness of the mystical experience.
Born out of a phase of mystical practice, “spiritual death,” in which “a gradual death
of the natural man” occurs, allowing “what was abhorrent” to become “no longer
painful.” Only the self—mind or soul—can reflect such abundance.
In the passage from “Burnt Norton,” the soul is perched on the threshold of as-
cent; but, without having accomplished it, the soul is stalled and so it feels the cold-
ness, reminiscent of death’s shadow. The poet must pass through the valley of the
shadow of death. But it is only that, a shadow, and not death itself. Therefore, the
passing moves the poet into the valley of a second shadow, the shadow of God, and
it is through these two valleys combined that the poet must travel. The valley of the
shadow of death is that of nature itself, but also that of the will and the mind’s at-
tachment to nature. The shadow of God is more frightening, though, for it
produces the “dark night of the soul”; for, it is in the presence of the divine that the
self ’s will is swallowed up.
Lowell’s mysticism realizes this dimension as well. Lowell even explicitly uses the
imagery of being “swallowed up.” This process in mysticism has been described this
way: “The mystics have frequently written as if the elimination or the limitation of
the egoistic tendencies was merely a condition of drawing near to God in order to
enjoy divine union.” It is this loss of ego that produces a psychical death experience.
In Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” the poet finds hope but not in the sunflower and the
clematis—each of these have their own winding path leading upward, but not up
far enough. The hope comes in the pattern and movement of the kingfisher—its
upward and downward swoops are like the poet’s attempts. The poet’s path is
marked by advances, then setbacks, a fluttering toward God. Underhill in her work
Practical Mysticism has conjectured, “The conscious love which achieves this vision
[of mysticism] may, indeed must, fluctuate.”
With the recognition that the mystical journey is anything but straightforward,
the poet sees for himself the purpose of his quest. It is to find the “still point of the
turning world.” Even when the poet remains on the mystical path, the world turns.
There is a concept long held within the collective history of Christian mysticism
that the one who pursues a mystical knowledge of God can only achieve this form
of higher thought by uniting the self with the mind of God, and that to do so re-
quires an emptying of the self. The metaphor often used to illustrate the point is
that of a vessel—the self is a vessel that must be emptied of one substance in order
to be filled with another.
If we compare the nature of the fire imagery in Lowell to that of the second
stanza of part IV of “Burnt Norton,” we encounter in both poets a movement to-
ward the heart of God or love (perhaps Love in an abstract sense, as a form) likened
to encountering fire. In Lowell, this divine fire is associated with the martyrdom of
Stephen, whereas in Eliot the connection is carried out with the concept of God as
a consumptive entity. Lowell’s “Colloquy at Black Rock” reveals the mystical path
to be quick, rapid, to come through small but important and fast encounters and to
be inseparable from an awareness of place and location; but, too in Lowell there is
his standard reminder that there is a violence that stands behind all of nature.
Meister Eckhart in his description of God’s grace said of it: “Grace does not de-
stroy nature, it consummates it.” Lowell’s imagery, however, in this one sense moves
against the grain of the Christian tradition of mysticism.
Of course, it is not the first instance of fire being associated with the divine in
Lowell. As already noted, in the image of Mary in part IV of “Death by Cancer”
she is given an instruction: “Your scorched, blue thunderbreasts of love to
pour/Buckets of blessings on my burning head.” Mary is given the classical power
of Zeus and his thunderbolts; but, her function in theology has always been that of
representing agape, divine love, along with a very particular kind of human com-
passion, that of a mother’s love and the love for the suffering and weak. In Lowell,
fire is linked with the speaker and not with Mary. It is in fact she who must quench
the fire. And so, further connotations of passion and desire associated with burn-
ing and fire are evoked, to the effect that the mystical path is left incomplete. With
Eliot, however, we come more directly in contact with the mendicant’s path, the
“intolerable shirt of flame,” so that the saint is not a martyr but a seeker.
Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
If taken too literally, it can be an appalling image. Even at the level at which it
was intended to be read, that of metaphor, there is no comfort in this representa-
tion of divine power, just as there was no comfort to be found in Eliot’s trope of the
rock. And yet, Meister Eckhart referred to God’s love as fire: “What is divine order
but divine power and from both of them springs love which is ardour and wisdom
and truth and power. For love is burning in the realm of essence: transcendental,
actual being, free from nature. It is its nature to be natureless.” “Burnt Norton”
moves in a direction away from nature—it extrapolates from nature a set of ab-
stractions, but leaves even those behind.
By contrast, Lowell in “The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket” depicts God as
“expressionless,” but he does not attempt to make nature natureless. In fact, Lowell’s
imagery transgresses the desire to enter into a non-phenomenal world and turns the mys-
tical path upside down and on its head. He essentially reverses the mystical order.
There once the penitents took off their shoes

And then walked barefoot the remaining mile;
And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows file
Slowly along the munching English lane,
Like cows to an old shrine, until you lose
Track of your dragging pain.
The stream flows down under the druid tree,
Shiloah’s whirlpools gurgle and make glad
The castle of God. Sailor, you were glad
And whistled Sion by that stream. But see:
The masochism inherent is obvious enough. Underlying the pilgrim’s march is a

manifestation of collective social guilt. The need to participate in collective rituals
can be a positive or a negative, but if conceived negatively this component of human
behavior is grounded in the psyche’s propensity to gravitate toward totalizing and
authoritative ideologies. The mind’s connection between finding systems of belief
that will safeguard the psyche in the modern world from encountering at the indi-
vidual level the angst accompanying the disintegration of social bonds and collec-
tivity is expressed in Lowell’s passage by the pilgrim’s “cow-like” conformity to
religious ritual. The pilgrim’s pain is a form of melancholia, a symptom and an ex-
istential condition of modern experience. Victor Frankl in The Doctor and the Soul
explains the relationship between melancholia and anxiety as rooted in repressed
feelings of guilt—“melancholic experience itself comes about as the result of the
interplay between the human and the morbid elements in the human being.” Fur-
thermore he describes, “true human melancholia with its characteristic guilt feel-
ings, self-reproaches, and self-accusations would be inconceivable in an animal.”
I offer for a brief comparison to Lowell, Rilke’s vivid imagery of renunciation
and the mystical process. In The Book of a Monastic Life, Rilke offers the following,
a kind of hymn dedicated to the unfathomable incommensurability that lay be-
tween God’s abstract nature and humanity’s concrete one.
I have hymns you haven’t heard
There is an upward soaring

in which I bend close
You can barely distinguish me
from the things that kneel before me.
They are like sheep, they are grazing.

I am the shepherd on the brow of the hill.
When evening draws them home
I follow after, the dark bridge thudding,
and the vapor rising from their backs

hides my own homecoming.
In Rilke’s poem, what we have is the tradition conception of the mystical path. There
is the imagery of a flight pattern, ascent, through which the seeker finds unification
with God. The presence of God is drawn through the images typical to basic Chris-
tian metaphors—sheep and home. The sway of God’s presence—the darkness and
light of God, representing the bringing together into a monastic whole all binaries
and extremes—is likened to a ghostlike steam streaming off the mendicant’s self-

punished backs. The word “rising” is very important to Rilke’s metaphors. God rises,
ghosts rise, angels rise, the spirit rises, and the sun rises. Here, the sun has already
set—it is after dark—but the seeker’s mind is in descent away from God but the
sheeplike condition of God’s people will bring the mind back around to its ascent.
It is the spiral up that should be sought; but, many mistake the mystical path for one
of self-persecution. Rilke’s image of the turned backs conjures associations of self-
mortification (often performed and accomplished by the flogging of one’s own
back). As Rilke indicates, masochism does not lead one to God, but only hides God.
In Lowell’s poem, we have the shoeless pilgrims who have made their way to
the holy shrine of Norfolk, England, in Walsingham, who have become like
“cows,” not sheep, unreflective and stodgy, slow, and uncritical of their own pain.
Their movement is the opposite of the quick, rapid progress of the soul’s ascent of
enlightenment.
Slowly along the munching English lane,

Like cows to an old shrine, until you lose
Track of your dragging pain.
The shrine is a vessel, ancient and seedy, earth-worn, but restored; still, it conveys a
pre-Christian religious order. The rites of nature worship, of animism, and pagan
spirituality overshadow the remembrances of Christ, as it is not the Cross but the
“druid tree” that becomes the center of the pilgrim’s attention, though unknow-
ingly so. What the pilgrims are not aware of is their own psychological vestiges of
a time past, vegetation rituals, and death-drives. The “druid tree” becomes the
source of the river of life, as it stands by the sea’s edge.
To appreciate the depth of just how Lowell is able to reverse the mystical
process, consider a point made by David Baumgardt about the history of mystical
practice. In his series of lectures, the subject of which was later published in Great
Western Mystics (1955), he refers to Miester Eckhardt’s writings as expressions of a
“mysticism of inwardness,” stemming from the Medieval and Renaissance eras of
Christianity. He says of Eckhardt that there we encounter the “idea of several
stages of the inner mystical life, the idea of a spiritual ladder, a scale, a moral and
intellectual stairway which man has to climb in the ripening of his mystical expe-
rience.” Baumgardt goes on to say, “There are overtones in Eckhart’s appeals to de-
tachment which speak a completely different language.” Recontextualizing
Baumgardt’s observation in order to shed light upon Eliot and Lowell, “Burnt
Norton” fits well the traditional Western paradigm that the mystical path is an
“intellectual stairway.” Lowell, on the other hand, uses imagery that negates this
“stairway.” It is not a climb up, as it is in Eliot, but a trajectory across that Lowell’s
poems envision. In the majority of instances that Lowell incorporates imagery re-
lated to mysticism, he chooses the mendicant as his example.
Eliot’s Anglicanism, though riddled with formal observances, placed a greater
emphasis upon an intellectual recognition of God, linking the spirit of “man” with
the spirit of God. Lowell’s somewhat failed project of converting to Catholicism,
however, most likely leads him to conceive of mysticism as an incarnation rather
than as a conceptual idea. Popular versions of Catholic practice, alive with their
pomp and spectacle, are what we find in Lowell’s poems. And yet, Lowell read
more Jonathan Edwards (even attempted to write a biography of him) than Ori-
gen. Whatever the sources, Lowell visualizes God more than he celebrates God,
and it is certainly not the cerebral God of Eliot we encounter in Lowell’s depiction
of the Lady of Walsingham.
The actual, historical shrine of the Lady of Walsingham was erected in the
eleventh century at the commission of a widow, Richeldis de Faerches. As the leg-
end has it, the widow prayed earnestly to Mary asking for a way that she might
honor her. The ‘answer’ the widow received was to go and make a pilgrim to
Nazareth. Once there after visiting the presumed ‘home’ of Jesus’ childhood she
learned that it was Mary that instructed her to return to England and build a
replica of the home. The shrine’s significance is presumably its expression of famil-
ial agape, as well as becoming a site of the miraculous; but, in Lowell’s poem this
supernatural component surrounding the history of the shrine is radically under-
mined by a strong sense of the skeptical and the ironic.
In Lowell’s passage, the pilgrims have walked the expected mile around the
Church at Walsingham. As the poem progresses, the extremity of the pilgrims’ con-
dition is realized through the desire that they hold within themselves to eradicate
emotional suffering. There have been mendicants throughout history who have be-
come so absorbed and taken in by the very procedures of mystical pursuit that they
have ignored their basic bodily needs to the point of detriment. As the scholar of
mysticism has put it, “They are, indeed, clearly enough aware of some need, of
something lacking; but what it is, they know not—not even when they call it love.”
Mistakenly some mendicants have confused their infliction of self-punishment
with God’s love, or perhaps even worse, with love in general. Lowell’s pilgrims psy-
chologically become displaced by their own internal drives toward masochism.
Seeking to overcome their emotional and psychical suffering, Lowell’s pilgrims have
created additional suffering. They are trapped inside their own need to suffer. Low-
ell progresses from a series of abstractions that remain rooted in the physicality of
Mary to the poem’s culmination of apocalyptic images of carnal death.
Our Lady, too small for her canopy,

Sits near the altar. There’s no comeliness
At all or charm in that expressionless

Face with its heavy eyelids. As before,
This face, for centuries a memory,
Non est species, neque décor,
Expressionless, expresses God: it goes
Past castled Sion. She knows what God knows,
Not Calvary’s Cross nor crib at Bethlehem
Now, and the world shall to Walsingham.
As the scholar Leuba explains, mysticism tends to guide the individual into believ-
ing “every scene [is part of a] divinely guided drama.” This provides mysticism with
a characteristic of performance. In Lowell, the same principle applies to the pilgrims
of Walsingham. In Lowell’s poem, the internal drama of the mind merges into a
bodily, physical drama, one that offers reverence for a bodily Christ, and yet Mary is
made co-eternal with God’s knowledge. In Lowell’s poem, it is she who has reached
the mystical level of ascent; it is Mary who is motionless at the still point before God.
Meister Eckhart described the logos as connected to the memory and to the re-
flection of divine form, beauty, and intelligence in mirroring of the mystic.
See, God is in all things, therefore God is also in thy memory; and when
the soul in her understanding gives birth to the image of God, as it lies in
her memory, then God is the word of thy soul, and when this word pro-
ceeds into the will it becomes love therein. Thus God Father is in thy mem-
ory and God Word in thy intellect and God Spirit in thy love, though but
one God.
Lowell’s description of Mary who is sits “expressionless” but, nonetheless, “ex-

presses God” places her within the context of having reached the height of mysti-
cal pursuit. Her face has become the exact rendition of spirit, which by definition
cannot hold human attributes without becoming incarnate. It is not so much that
Mary is made into an incarnation of God, but that she is the perfect earthly re-
flection of the emptiness of God—a pure absence of the physical. It is the feminine
and not the masculine Lowell reveals, just as in Life Studies it is his mother and not
his father that he chooses to use for a basis of self-identification. Ultimately, Mary
is projected psychologically in the poem as the perfect embodiment of Platonic
form, an incarnation of the principle of the aesthetic.
The role of Mary’s relationship to the story of the Gospel drama has long been
debated. John de Satge in Mary and the Christian Doctrine observed, though, “It is
significant that Mary was named among those devoting themselves to prayer.”
What little is mentioned of her in the Synoptic Gospels gives the impression that
she is submissive. But it is a particular type of submissiveness, that which comes

through the sacrifice of selfish interests that become sanctified into selfless love
through the act of prayer. Satge went on to add, “Just as mother does not end when
the child is born, so the mother through whom the Christ was born was not shed
at his maturity as a spent rocket is shed from a spacecraft.” And as Satge places her,
she is “The mother through whom the more-than-davidic king had been born had
become the disciple within the Kingdom.” Thus, Mary too, would share in the Da-
vidic line of descent. But Lowell’s Mary is not necessarily the Queen of the Davidic
line; or, if she is, it remains a neutral or subordinate point. Rather, in Lowell’s poem
Mary is a figural representation; she is also goddess of the sea, a divine manifesta-
tion of nature—she is the medieval Stella Maris. Like the Pynson Ballad, stanza 14,
which Lowell may or may not have deliberately meant as an allusion, Mary is given
a universality by virtue of her protection over the seas.
And syth here Our Lady hath shewyd many myracle

Innumerable, nowe here for to expresse
To suche as visyte thys hir habitable.
Ever lyke newe to them that call hir in dystresse.
Foure hundreth yere and more the cronacle to witnes
Hath endured this notable pylgrymage,
Where grace is dayly shewyd to men of every age (128).
In Pynson’s Ballad, Mary is equated with universality—she is of every age, timeless,

eternal.
Lowell’s image of Mary also intersects with that of Eliot’s depiction if we con-
sider Eliot’s poem, “Marina.”
This form, this face, this life

Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.
What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers

And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter.
The softening of the language from Mother, articulated more harshly in the poem,
to the possessive of “My daughter” signifies a shift in perception. The closer the
poet comes to achieving a vision of God the more the poet must accept the femi-
nine as a divine presence.
As in Lowell’s poem, it is the face of Mary that is concentrated upon. Or as

Eliot says in “Coriolan,”
Mother
May we not be some time, almost now, together,
If the mactations, immolations, oblations, impetrations,
Are now observed
May we not be
O hidden
Hidden in the stillness of noon, in the silent croaking night.
Or to say it more succinctly as Eliot does at the end of “Coriolan,”
O mother
What shall I cry?
Although Lowell chooses the pilgrim rather than the mendicant as his focal point,
what he describes in the section of “The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket,” in “As
a Plane Tree by the Water” is not unlike what Meister Eckhart described as the
“disappearance” of God. Eckhart put it this way,
This God does not disappear unless we turn our back on him of our own ac-
cord. He who has God thus, in reality, has gotten God divinely, to him he is
apparent in all things, everything smacks to him of God, everywhere God’s
image stares him in the face. God is gleaming in him all the time; in him
there is riddance and return, the vision of his God ever present to his mind.
The disappearance of God is caused by the mind. Lowell writes in the poem, “As
a Plane Tree by the Water,”
Darkness has called to darkness, and disgrace

Elbows about our windows in this planned
Babel of Boston where our money talks
And multiples the darkness of a land
Of preparation where the Virgin walks
And roses spiral her enameled face
Or fall to splinters on unwatered streets.
Our lady of Babylon, go by, go by,
I was once the apple of your eye;
Flies, flies are on the plane tree, on the streets.
The opposite of true mystical ascent is described here. The world still exists. There
are flies and flies. The streets are inescapable. And, so the implication is that
nothing or very little has been overcome. Mysticism has been called a way of
making the baser parts of the human animal disappear. However, in Lowell’s “As
a Plane Tree Planted by the Water” there is no such newness created within the
human spirit.
In Lowell’s poem, the world is to attract the buzz of flies, tiny vultures, of death’s
recognition. It is the world itself—social and natural—that is confronted. Meister
Eckhart’s belief that “God is not the destroyer of nature, he is the perfecter of it” is
so prevalent in the tradition of mysticism; yet, in Lowell’s mysticism imperfection
of nature is what is focused upon. There is no perfect work in Lowell’s depiction of
nature. In fact, nature in Lowell is described as the site of error, transgression, fault,
offense, punishment, crime.
The third stanza of “As a Plane Tree Planted by the Water” gives us Lowell’s vi-
sion of the mystical as apocalyptic and nihilistic. But it is also thoroughly modern
as it draws heavily from Baudelaire’s “Une Charogne” or “A Carcass.” Here is Low-
ell’s third stanza,
Flies strike the miraculous waters of the iced

Atlantic and the eyes of Bernadette
Who saw Our Lady standing in the cave
At Massabieille, saw her so squarely that
Her vision put out reason’s eyes. The grave
Is open-mouthed and swallowed up Christ.
O walls of Jericho! And all the streets
To our Atlantic wall are singing: “Sing,
Sing for the resurrection for the King.”
Flies, flies are on the plane tree, on the streets.
Mary as a linguistic signifier leads metonymically to Christ. But Lowell undercuts

the announcement of the Immaculate Conception (associated with Massabieille
and the cave of Lourdes, the site of Mary’s visitations) through the chain of signi-
fiers that lead by the end of the stanza to a concretized image of swarms of flies
apocalyptically assaulting the plane tree. The tree of life becomes the tree of death,
and nature becomes the enemy of God’s work (or an expression of God’s enmity
with a sinful humanity) rather than revelatory of grace. The idea is reminiscent of
Baudelaire’s “A Carcass,” wherein the poet speaks of the “blow-flies” that “were
buzzing rough that putrid belly” of a woman’s body (the feminine, here, is an ex-
tended metaphor of the physicality of nature depicted as human body and human
form). In Baudelaire we find,
Then, O my beauty! say to the worms who will

Devour you with kisses,
That I have kept the form and the divine essence
Of my decomposed love!
Lowell’s exploration of the mystical brings up around to degraded forms—the

Platonic ideal that Mary signifies in her “expressionless face” that “expresses God” is
lost as the poem turns itself around to face the natural world. Mary’s truth of eter-
nal form is unmasked in the poem as a lie, confirmed by nature’s rituals of bringing
forth life only in order to in turn usher in death. Rilke put the problem of death
more beautifully than Baudelaire (or Lowell) ever could,
What will you do God, when I die?

I am your pitcher (when I shatter?)
I am your drink (when I go bitter?)
I, your garment; I your craft.
Without me, what reason have you?
Rilke asks why God would have made creation as an imperfect reflection, but he
circumscribes the question within the context of the mystical assertion that hu-
manity and nature may be emptied out in order to be filled with divine presence.
Lowell creates a variation of this question by rhetorically presenting an image of a
humanity that seeks transcendence—attempts to reach that which it believes itself
to reflect—only to find out in the end that there is only the imperfect reflection of
humanity mirrored in one another.
Contrasting powerfully to Eliot’s handling of myth and tradition, Lowell’s ex-
ploration of religious and historical symbolism deconstructs without attempting
to offer an alternative worldview. There is no new wine to pour into the old wine
skins of tradition, and this is part of the violent anguish Lowell’s poems bear out.
The old is left sagging and torn, tradition a thing to be revisited continuously but
only ironically, and so the early poems of Lowell engage in a peculiar semantic task.
Typical of formalist style, Lowell’s early poems are closed circuits of meaning.
Oddly, Lowell is able to deconstruct the use of religious symbols without opening
up the closed circuit of the formal aspects the poems proclaim. It is Lowell’s
supreme role as an ironist that allows him the success of this feat.
chapter five
Afflictions and Leviathans
Fear death by water.

—T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
The great enigma of human life is not suffering but affliction.

—Simone Weil
And the Leviathan breaks water in the rice.

—Robert Lowell, “The Crucifix”
She drove in the dark to leeward,

She struck—not a reef or a rock
But the combs of a smother of sand: night drew her
Dead to the Kentish Knock;
And she beat the bank down with her bows and the ride of her
keel:
The breakers rolled on her beam with ruinous shock;
And canvas and compass, the whorl and the wheel
Idle for ever to waft her or wind her with, these she endured.
—Gerald Manley Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland (1918)
AFFLICTIONS AND LEVIATHANS | 97
Lowell’s fisherman, farmers, suffering Quakers, and holy innocents are in good
company with Raymond Carver, Graham Greene, William Faulkner, and Flan-
nery O’Connor’s spectrum of the psychologically isolated and spiritually deranged.
Almost all the New Englanders are misanthropes, malcontents, and spiritually
maimed. They are psychically diseased, possessing malformed wills and diseased
souls. The characters that populate Lowell’s poetry share in common an existential
condition of affliction.
Lowell’s relationship to Catholicism is similar to the southern writer, Flannery
O’Connor’s, anomalous and confounding relationship to faith. An oddity shared by
Lowell and Flannery O’Connor is the belief that faith could be violently demon-
strated in literature, even sadistically so. O’Connor believed that a brutal aesthetics
of faith could awaken an anesthetized society, dull to the very question of God. As
Flannery O’Connor argued in Mystery and Manners, a society that holds violence
and greed as its gods can only recognize a faith that is likewise violent. O’Connor’s
argument was that peculiar to “modern man who recognizes a divine being not him-
self.” Such a person “wanders about, caught in a maze of guilt he can’t identify, try-
ing to reach a God powerless to approach him.” In O’Connor’s argument, the
modern psyche is defined by an inability to understand the concept of God. The
problem is far from simple. Because the modern psyche cannot grasp the meaning
that lay behind the concept of God, the individual’s psyche is incapable of seeing
within itself any reflection of the divine. It is a particular type of chasm between
humanity and God that O’Connor strove to depict in her fiction. The gulf between
humanity and God is primarily unilateral. For although God moves in the direction
of seeking the company of humanity, humanity does not necessarily move in the di-
rection of seeking God. Thus, in O’Connor’s fiction we find that God, in order to
reach humanity, must violently disrupt the pedestrian qualities of life. On a theo-
logical level, O’Connor’s use of a violent aesthetic to raise spiritual questions seems
a bit spurious. Yet, her point remains typical of many a modernist perspective.
The modern psyche’s inability to recognize its likeness to the divine is a point
that Lowell labors to make in Land of Unlikeness. The epitaph Lowell affixed to the
volume was a quote from Saint Bernard: Inde Anima Dissimilis Deo Inde Dissimilis
Est Et Sibi: when the soul has lost its likeness to God it is no longer like itself.
While O’Connor attempted to solve the problem of the modern psyche’s dissimil-
itude to the divine by positing that God could act violently to a violent world in
order to shake that world out of its slumber and reawaken it to an awareness of
transcendent forces, on the other hand in Lowell’s poems we do not necessarily en-
counter a concept of a violent God. Rather in Lowell’s poems, we discover society’s
violence. The dissimilitude between society and God occurs at the level at which
humanity has forgotten its divine characteristics—love, mercy, compassion, for-
giveness, helpfulness.
But there is a greater dimension than this to Lowell’s handling of the dissimil-
itude of the self ’s likeness to God, that of the theological problem of affliction. The
concept of affliction that Lowell worked into his poetry is certainly, and perhaps
even rather obviously, traceable to Puritanism. Given that so much of Lowell’s im-
agery centers upon a retelling of New England’s Puritan past, it is helpful to con-
sider a historical example of the Puritan belief in affliction.
The view that the elect of God should suffer affliction is exemplified in the Au-
tobiography of the sixteenth century Puritan Thomas Shepard (1605–1649). Shep-
ard’s Autobiography is a layered text. It is partly a travel narrative, as it is a chronicle
of Shepard’s sea voyage to New England. Like the Homeric use of sea travel as
mythical expression of national identity, New England writers would establish a
long history beginning with Shepard’s Autobiography of appropriating the sea as
metaphor for the ways in which self-consciousness can shape-shift into narratives
of cultural consciousness. Lowell picks up on this technique of appropriating the
sea as metaphor to construct a narrative of cultural consciousness in poems such as
“The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” and “The Drunken Fisherman.”
In addition to being a travel narrative, Shepard’s Autobiography depicts a provi-
dential vision of God as a stern hand. The events of travel and the political perse-
cution that Shepard experienced are made to conform in the text to the view that
what has been suffered is the result of God’s justice. Thomas Shepard was born in
Towcester, Northamptonshire, and educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
His advocacy of Puritan theology attracted the dangerous attention of the
Archibishop William Laud, and so Shepard set out to leave his native England.
Shepard’s Autobiography chronicles his escape from England and his first encounter
with Massachusetts, measuring all the while the temperament, disposition, and ori-
entation of a man who would conceive of his travels as the affliction of God upon
him. Shepard’s influence upon the American Puritan mindset cannot be overesti-
mated. In fact, Shepard’s Autobiography and in his second work, a spiritual Journal,
gave way to the second generation or second theological wave of American Puri-
tans. Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), Jonathan Edwards’s God
Glorified—in Man’s Dependence (1731) and Edwards’ The Distinguishing Marks of a
Work of the Spirit of God (1741) each bear the mark of Shepard’s worldview.
It is difficult as a reader to completely empathize with Shepard’s worldview that
the affliction of God is a sign of God’s favor. For Shepard, suffering and favor ac-
company one another within the schema of providential will. G. Thomas Causer in
American Autobiography notes that Shepard “in exploring the significance of his
own life tended to fashion it into a myth representing and interpreting the experi-
ence of his whole generation.” There is also an important confessional element in
Shepard’s Autobiography. Shepard addresses the narrative to his surviving son. The
apostrophe that occurs in the narrative is not directed toward God, as one might
expect in a spiritual autobiography, but rather it is the father-son relationship that

presents itself as the dominant reason why Shepard tells the story of his travails.
Shepard’s story is marked by tragedies. When the narrative opens a winter storm
causes Shepard and his wife to be delayed in their journey out of England. Delayed
at Yarmouth, he experiences death within his family. As Shepard tells of his wife’s
infirmity and of the death of his first born son, he describes the circumstances as
the consequence of his own misdeeds toward God. While Shepard grieves the loss
of his child, he interprets the event as he interprets all the events accounted for
within the text, as signs of God’s affliction.
Since there was no literal misdeed, Shepard believes himself to have committed
a sin of the heart. As Shepard explains the concept of affliction, it is a scourge
brought by the hand of God to smite the soul. He describes affliction as the process
of “the Lord showing his dreadful power toward us.” But this terror is offset by “yet
his unspeakable rich mercy to us who in depths of mercy heard, nay helped, us
where we could not cry through the disconsolate fears we had out of these depths
of seas and miseries.” If Shepard’s statement appears contradictory, it is. The reader
of Shepard’s Autobiography might be tempted to ask what kind of soul requires such
miseries. Yet, Shepard does not interpret his concept of affliction as problematic.
He conceives of affliction as a sign of God’s grace visited upon the elect. As Shep-
ard devises the concept in the Autobiography, God uses affliction to bring a wan-
derer back into the fold and to return him to a place of humility.
For example, when Shepard writes of the death of his first born son it is clear
that Shepard regards himself as the cause of his son’s death. The passage demon-
strates what would later become a standard formula in Puritan texts. This standard
formula is as follows. First, there is a statement of self-accusation and self-judg-
ment. Second, there is the projection of self-judgment perceived in the text as
God’s judgment. Thirdly, there is the assigning of terrible events to the will of God.
And lastly, there is an affirmation that in spite of tragic occurrences there is a prov-
idential plan in place that in time will reveal the mercy of God.
The pattern of Shepard’s Autobiography establishes a dialectical movement be-
tween the catastrophic judgment of God and the generous nature of God. Out of
this dialectic emerges an explanation for the common, as well as the unfortunate
parts of life. Because Shepard has committed no actual sin, he searches his heart
(that internal, hidden world of thought and motivation) to try and find the cause
of God’s dreadful actions against him.
So upon the Sabbath-day morning boats came to our vessel from the town,
and so my dear wife and child went in the first boat. But here the Lord saw
that these waters were not sufficient to wash away my filth and sinfulness,
and therefore he cast me into the fire as soon as ever I was upon the sea in
the boat, for there my first-born child, very precious to my soul and dearly
beloved of me, was smitten with sickness; the Lord sent a vomiting upon it
whereby it grew faint, and nothing that we could use could stop its vomit-
ing, although we had many helps at Yarmouth, and this was a very bitter af-
fliction to me. And the Lord showed me my weak faith, want of fear, pride,
carnal content, immoderate love of creatures and of my child especially, and
begot in me some desires and purposes to fear his name. But yet the Lord
would not be entreated for the life of it, and after a fortnight’s sickness at
last it gave up the ghost when its mother had given it up to the Lord, and
was buried at Yarmouth where I durst not be present lest the pursuivants
should apprehend me and I should be discovered, which was a great afflic-
tion and very to me and my dear wife. And hereby I saw the Lord did come
near to me, and I did verily fear the Lord would take away my wife also, if
not myself not long after. And these afflictions, together with the Lord’s
crossing us and being so directly against our voyage, made me secretly will-
ing to stay and suffer in England, and my heart was not so much toward
New England. Yet this satisfied me, that seeing there was a door opened of
escape, why should I suffer? And I considered how unfit I was to go to such
a good land with such an un-mortified, hard, dark, formal, hypocritical
heart, and therefore no wonder if the Lord did thus cross me.
In the next passage from Shepard, he writes of the loss of his wife. He repeats the
topic that God’s affliction has been brought upon him. While it is admittedly diffi-
cult for the contemporary reader to understand Shepard’s theory of God’s affliction,
there is a quite touching and compelling aspect that comes through in the passage.
Here is a man who is trying to reconcile his wife’s death, which seemingly is sense-
less. Out of that sense of chaos, Shepard grapples to find a way to bring order out
of the situation by attempting to find God’s providential will at the heart of the loss.
Once more Shepard makes himself to blame, saying that had he heeded God’s ear-
lier afflictions and learned from those perhaps his wife’s life would have been spared.
But the Lord hath not been wont to let me live long without some afflic-
tion of other, and yet ever mixed with some mercy, and therefore, April the
second, 1646, as he gave me another son, John, so he took away my most
dear, precious, meek and loving wife in childbed after three weeks lying in,
having left behind her two hopeful branches, my dear children Samuel and
John. This affliction was very heavy to me, for in it the Lord seemed to
withdraw his tender care for me and mine which he graciously manifested
by my dear wife; also refused to hear prayer when I did think he would
have harkened and let me see his beauty in the land of the living in restor-
ing her health again; also in taking her away in the prime of her life when
she might have lived to have glorified the Lord long; also in threatening
me to proceed in rooting out my family, and that he would stop, having
begun here, as in Eli for not being zealous enough against the sins of his
son. And I saw that if I had profited by former affliction of this nature I
should not have had this scourge. But I am the Lord’s, and he may do with
me what he will. He did teach me to prize a little grace gained by a cross
as a sufficient recompense for all outward losses.
What we have is a list of grievances. In the passage wherein Shepard discussed los-
ing his son, he accepts the burden of responsibility for this death. But here Shep-
ard is less willing to resign himself to the idea that his wife’s death is the result of
God’s affliction; and, yet, in spite of his reluctance he does in the end believe that
God’s affliction is the cause of his tragedy.
While Shepard does keep his faith in tact, his Autobiography reveals that he still
holds questions concerning why affliction has been brought upon his family. In the
act of his questioning, Shepard turns his sorrow in upon himself. He concludes his
Autobiography on a less than magnanimous note: “Thus God hath visited and
scourged me for my sins and sought to wean me from this world, but I have ever
found it a difficult thing to profit even but a little by the sorest and sharpest afflic-
tions.” As Shepard’s Autobiography creates the foundation for the Puritan schema
of perceiving worldly events as the hidden “signs” of God’s involvement in hu-
manity, his text also establishes a framework for the first generation of Puritans to
interpret their journeys across the sea from England to America as spiritual ad-
venture or a spiritual journey.
A good portion of Shepard’s story involves the perils of traveling upon the sea,
as he chronicles the storms and setbacks he and his family suffered. A characteris-
tic of Shepard’s writing style is the sharpness of detail he uses to describe his voy-
age to New England, such as what is contained in this passage.
So that in the year 1634, about the beginnings of the winter, we set sail from
Harwich, and, having gone some few leagues onto the sea, the wind stopped
us that night, and so we cast anchor in a dangerous place. And so the morn-
ing the wind grew fierce and rough against us full, and drave us toward the
sands, but the vessel being laden too heavy at the head, would not stir for all
that which the seaman could do, but drave us full upon the sands near Har-
wich harbor. And the ship did grate upon the sands and was in great dan-
ger, but the Lord directed one man to cut some cable or rope in the ship,
and so was turned about and was beaten quite backward toward Yarmouth,
out of our way. But while the ship was in this great danger a wonderful,
miraculous providence did appear to us, for one of the seaman, that he
might save the vessel, fell in when it was in that danger and so was carried
out a mile or more from the ship and was given for dead and gone. The ship
was then in such danger that none could attend to follow him, and when it
was out of danger it was a very great hazard to the lives of any that should
take the skiff to seek to find him. Yet it pleased the Lord that, being dis-
cerned afar off floating upon the waters, three of the seamen adventured out
upon the rough waters, and at last, about an hour after he fell into the sea
(as we conjectured), they came and found him floating upon the waters,
never able to swim but supported by a divine hand all this while.
Lowell’s “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” in Lord Weary’s Castle, incorpo-

rates the psychological fear of the Puritans. In the light of Shepard’s Autobiography
we can observe how the poem captures the Puritans’ great apprehension that they
might drown at sea before reaching America. Lowell’s poem engages the Puritan
theology of interpreting events at sea hermeneutically as providential, but the poem
is also about death. The tone of the poem is set by the dedication: “For Warren
Winslow, Dead At Sea” and in Lowell’s retelling of the story of the Puritans’ cross-
ing the sea there is acceptance of the fact that some Puritans died in their attempt.
The poem is textured. There are different levels to its narrative structure, largely
in part because the poem reveals competing sub-texts. Lowell retells the American
narrative of the Puritans, but his account slips into a retelling of Melville’s Moby
Dick. By relying upon aspects of Melville’s Moby Dick, Lowell is able to bring the
poem quickly to a place of the contemplative and the reflective. Our national nar-
ratives are ultimately stories of obsession and conquest. And toward whose obses-
sion are we more sympathetic, the historical first generation of Puritans, Lowell’s
Quakers, or Melville’s Ahab? The three blur into one in Lowell’s poem so that there
is no occasion to take sides.
Of the great God, where time’s contrition blues

Whatever it was these Quaker sailors lost
In the mad scramble of their lives. They died
When time was open-eyed,
Wooden and childish; only bones abide
There, in the nowhere, where their boats were tossed
Sky-high, where mariners had fabled news
Of IS, the whited monster. What it cost
Them is their secret. In the sperm-whale’s slick
I see the Quakers drown and hear their cry:
“If God himself had not been on our side,
When the Atlantic rose against us, why,

Then it had swallowed us up quick.”
The narrator in the poem holds an epistemological position of privilege and power,
as he is able to transcend theological beliefs and speak as one attuned to the harsh-
ness and neutrality of the natural workings of the sea. The narrator is comparable
to Melville’s Ishmael, the watchful and imaginative observer of the Pequod’s whal-
ing quests. It is useful to recall from Moby Dick that the Pequod was owned by two
Quakers, Peleg and Bildad. It also helpful to remember how Moby Dick concludes:
the Pequod is pulled down into the stirring waters and all are drowned for the ex-
ception of Ishmael.
Like Ishmael, Lowell’s narrator catches a vision of drowning Quakers. In the vi-
sion, the Quakers’ faith is out of step with the reality of their fate, and so it is only
the narrator who is capable of sorting out the discordance between what the Quak-
ers believed and what happens to them. The narrator’s sight is limited to the past,
yet his outlook is apocalyptic. His view is myopic, as he can only see the Quakers
from the perspective of the sea itself, replete as it is with its own monsters, so that
the sperm-whale’s slick has greater momentum than the Quakers’ belief in God.
In Part IV of the poem, the Leviathan is used as a figural representation of the
Quakers’ experience. Lowell is careful to combine the anguish of the seaman’s ex-
perience with that of the Quakers, so that the two become combined into one
overarching symbol. Here again, the poem moves in the direction of Moby Dick.
This is the end of the whale road and the whale

Who spewed Nantucket bones on the threshed swell
And stirred the troubled waters to whirlpools
To send the Pequod packing off to hell:
This the end of them, three-quarters fools,
Snatching at straws to sail
Seaward and seaward on the turntail whale,
Spouting out blood and water as it rolls,
Sick as a dog to these Atlantic shoals:
Clamavimus, O depths. Let the sea-gulls wail
For water, for the deep where the high tide
Mutters to its hurt self, mutters and ebbs.

Waves wallow in their wash, go out and out,
Leave only the death-rattle of the crabs,
The beach increasing, its enormous snout
Sucking the ocean’s side.

This is the end of running on the waves;
We are poured out like water. Who will dance
The mast-lashed master of Leviathans
Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves?
The mentioning of the Leviathan alludes to chapter LXXXI of Moby Dick, “The
Pequod Meets the Virgin.”
As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its
eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay, not as
much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what landsman
would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost
monster of the seas was writing and wrenching in agony! Not eight inches
of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems it credible that by
three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the big
weight to an eight-day clock. Suspended? and to what? To three bits of
board. Is the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said—“Canst
thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish-spears? The sword
of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the haber-
geon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are
counted as stubble; he laugheth at the making of a spear!” This the creature?
this he? Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the
strength of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under
the mountains of the sea, to hide from the Pequod’s fish-spears!
In the Old Testament and often in rabbinic literature, Leviathans are depicted
as a hybrid between a serpent and a sea monster, always described as being of un-
fathomably gigantic proportion so that the enormity of its strength signifies its
unique place in creation. But also the Leviathan because of its singular position in
creation is representative of a particular kind of covenant. The Leviathan does not
represent a covenant between God and humanity, but rather is between God and
His creation. The covenant provided distance between God and nature, so that the
conclusion could not be drawn that God and nature were one.
The purpose of the covenant with the Leviathan is no doubt intended to
demonstrate God’s sovereignty over nature, but we must ask if Lowell’s use of the
Leviathan bears the same intent? The last portion of “The Quaker Graveyard,” Sec-
tion VII, recalls another kind of covenant taken from Genesis, that of the promise
that a remnant of humanity would be preserved and that God would not destroy
the world with a second flood.
When the Lord God formed man from the sea’s slime
And breathed into his face the breath of life,
And blue lung’d combers lumbered to the kill.
The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.
But the stanza also indicates that it is not a matter of covenant, faith, or providence
that will determine the ultimate outcome: it is people, not God, who have “lum-
bered to the kill,” so that if we are wiped out it will be of our doing. The covenant’s
power is left diminished, in fact, by the poem’s excessive use of apocalyptic imagery.
Yet “The Quaker Graveyard” leaves unanswered a very important question: if it
is humanity who “lumbered to the kill” and we alone are responsible for our lives,
why the powerful concentration upon the sea as an unshakable force over which
humanity has no power (let alone authority) to control? There is in the end, in spite
of our actions, something that supersedes us. And, that is “the earth-shaker green,
unwearied, chaste/In his steel scales.”
. . . We weight the body, close

Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came,
Where the heel-headed dogfish barks its noise
Oh Ahab’s void and forehead; and the name
Is blocked in yellow chalk.
Sailors, who pitch this portent at the sea
Where dreadnaughts shall confess
Its hell-bent deity,
To sand-bad this Atlantic bulwark . . .
Here, Warren Winslow and Ahab merge together, as the narrator imagines how
the body was cast overboard. And instead of returning ashes to ashes and dust to
dust, the body makes its way back into the primordial mix of the sea.
“The Drunken Fisherman” is less complex; a simple scene of a man fishing for
rainbow trout is transformed into a cosmic battle of good versus evil. Each force
depicted in varying images of water fights for the man’s soul. His blood, flowing
from the Adamic curse, and the blood trickling forth from the trout’s mouth as it
is snagged by the fisherman’s hook, merge into symbols of God’s covenant with
humanity, in the image of the rainbow. The man is a literal fisher, but his activity
calls to mind the Disciples of Christ and his commandment to follow Him and be-
come fishers of men.
Wallowing in this bloody sty,

I cast for fish that pleased my eye
(Truly Jehovah’s bow suspends

No pots of gold to weight its ends);
Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout
Rose to my bait. They flopped about
My canvas creel until the moth
Corrupted its unstable cloth.
The poem then turns to a meditation upon time. Lowell chooses pedestrian
images to confront the problem of time as a devourer of humanity. Things are
shown to represent time’s movement. Repeated throughout is the image of a
worm. Its crawly nature recalls the idea of man as a worm, but it also calls forth
the curse of Satan.
A calendar to tell the day;

A handkerchief to wave away
The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm
Pouching a bottle in one arm;
A whisky bottle full of worms;
And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms
To mete the worm whose molten rage
Boils in the belly of old age?
The meditation upon time takes a second turn in the poem’s fourth stanza, as time
is connected to the waters of life, as well as the waters of death.
Now the hot river ebbing, hauls

Its bloody waters into holes;
A grain of sand inside my shoe
Mimics the moon that might undo
Man and Creation too; remorse,
Stinking, has puddled up its source;
Here tantrums thrash to a whale’s rage.
This is the pot-hole of old age.
In “The Crucifix,” Lowell writes of “How dry time screaks in its fat axle-grease.”
In the final stanza of “The Drunken Fisherman,” Lowell does not use the image of
the Leviathan directly, but the image of casting a hook parallels Job.
If there is no way to cast my hook

Out of this dynamited brook?
The Fisher’s sons must cast about

When shallow waters peter out.
I will catch Christ with a greased worm,
And when the Prince of Darkness stalks
My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . .
On water the Man-Fisher walks.
In Job 40:24–32 and 41:1–24 the creature is presented as an untouchable part of

creation. In God’s response to Job, the main question Job posed is evaded—why
had obedience not been sufficient to protect him from destruction? Rather than
answering, God becomes an inquisitor of Job, asking a series of questions that Job
cannot answer.
Can you draw out Leviathan with a hook,

Or snare his tongue with a line which you lower?
Can you put a reed through his
Nose,
Or pierce his jaw with a hook?
Will he make many
supplications to you?
Will he speak softly to you?
Will he make a covenant with
You?
Will you take him as servant
Forever?
Will you play with him as with
A bird,
Or will you leash him for your
Maidens?
Will your companions make a
Banquet of him?
Will they apportion him among
The merchants?
Can you fill his skin with
Harpoons,
Or his head with fishing
Spears?
Lay your hand on him;
Remember the battle—-
Never do it again!
Indeed, any hope of

Overcoming him is false;
Shall one not be overwhelmed
At the sight of him?
No one is so fierce that he
Would dare stir him up.
Who then is able to stand
Against me?
Who has preceded Me,
That I should pay him?
Everything under heaven is
Mine.
Whatever legitimate questions Job had in initially approaching the conversa-

tion with God, these are made silent and practically insignificant by God’s de-
scription of his covenant with the Leviathan. The Leviathan is circumvented by
God. Each of God’s actions toward the Leviathan—piercing it with a hook, press-
ing its tongue with a cord, bridling it with a ring, and even the more gentle act of
play—each denote that the nature of the covenant with the Leviathan is directed
toward subduing it. At the end of the inquisition, Job is forced to succumb to God’s
sovereignty for the simple fact that Job cannot do battle with the Leviathan. Job
has no power to bind, pierce, tame, or make a covenant with the Leviathan. It is the
one part of creation over which God and God alone has ultimate domain. The
Leviathan is also a symbol of humanity, in spite of the Leviathan’s radical differ-
ence and otherness to human life.
Unlike the Leviathan, God cannot put a hook through the nose of humanity in
order to rule it. Yet, there are portions of Old Testament thought that express the
metaphor that God in his anger at those who forget his ways will “bridle” such
people with the hook of the Leviathan. In 2 Kings 19:27–28, we are told of how
those who refuse to acknowledge the presence of God will essentially be treated as
a Leviathan.
But I know your dwelling

place,
Your going out and your
coming in,
And your rage against Me.
Because your rage against Me
and your tumult
Have come up to My ears.
Therefore I will put

My hook in your nose
And my bridle in your lips,
And I will turn you back
By the way which you came.
The figure of the Leviathan brings the poem to its end, but it fails to provide any
sense of resolution. In one sense, the Leviathan stands in for the rough lives of the
New England seamen. Their toughness and duration is like the strength of the
Leviathan. But, the image also is made to call up death as the fifth line recalls the
image of Arthur Winslow, Lowell’s deceased grandfather. And because Arthur
Winslow as a pillar of Boston society, the image of the Leviathan moves from his sin-
gular death into the collective deaths of New England’s struggle against the British.
Lowell’s poem condenses the American tale of the fight for colonial independ-
ence. By connecting death with the New England narrative of its independence, the
image of the Leviathan moves the reader to a contemplation of the ideals associated
with patriotism. The effect is one of irony and deconstruction, as the ideals clearly
do not hold when placed into the context of New England’s larger significance.
The poem focuses in New England as a fisherman’s community and the land’s
relationship to the sea. The poem is an environmental warning against the damage
of the “damned goods” and the “sewage.” The only truly heroic image is that of the
Leviathan which is linked to the seaman’s bravery. The reader’s natural association
of Salem with the witch trials and other atrocities is deliberately left out in the
poem, so as to strip the region bare of its American tales. Here, Lowell seems bent
upon telling us that the real story of New England is the story of its seafaring.
In Salem seasick spindrift drifts or skips

To the canvas flapping on the seaward panes
Until the knitting sailor stabs at ships
Nosing like sheep of Morpheus through his brain’s
Asylum. Seaman, seaman, how the draft
Lashes the oily slick about your head,
Beating up whitecaps! Seaman, Charon’s raft
Dumps its damned goods into the harbor-bed,—
There sewage sickens the rebellious seas.
Remembering, seaman, Salem fishermen
Once hung their nimble fleets on Great Banks.
Where was it that New England bred the men
Who quartered the Leviathan’s fat flanks
And fought the British Lion to his knees?
The inability of New England to rise up to its idealistic principles is presented in

“Salem” as a question, but in “The Boston Nativity” typical images of the American
story of democracy are linked together with the names of historic New England
families, including that of T.S. Eliot’s family. Thwarting the progress of democracy,
these families more nearly approach the status of an aristocracy, the Brahmin elites,
“Mathers, Eliots, and Endicots/Brew their own gall.” Still in its embryonic form, the
American dream is shown to be immature and underdeveloped: “Cradle of Free-
dom, rock your little man.” The entire poem reels from a sardonic view of the Amer-
ican dream: the “Mayflower rots,” New England is comprised of “poor bred-out
stock” and “Concord’s shot” of the ideals and values of liberty and freedom “becomes
a boomerang” that circles back around to defeat the region.
In the background of “The Boston Nativity” is the coming of the Christ child,
but the event comes in the middle of history’s violence. The world as it is cannot
pave the way for the birth and the brutality of life is so great that all that can be said
is that Christ is the “carrion king.” The poem’s final stanza shows a remarkable re-
semblance to Yeat’s “The Second Coming.” In Yeats,
That twenty centuries of stony sleep

were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
If Christ has come to save the world, Lowell’s poem tries to approach the possibil-
ity from the perspective of realism. Christ would become the king of a humanity
that only knows of carnage and destruction. His “eternal clay” cannot recognize his
identity and so christen him “dead,” just as the spirit of the world is dead. Or as
Lowell puts it in “The Bomber,” a poem about a World War II pilot, “How can frail
wings and clay/Beat down the biting dust/When Christ gives up the ghost?” The war
is compared to Holy Crusades: “Baptized the infidel Huns/For the Holy Ghost,”
as it quickly moves into a question of God standing behind the evil design of his-
tory’s course.
Did you know the name of flight

When you blasted the bloody sweat
And made the noonday night:
When God and Satan met
And Christ gave up the ghost?
The line “And Christ gave up the ghost,” which appears three times in the poem as
a kind of refrain recalls the problem of Docetism, a particular sect of Gnosticism.
The Docetics held the belief that Christ did not actually die on the cross, but
that he gave up his spirit before he was crucified. The result of the Docetics’ doc-
trine was that it ruled out Christ as physically suffering, arguing that it would be
impossible for the nature of God to even experience pain, much less endure it. The
refrain in “The Bomber” that “Christ gives up the ghost” is complemented by the
line that “we give up the Ghost,” holding the implication that when humanity re-
linquishes its spirituality the result will be our end. We will sink “At the dawn like
Phaeton/To the demolishing sun” once history has come to its completion.
The concluding poem of Land of Unlikeness, “Leviathan” in a unique way com-
plements “Rebellion,” a poem that appeared in Lord Weary’s Castle. In “Leviathan”
suffering is shown to be the thread that links all stages of time, moving history
from Abel to the New England farmer, to the civilizations arising out of Abel’s
knocked out brains, to the establishment of social contracts of a political nature.
When the ruined farmer knocked out Abel’s brains,

Our Father laid great cities on his soul,
A monolithic mole
To bury man and yet to praise him. Cain’s
Life-blood shall drown the Serpent in his Hole.
The poem attempts to circumvent the role of the serpent through its rather direct
allusions to Old Testament covenants: “When Israel turned from God’s wise fel-
lowship,/He sent us Canaan or Exile, Ark or Flood.” Divine punishment for the
breaking of covenants and an attempt to reconcile humanity to God are made sig-
nificant in the poem; nonetheless, the poem’s conclusion collapses the ideal of a
divine covenant into the political realism of social contract theory. Social law may
try to mirror divine authority, but the poem speaks to the limitations of both social
and religious authority as both divine and secular law become unraveled by the ag-
gression of humanity’s innate drive for conquest and power.
The “saving heart of Christ” is lost to the other images, those of political king-
ship. The blood of Christ sinks into the blood lost in war, and so the poem culmi-
nates in the mentioning of monarchial rule, as if to say that the thread of suffering
running throughout history collides and converges with political authorities. The
poem ends by asking if it is not the case that all forms of authority and power ring
“Out the satanic sting,/Or like an octopus constrict my soul?”
Of greater importance than the question of political sovereignty is Lowell’s
method of using the figural representation of the Leviathan as a means of measur-
ing time. “The Crucifix” is a meditation on time, the ancient, and the age of the
prophetic. Time is shown to march forward into periods of transition and devel-
opment: “The prophets thunder, and I run upon/My father, Adam.” Whatever new
thing springs forth, though, is firmly planted in the traditions of the old; so that the
poet’s command to “Get out from under my feet, old man. Let me pass” becomes
a doomed venture. “The Crucifix” performs a critique upon the modern worldview
that all things must be made new. The innovativeness of the modern to refashion
the world ignores the reality that change is dependent upon the past. The “desolate
of a hand/That shakes the Temple back to clay” is not strong enough to confront
the problem of humanity’s primal roots to self-destruction, so that the question is
raised in the poem “how can/ War ever change my old into new man?”
“Rebellion” is an autobiographical poem that sets the stage for his looking for a
way to use form to express personal content.
There was rebellion, father, when the mock

French windows slammed and you hove backward, rammed
Into your heirlooms, screens, a glass-cased clock,
The highboy quaking to its toes. You damned
My arm that cast your house upon your head
And broke the chimney flintlock on your skull.
Last night the moon was full:
I dreamed the dead
Caught at my knees and fell:
And it was well
With me, my father. Then
Behemoth and Leviathan
Devoured our mighty merchants. None could arm
Or put to sea. O father, on my farm

I added field to field
And I have sealed
And everlasting pact
With Dives to contract
The world that spreads in pain;
But the world spread
When the clubbed flintlock broke my father’s brain.
Here, Lowell relies heavily upon the same kind of technique that he uses to con-
vey meaning about the whole of humanity; but, the poem reveals the impossibility
of a poet relying upon classical and Christian archetypal language to lend the im-
mediacy of experience and the emotive. In “Rebellion,” we find the Leviathan rear-
ing his head once more. This time, the rearing of his head is obtrusive. We should
give Lowell credit for seeing the universality of his experience: the story of a son’s
revolt against his father over a woman is the story of father-son revolt in general.
Yet, the individuality of the experience is lost amid the poem’s turning to other
ideas, such as the sea and the merchants; images needed no doubt to help justify
the mentioning of the Leviathan.
We can also see how Lowell’s figural imagination and its reliance upon the
Leviathan as representation of father-son revolt connect the revolt to central ques-
tions of affliction. Yet, it is not until Life Studies that Lowell will be able to make
sense of autobiographical material as strictly psychological, rather than seeing
within it sublime schemas of historical violence, sin, suffering, and existence.
chapter six
The Impersonality of the

Poet in T.S. Eliot and
the Reclaiming of the
Personality of the Poet
in Lowell’s Life Studies
Genius means little more than perceiving in an unhabitual way.

—William James
Certain critics—T.E. Hulme, Ford Maddox Ford, Allen Tate, and T.S. Eliot—
influenced high modernism so severely that the ramifications of their views lin-
gered well up until the publication of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies in 1959. Behind
the literary perspective offered by these critics was their inheritance of nineteenth-
century aesthetics. At the heart of nineteenth-century aesthetics is the opinion that
subjective experience should merge with the objective qualities of the work of art;
in other words, the poet should be capable of bringing together into a harmonious
whole the subjective core of the poet’s experiences with that of the objectivity of the
poem’s form.
The literary opinions of Hulme, Ford, Tate, and Eliot were divergent in a num-
ber of respects; yet, a common aspect of their ideology dominated the way that a
great deal of poetry was written from the turn of the twentieth century until the
beginning of the 1960s. This commonality focused upon the role of the poet as an
impersonal conduit of language, whereby the private (personal) emotions of the
poet were to be negated in favor of the objectivity of the work of art produced.
Largely the view held within the Tate and Eliot camp was that a poem should not
contain an obvious reference to the life of the poet, but this view arose from these
THE IMPERSONALITY OF THE POET IN T. S . ELIOT | 115
critics’ interpretation of what it meant in nineteenth-century aesthetics for the sub-

jectivity of the artist to merge with the objectivity of art’s form.
Lowell’s non-conventional use of autobiographical material in Life Studies in
many ways reversed the high modernist stance of Tate and Eliot by reinterpreting
the role and the meaning of nineteenth-century aesthetics. It is not that Lowell
completely relinquished his nineteenth-century inheritance of the belief that sub-
jective experience and form must represent a unity in the poem; rather, the differ-
ence between Lowell and Eliot, for instance, hinges upon how the ideals of
subjectivity and objectivity get defined. Eliot interpreted the legacy of nineteenth-
century aesthetics as “the impersonality of the poet”—the eradication of any direct
or obvious references to the poet’s life or even to the poet’s immediate grasp of self.
Alternatively, Lowell interpreted the nineteenth-century theory that subjectivity
and objectivity should come together in a poem as meaning that there could be a
‘space’ within a poem for the ‘presence’ of the poet’s wealth of personal experiences, includ-
ing the poet’s autobiographical experiences. But both Eliot and Lowell drew upon the
relationship between the twentieth century and the nineteenth century to create
their opinions about what it meant for a poem to exist as a unity between the sub-
jective and objective components of life and art’s form.
In Eliot’s Sacred Wood and his infamous “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”
he noted, “Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own crit-
ical turn of mind” to be found in its “creative genius.” While on the surface this re-
mark may not seem like it points toward the establishment of the impersonality of
the poet in Eliot, it actually does. We can conclude from Eliot that the individual-
ity of the poet is to be subsumed into a larger structure. The poet’s genius is only a
matter of how well the poet is able to shape, use, and reinterpret the legacy of his-
tory and tradition, of the past. What Eliot tells us is that genius is not entirely self-
reflexive. Within Eliot’s ideological perspective, the collectivity overshadows the
individual poet’s talent.
In nineteenth-century aesthetics, Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater espoused
literary theories of tradition, and while Eliot quotes from Arnold at the beginning
of Sacred Wood it is more probable that Pater’s idea of a “living tradition” functioned
as a greater source of inspiration to the formation of Eliot’s opinions on the sub-
ject. Eliot’s perimeters of modernism have been compared to the views of Pater. For
instance, Louis Menand in his recent work Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and
His Context, has posited that “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and Pater’s
essay, “Style,” express strikingly similar notions about the meaning of the imper-
sonality of the poet. Menand writes, “We will discover at the center of both argu-
ments a similar model of the mind, one that seems both reductive, because such
passivity is ascribed to it, and extravagant, because it is required to generate such an
exalted kind of truth.” By comparison, in Lowell’s Life Studies this feeling of
reductionism and passivity is ever present in the text. “91 Revere Street” demon-
strates the passivity of the poet as he allows childhood memories to flood over his
mind; but, there is also an added dimension in Lowell’s narrative, as the poet grap-
ples with the inescapable feelings associated with childhood memories. There is
also an active quality in “91 Revere Street” as Lowell wants to dissect the culture
that he experienced in his early days by calling that culture into question and even
holding it partially accountable for the emotional isolation he felt between himself
and his parents. Furthermore, Lowell holds the aloofness and indifference of his
parents’ generation and of Boston culture as partially responsible for the lack of ex-
pressed love between his mother and father. This active quality of wanting to chal-
lenge culture and perceived social norms positions Lowell’s text as moving against
the grain of Eliot’s version of passivity in the impersonality of the poet.
Eliot’s argument in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is that there are always
aspects of the poet’s uniqueness that certainly are to be appreciated; however, it is
a mistake to assume that those characteristics stem from much apart from the
poet’s ability to relate to the past or to find within language objective properties of
the mind. In other words, it would be a grave error (the fallacy of authorial inten-
tion) to think that what makes a poet unique is the poet’s own life, his or her au-
tobiographical presence in a poem. By mostly negating the poet’s right to an
autobiographical presence, Eliot’s theory turns the poet into a figure who must
speak publically for an entire culture. And for Lowell, he used this aspect of the
poet as a public figure speaking for an entire culture as a way of voicing the angst
and dissatisfaction of the Cold War culture of the 1950s and the rise of a bohemian,
counter-culture in the 1960s; and this is perhaps not that dissimilar from what
Eliot managed in The Waste Land as he expressed the fears of the first world war
generation. In Eliot, we find the remark,
We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predeces-
sors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavor to find something
that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet
without his prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the
most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his
ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.
This idea that the poet is “most vigorous” in finding ways of reshaping the genius
of the past has been so frequently criticized for leaving the poet the freedom of
self-expression that it has often been overlooked that if interpreted slightly differ-
ently from the traditional high modernist position the statement could be taken to
indicate that the poet has the right to write politically. Lowell’s version of dealing
with the past was to make the past politically charged.
Eliot argued though that “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice,

a continual extinction of the personality.” If extinction seems like a harsh road for
a poet to take, it is. The outcome of the “extinction of the personality” is much as
would be expected. Eliot describes the poet’s coming into knowledge of the past
as a “process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition.” So,
what is tradition in Eliot’s formula? As tradition relates to the poet, it signifies
the poet making his own creativity subordinate to the idealization of language.
Moreover, it is the replacement of self-consciousness with a national, cultural, so-
cial consciousness.
Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited,

and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves, in the first
place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any-
one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the
historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past,
but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write but not
merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the
whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of
the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and com-
passes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the
timeless as well as the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal to-
gether, is what makes a writer traditional . . . No poet, or artist of any art, has
his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the ap-
preciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value
him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
I mean by this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical criticism.
Why would it be necessary for Eliot to place the poet among the dead, so to
speak? Eliot’s designation insists upon the comparative measures of the poet. It is
Eliot’s way of handling the long standing aesthetic question of how art is to be
judged. As will be discussed later in this chapter, it is also his way of dealing with
the topic of genius as it stands in relation to the poet. Tradition not only runs
through the poet, but tradition also makes it possible for the poet to be evaluated.
As Eliot goes on in the essay to name his view the “Impersonal Theory of Po-
etry,” how he develops the theory is predicated upon the advancement of the idea
that the aesthetic dimension of a poem is its universality. This universality can only
be accomplished, Eliot argues, if the direct emotions of the poet are removed from
the poem. For instance, in his discussion of the success of Dante’s Cantos he re-
marks, “great poetry may be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever:
composed out of feelings solely.” The difference between emotion and feeling prob-
ably would escape most of us as so slight as to represent no real difference at all. But
for Eliot, the distinction is a difference and it rests in the view that feelings are
more closely relatable to an impression.
On the one hand, an emotion so strongly affects us that it rarely can be ignored
or transformed into anything other than what it already is. Impressions are receiv-
able from the outer, external world from the environment and the reality around us.
But emotions tend to rise and swell up from the inside with or without due provo-
cation from external reality. Trying to test an emotional response by holding it up
to an external reality principle often reveals that the two do not actually match.
When reading a poem or viewing a painting there can be a feeling of appreciation,
a feeling of its beauty. We may experience the aesthetic, an aesthetic feeling. There is
no corresponding aesthetic-emotion, however. Our basic human emotions are set
and established in us, and Eliot is right when he says the range is not so great.
Happiness, sadness, joy, anger, love, these are few. They may take on combinations,
but even in the combinations the range is highly limited. Anguish, rage, hate, in-
difference, these are variations to be sure. But there is never an emotion of the aes-
thetic, even if we believe the aesthetic has produced in us happiness or evoked some
feeling of sadness. If the aesthetic does indeed cause some likeness of these emo-
tions to bubble up in us, would it not be more correct to say that these stem from
the keenness of a delicately defined temperament? We can see why the aesthetic
may be more relatable to the mental faculties of judgment, as opposed to the stir-
rings of the emotions. It is because there is no such thing as an aesthetic emotion!!
Eliot takes up the example of Keats to prove the point: “The ode of Keats con-
tains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightin-
gale, but which the nightingale, partly, perhaps because of its attractive name, and
partly because of its reputation, served to bring together.” It is the symbol that
holds the internal and external realities together; impressions, or feelings, associ-
ated with the nightingale may or may not be related to the traits of the real bird,
but because those associations can be made to hold in connection to some de-
scription of the nightingale then the symbol is workable.
Whatever literal emotions may be aroused in a poet (or casual observer) are in-
ternally negated by the aesthetic importance of establishing a lasting symbol. It is
in the construction of a symbol the universality of the poem arises. The symbol,
then, comes to override the individual personality of the poet.
The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the

metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is,
that the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium,
which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and
experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and ex-
periences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry,
and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligi-
ble part in the man, the personality.
Eliot takes Dante as his example and extrapolates from him the following aspects
of the theory of “The Impersonality of the Poet.”
It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular

events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His
particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his
poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the
emotions of people who have very little or unusual emotions in life. One
error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions
to express: and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers
the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to
use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feel-
ings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has
never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Con-
sequently, we must believe that “emotion recollected in tranquility” is an
inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without
distortion of meaning, tranquility. It is a concentration, and a new thing
resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences
which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences
at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of de-
liberation. These experiences are not “recollected,” and they finally unite in
an atmosphere which is “tranquil” only in that it is a passive attending
upon the event.
There are several aspects of Eliot’s statement deserving of commentary. The emo-
tional life of the poet or artist is placed into perspective within the broader goals of
constructing an art object. The implication is that there is a dividing line between
ordinary consciousness and a poetic consciousness. Eliot envisions the poet’s mind
in a state of ascent, transcending the natural limits of emotions in order to reach a
higher call or vocational practice of the aesthetic.
But what is the aesthetic in Eliot’s theory? He most nearly approaches classify-
ing the aesthetic as a pure condition of being, an apex of awareness wherein the
poet’s mind becomes unified with art. It is no accident, of course, that Eliot’s for-
mula resonates with religious and philosophical theories of idealism. It is meta-
physics of idealism that Eliot constructs in his theory of the impersonal poet.
Drawing upon an interpretation of F.H. Bradley, Eliot concludes experience is
inferior to eternal moments. A good term to apply to Eliot’s idealism (both meta-
physical and aesthetic) is cohesion. The word is intended to recall Bergson’s concept
of duree or duration and Whitehead’s concept of apprehension; while Bergson and
Whitehead’s philosophies are nuanced almost to a fault, a similarity can be drawn
between their views in the concept of the mind’s ability to bring together units of
time so as to establish connection between these moments. For Eliot, tradition is
comparable to the mind’s ability to establish patterns of continuity between expe-
riences held in place by time; without the mind’s ability to accomplish such pat-
terning, all events would be random and the acquisition of knowledge would be
lost. Tradition, like time, prevents art from disappearing into the vacuity of a mean-
ingless existence. Eliot’s idealism interprets experience as having meaning only if
the values contained within or arising out of that experience can be given some de-
gree of permanency through memory. Thus, it is a historical memory that is estab-
lished through tradition. And the temporal layers of experience are to be replaced
by an outward form, so that there may be an everlasting, non-temporal significance
assigned to experience.
Eliot’s view strikes a chord with Kant’s theory of aesthetics. In the Critique of
Judgment, Kant establishes groundwork or a foundation for how beauty is to be
conceived. There, a portion of Kant’s concern is with determining how a judgment
about art can be made. Are their properties intrinsic to a work that causes the
viewer to admit that the work qualifies as art? If this were the case, then necessity
would dictate a reproduction of certain qualities each instance a work of art was
to be produced. The viewer would also have to be trained so as to see these quali-
ties in order to proclaim the work as art (this was Hume’s view). Kant avoids
reaching such a conclusion as this; however, at the same time he attempts to keep
intact the idea that a work deemed as art is an object, or contains an objective struc-
ture. Hence, he is able to say that there is a “purpose” to the work of art and that
this purpose arises from the “design” of the work of art as an object. The ‘thing-
ness’ of the work of art is counterbalanced, though, by the subjective qualities of
the genius the art expresses.
Kant’s attempt is to create a theory that harmonizes the objective and subjective
dimensions of the work of art. He says that the artist will be so adept at subordi-
nating his own instincts to the ‘thing-ness’ of the work that the design or “rules” co-
ordinating the work will not dominate the work’s appearance. What the viewer sees
as beauty in the work of art is really the artist’s powers (the artist’s subjectivity)
having been made to bend to the objective structure of the work. Kant is also care-
ful to posit a dichotomy between artifice and Nature, a distinction that will be-
come preeminent a generation later among the Romantics. Kant was hardly a
Romantic, but the divisions he established helped pave the way for many of the
problems the Romantics inherited in trying to secure a theory of how the aesthetic
is created. The “fettering of the artist’s mental powers,” as Kant puts it in the pas-
sage quoted below from the Critique of Judgment, becomes a central issue for the
Romantics. If the artist does fetter himself, what are the results?
For whether we are dealing with natural or with artificial beauty we can say
generally: That is beautiful which pleases in the mere act of judging it (not in
the sensation of it, or by means of a concept). Now art has always a defi-
nite design of producing something. But if this something were bare sen-
sation (something merely subjective), which is to be accompanied with
pleasure, the product would please in the act of judgment only by medita-
tion of sensible feeling. And again, if the design were directed towards the
production of a definite Object . . . Hence the purposiveness in the product
of beautiful art, although it is designed, must not seem to be designed; i.e.
beautiful art must look like nature, although we are conscious of it as art.
But a product of art appears like nature when, although it is in agreement
with the rules, according to which alone the product can become what it
ought to be, is punctiliously observed, yet this is not painfully apparent . . . . it
shows no trace of the rule having been before the eyes of the artist and
having fettered the mental powers.
The Romantics are often blamed for bringing to light the role of Genius in the
artist, even inaugurating a kind of cult status of Genius. But, it is really the supreme
rationalist Kant whom we have to thank (or admonish) for merging together artist
and Genius.
For every art presupposes rules by means of which in the first instance a
product, if it is to be called artistic, is represented as possible. But the con-
cept of beautiful art does not permit the judgment upon the beauty of a
product to be derived from any rule, which has a concept as its determining
ground, and therefore at its basis a concept of the way in which the prod-
uct is possible. Therefore, beautiful art cannot itself devise the rule accord-
ing to which it can bring about its product. But since at the same time a
product can never be called Art without some precedent rule, Nature in
the subject must (by the harmony of its faculties) give the rule to Art; i.e.
beautiful Art is only possible as a product of Genius.
Kant’s theory sets the precedent for belief in “the universality of an aesthetical
judgment.” As Kant says of this universality, it “is noteworthy, not indeed for the lo-
gician, but for the transcendental philosopher.” It was apparently deserving of at-
tention, too, for the transcendental poet Eliot.
Eliot’s theory of the impersonality of the poet reflected a lingering set of opin-
ions inherited from both Kant and Romanticism. This is not to say that Eliot was
truly a Romanticist; ample evidence supports his classical leanings, as well. It is to
be remembered that at one point Eliot said of himself that he was neither a
Romantic nor a Classicist. Eliot’s aesthetics of idealism raises the problem of what
becomes of the subject/subjectivity of the poet or artist if private emotions are ex-
cluded? What becomes of the subject/subjectivity of the poet if ordinary con-
sciousness is to be lifted to a place of unity with the aesthetic object? How can
such a synthesis between the two occur? These are not questions that Eliot ever re-
ally answers, instead he starts from the premise that the synthesis can be made and
that the mature poet knows how to create this synthesis. The fact that Eliot did not
really answer this problem for his generation left the problem for future poets to re-
solve; Lowell resolved the tension between subjective experience and outer, exter-
nal form in Life Studies by demonstrating that the absence of the poet’s self from
the work cannot sustain the resolution of the dichotomy. Lowell voiced the next
generation of poets’ view that the self had to be firmly within the poem in order for
subjectivity and objectivity to aesthetically meet.
Eliot had written concerning the impersonality of the poet, “Poetry is not a
turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion” and “it is not the expression
of personality, but an escape from personality.” The line that follows this remark is
rarely quoted: “But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know
what it means to want to escape from these things.” There is an underlying desire
strongly akin to fear that helps to shape Eliot’s theory. It is perhaps only a certain
kind of poet—the one who finds him or herself in the clutches of personal despair
and needs to flee a sense of self in order to preserve the self—who should gauge art
by the extinguishment of personal emotion. While Eliot’s generation of poets had
handled this fear and anguish by trying to avoid the self altogether in the poem,
Lowell and his generation of poets began to branch out and move in the direction
of reclaiming the self as the primary source of energy of the poem. The self became
the heartbeat of the poem for Lowell’s generation of poets.
In Lowell’s Life Studies, there are many instances in which we find the extin-
guishment of a direct and attainable sense of a personal self. A small example is the
poem, “Banker’s Daughter.” The poem contains a description of Lowell’s manic de-
pression, but in such an extremely obscure way that any intentional connection is
difficult to make and could easily be overlooked by the reader. Using the historical
narrative of Marie de Medici, Lowell describes the difficulty of a life lived with fre-
quent “mood-swings.” Though the narrative is presumably about Marie de Medici,
would Lowell have noticed or made mention of such a detail if he did not perceive
a connection across history, time, even gender between Marie de Medici’s “mood-
swings” and his own? It could seem a bit of stretch to propose such a theory, but
considering the Eliot dictum that the poet’s own life had to be extinguished by the
poem itself it becomes plausible to argue that Lowell quite often used historical
narratives as a way of disguising characteristics of his own personal life. The emo-
tional separation Lowell describes in Life Studies between himself and his spouse is
recounted as well in the historical portrait of Marie de Medici and her husband.
And that Lowell should create a self-identity in the poem between himself and a
female persona is important; for it reverses the Cold War cultural stereotypes sur-
rounding masculinity. The poem is actually very anti-masculine.
Alas, my brutal girlish mood-swings drove

my husband, wrenched and giddy, from the Louvre,
to sleep in single lodgings in the town.
It is a drastic call to arms that Eliot’s theory argues—that a poet should have to
relinquishment the personal self in favor of the poem. This has too often been in-
terpreted as a commandment on Eliot’s part. A slightly better way of understand-
ing Eliot’s theory that the personality of the poet should not interrupt the meaning
of a poem is to see it as Eliot’s attempt to rescue the self from drowning in the
emotions of the present by calling for the poet to look back toward the past, toward
history and tradition. Thus, for Eliot the work of art and its objective structure
begin to create the effect of offering salvation to the poet so that the poet may find
a way of rising above his or her individual humanity by grasping a way to enter into
the humanity of others.
Again we can find this point of view evident in Lowell’s Life Studies. Much of
the long narrative in Life Studies, “91 Revere Street,” is Lowell’s efforts to come to
an empathetic understanding of his parents’ lives, including their attitudes, pecu-
liar habits, dispositions, even their marital fights. While “91 Revere Street” is quite
cold and at times even condemning, much of this is directed against the Boston
culture; but, beneath the diatribe against the pretense and the unraveling of class
structure in New England society, there is also a sensitivity that Lowell expresses
toward wanting to connect with the humanity of his parents and their generation.
It is one way that Lowell interprets Eliot’s concept of impersonality and tradition.
Or consider the poem in Life Studies, “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms.” The scene
is an attempt on the part of Lowell as son to understand the beauty, the trials and
errors, the fear and the hope of his parents’ relationship with one another. The lines
are a kind of snapshot or still life of marriage.
Father and Mother moved to Beverly Farms

to be a two minute walk from the station,
half an hour by train from the Boston doctors.
they had no sea-view.

but sky-blue tracks of the commuters’ railroad shone
like a double-barrelled shotgun
through the scarlet late August sumac,
multiplying like cancer
at their garden’s border.
The poem’s symbol of cancer pushing into the garden creates the feeling in the
poem of happiness and quietness . . .
Father had two coronaries.

he still treasured underhand economies,
but his friend was his little black Chevie,
garaged like a sacrificial steer
with gilded hooves,
yet sensationally sober,
and with less side than an old dancing pump.
the local dealer, a “buccaneer,”
had been bribed a “king’s ransom”
to quickly deliver a car without chrome.
Eliot’s argument in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” had been that “The
emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality with-
out surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done.” This “surrender” is exile,
but it is also what keeps the poet from personal ruination and utter self-destruction.
We might infer that the poet is a kind of wrecked being who seeks release in order
to survive the abundance of what is felt through experience. Yet “surrender” also
implies an act of making the self submissive. Once more we come across the no-
tion of passivity in connection to the creation of the work of art. Creativity may sig-
nify activity, but the poet is again described as a medium or conduit that channels
a historical language, the past, or history itself. That the poet must “surrender” to
the work of art seems counterintuitive to the contemporary opinion that art repre-
sents self-exposure and the placement of the artist’s ego, fantasy, or projections of
self into the work. What the poet “surrenders” or gives up are all the trappings of a
personal self—an individualized will and existential freedom. As a result, the poet
is made into an abstract being with an abstract will, abstract freedom, and abstract
emotions, all of which take on their concreteness only by virtue of the poet’s abil-
ity to represent these abstractions as a historicized and national past. It is this act
of transfiguring the actual poet into an abstract being that stands at the back of
Eliot’s theory of the poet’s universality.
As much as there are affinities between Lowell’s Life Studies and Eliot’s theory
of the impersonality of the poet and of the need to embrace history and tradition,
there is also a marked break with this view that Life Studies also represents. Life
Studies probably lacks the depth of emotion that we might expect from a contem-
porary work (and that is likely attributable to the text’s relationship to high mod-
ernism), but it also tries to overcome abstraction by the recalling of Lowell’s family
history. This use of family history is what sets it apart from apart from Eliot.
chapter seven
The Nineteenth-Century
Aesthetics of Walter Pater
and Lowell’s “91 Revere
Street”
The poetry critic M.L Rosenthal’s description in the Nation (1959) of Life Studies
highlighted the relationship of Lowell’s aesthetics to the world of history and tra-
dition. As Rosenthal commented, the poems in Life Studies “are poems of violent
contradiction, a historical overture, to define the disintegration of the world.” This
characteristic of Lowell positions him within a context closely associated with both
T.S. Eliot’s theory of the impersonality of the poet and Walter Pater’s theory that
the genius of the artist is to be understood in his ability to receive the past as his
own vision. That Life Studies should represent aspects of “a historical overture”
means that the poet’s own life, though autobiographically present in the collection,
is also submerged within the historical figures of other narratives.
The dominance of nineteenth-century aesthetics and its influence upon high
modernism is not to be underestimated. As much as there is a parallel between
Lowell and Eliot’s aesthetics, there is also one to be drawn between Lowell and the
nineteenth-century author Walter Pater (1839–1894). Pater is most well known for
his 1878 Imaginary Portraits and his 1889 collection of writings, Appreciations, with
an Essay on Style.
Pater’s Imaginary Portraits solidified the nineteenth-century opinion that an in-
dividual’s education begins in childhood as the child learns ways of interpreting
his social environment. We find a similar view, for instance, in Rousseau’s Emile in
the belief that education leads to the inculcation of aesthetic values. One of the
pieces in Imaginary Portraits, “The Child in the House,” provides a clear example
THE NINETEENTH - CENTURY AESTHETICS OF WALTER PATER | 127
of Pater’s view that an aesthetic temperament is cultivated by recognizing that beauty

exists within the social environment.
“The Child in the House” is written from the standpoint of fiction; however,
critics of Pater have tended to interpret it as autobiographical. Pater’s example be-
comes the groundwork for James Joyce, and of course for Lowell. As a portrait,
Pater’s piece is about a boy who experiences an awakening, a burgeoning of his
spirit toward the physicality of the inanimate world of objects surrounding him,
and of out this burgeoning he experiences an intensification of feeling. The impli-
cation in “The Child in the House” is that the aesthetic temperament breaks in as
an unpredictable force upon the young artist. And so the young artist must learn
how to control this force, which is really the sensibility of the artist toward his so-
cial environment. The boy’s relationship to his environment is one of passively re-
ceiving the odd mixture of joy and sorrow that he feels in connection to his
emergent aesthetic disposition; there is nostalgia and desire.
Let me note first some of the occasions of his recognition of the element
of pain in things—incidents, now and again, which seemed suddenly to
awake in him the whole force of that sentiment which Goethe has called
the Weltschmerz, and in which the concentrated sorrow of the world
seemed suddenly to lie heavy upon him . . . For it is false to suppose that a
child’s sense of beauty is dependent on any choiceness or special fineness,
in the objects which present themselves to it, though this indeed comes to
be the rule with most of us in later life; earlier, in some degree, we see in-
wardly; and the child finds for itself, and with unstinted delight, a differ-
ence for the sense, in those whites and reds through the smoke on very
homely buildings, and in the gold of dandelions at the road-side, just be-
yond the houses, where not a handful of earth is virgin and untouched, in
the lack of better ministries to its desire of beauty.
For Pater, the sense of order that is necessary to create art can only be produced by
the restraint of the personality as a will that imposes itself upon external reality in
order to transform that reality. Hence, art is never neutral. Even the critic’s job
could be understood in terms of the subjective influence of personality.
. . . and while prose is actually found to be a colored thing with Bacon, pic-
turesque with Livy and Carlyle, musical with Cicero and Newman, mysti-
cal and intimate with Plato and Michelet and Sir Thomas Browne, exalted
or florid, it may be, with Milton and Taylor, it will be useless to protest that
it can be nothing at all, except something very tamely and narrowly con-
fined to mainly practical ends.
Here, Pater’s classical examples set a certain bar for the critic to strive toward at-
taining. It is not toward the establishment of one specific formula that may be used
to account for art or its worth; rather, the critic will always impose upon art certain
dimensions of what he finds to be subjectively important.
In “Style,” Pater mentions Livy, Gibbon, Tacitus, and Michelet so as to estab-
lish a connection between the role of the artist, the critic, and the historian. Pater
had observed in reading these classical historians that their conception of history
tended to be a psychological projection of the historian’s personality upon the so-
called facts of the historical circumstance; such historians rarely gave a straight-
forward recounting of events. The classical historian tended to perceive patterns
within political events. Pater observed in reading surveys of Roman and Latin
history how the classical historian would impose a personal vision onto the
epoch, so that the recounting of historical events became a story filled with fear
or hope.
Your historian, for instance, with absolutely truthful intention, amid the
multitude of facts presented to him must needs select, and in selecting as-
sert something of his own humor, something comes not of the world with-
out but of a vision within . . . Livy, Tacitus, Michelet, moving full of
poignant sensibility amid the records of the past, each, after his own sense,
modifies—who can tell where and to what degree? And becomes some-
thing else than a transcriber; each, as he thus modifies, passing into the do-
main of art proper. For just in proportion as the writer’s aim, consciously or
unconsciously, comes to be the transcribing, not of the world, not of mere
fact, but of his sense of it, he comes an artist . . . And further, all beauty is in
the long run only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer ac-
commodation of speech to that vision within.
External reality is never fixed. The classical historian was rarely a fatalist; the his-
torian did not merely record events but offered a schema for grasping the magni-
tude of life.
Pater is careful to describe how the historian’s task was to participate in altering
the world around him by virtue of providing an interpretation of history. One
might say that the historian was guilty of giving a hermeneutical perspective. Tak-
ing cues from Calvin, Arminius, Jansen, and Moline, Pater constructs his theory of
art’s relationship to determinism and the will, or the subjective power of the artist.
There are moments in one’s own life, aspects of the life of others, of which
the conclusion that the will is free seems to be the only—is the natural or
reasonable—account. Yet those very moments of reflexion, on second
thoughts, present themselves again, as but links in a chain, in an all-em-

bracing network of chains. In all education we assume, in some inexplica-
ble combination, at once the freedom and the necessity of the subject of it.
And who on a survey of life from outside would willingly lose the dramatic
contrasts, the alternating interests, for which the opposed ideas of freedom
and necessity are our respective points of view? How significant become
the details we might otherwise pass by almost unobserved, but to which we
are put on the alert buy the abstract query whether a man be indeed a free-
man or a slave, as we watch from aside his devious course, his struggles, his
final tragedy or triumph.
Underpinning Pater’s theory is a theological and metaphysical concept of “free-

dom and necessity.” The “soul-stuff ” of personality (the repository of impressions
and then the emotional quality created by those impressions which have left an in-
delible mark upon the artist) is reminiscent of Augustine’s definition in the Con-
fessions of memory as the “storehouse” of the sensations and stimuli we receive from
our social environment. What we find in Pater is a strong nineteenth-century ex-
ample of how personality can work—it can offer a quasi-theological perspective,
hermeneutical interpretations of events and circumstances, and preserve the free-
dom of the artist from the determinism of history.
The recognition that genuine education is a cultivation of the self that begins in
childhood is a theme that runs throughout Pater’s Imaginary Portraits. The artist,
like the historian, is understood to impose his own vision upon the social environ-
ment. Pater’s “The Child in the House” opens with its protagonist, Florian Delal,
who while walking one afternoon comes across a poor, aged man. Florian engages
in a conversation with the man. That night, Florian’s memory drifts backward to a
set of images of home and childhood. Florian’s dream was in exchange for his “pity”
toward the old man, emphasizing that at the core of the aesthetic personality is a
charged sense of compassion. The story represents the fact that for Pater the per-
sonality develops in response to ideas of place and home. Pater calls it “that process
of brain-building by which we are, each one of us, what we are” connected to home.
In the following passage taken from Pater’s story, every nuance of home is made
visible to the mind’s eye through memory.
The true aspect of the place, especially of the house there in which he had
lived as a child, the fashion of its doors, its hearths, its windows, the very
scent upon the air of it, was with him in sleep for a season; only, with tints
more musically bent on wall and floor, and some finer light and shadow
running in and out along its curves and angles, and with all its little carv-
ings daintier.
Home is fashioned in Florian’s mind. In the dreamlike condition of memory,

the physical details of home become broken, fragmentary, divided; but, the mem-
ory also acts in the same instance to reproduce home as an ideal construct of the
mind. The oldness of the home not only lends charm, but is used deliberately by
Pater to signify the depth of the emotion associated with the place. The oldness of
the house connects Florian to a heritage of aristocracy that no longer possesses lit-
eral value. Florian’s connection to the seventeenth-century rococo painter Watteau
becomes an imagined quality of family lineage; but, it demonstrates well that
imaginary or not, how genealogy is perceived works to produce affections within
the individual.
The old house, as when Florian talked of it afterwards he always called it . . .

really was an old house; and an element of French descent in its inmates—
descent from Watteau, the old court-painter, one of whose gallant pieces
still hung in one of the rooms—might explain, together with some other
things, a noticeable trimness and comely whiteness about everything
there—the curtains, the couches, the paint on the walls with which the
light and shadow played so delicately.
As Pater theorizes, aesthetic awareness is birthed out the “two streams of impres-
sions, the sentiments of beauty and pain—recognitions of the visible, tangle, audi-
ble loveliness of things, as a very real and somewhat tyrannous element in
them—and of the sorrow of the world.” The aesthetic education is like an initiation
into the rites of some sacred mystery: the realization that the world apart from
home is filled with innumerable manifestations of suffering. It is an aesthetic the-
ory much like that of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation; for, Pater
theorized that the artist’s awareness of self grows up alongside the artist’s capacity
to comprehend the magnitude of the world. Once suffering has been understood to
exist as the negative movement of life, Pater theorized that “From this point he
could trace two predominate processes of mental change in him—the growth of an
almost diseased sensibility to the spectacle of suffering.” Out of this suffering there
arises the impulse toward the creation of art, “and, parallel with this, the rapid
growth of a certain capacity of fascination by bright color and choice form.”
In the story, Florian’s memory of home recasts the physical place into an ideal-
ization. He wrote that Florian in looking back perceived the house not as it really
was, but as a “half-spiritualized house he could watch the better, over again” out of
which could take place “the gradual expansion of the soul which had come to be
there.” The soul, or personality or the faculty of self-expression, comes to rest within
the memory of home; but the empirical world is not entirely lost either. The phys-
ical world is removed from its literalness as it lodges itself into the mind. The per-
sonality is constructed out of a dialectic between the mind and physical reality, but
the synthesis of the process is the creation of idealizations that manifest in art.
Pater deliberately borrowed from Goethe to explain how the concept of home can
produce in the sensitive child pathos.
And so for Florian that general human instinct was reinforced by this
special home-likeness in the place his wandering soul had happened to
light on, as, in the second degree, its body and earthly tabernacle; the
sense of harmony between his soul and its physical environment became,
for a time at least, like perfectly played music, and the life led there sin-
gularly tranquil and filled with a curious sense of self-possession. The love
of security, of a habitually undisputed standing-ground or sleeping place,
came to count for much in the generation and correcting of his thoughts,
and afterwards as a salutary principle of restraint in all his wanderings of
spirit. The wistful yearnings towards home, in absence from it, as the
shadows of evening deepened, and he followed in thought what he was
doing there from hour to hour, interpreted to him much of a yearning
and regret he experienced afterwards, towards he knew not what, out of
strange ways of feeling and thought in which, from time to time, his spirit
found itself alone.
The artist is left alone with himself; but, this condition, rather existential, is not in-
tended to lead to mere bathos or tragedy. Instead, the artist’s solitude is the birth
of art.
Lowell’s “91 Revere Street,” much like Pater’s Imaginary Portraits, tells the story
of how a young boy grows into an awareness of his aesthetic disposition. They are
both portraits of the artist as a young man. If we read Life Studies as something ad-
ditional to Lowell’s public description of his awkwardly upsetting details over his
mental breakdown and the woes of marriage, we find that “91 Revere Street” con-
tains a vision of a bildungsroman, or the story of an aesthetic education.
Lowell’s “91 Revere Street” opens deliberately with a reference to a family por-
trait. As a child Lowell describes how he would sit and view “my Cousin Cassie
Mason Myers-Julian-James’s privately printed Biographical Sketches: A Key to a Cab-
inet of Heirlooms in the Smithsonian Museum,” all the while imaginatively ascribing
exotic characteristics to his relative Mordecai. Starting with only the fact that
Mordecai lacked a “Christian name,” he surmised that “Undoubtedly Major
Mordecai had lived in a more ritualistic, gaudy, and animal world than twentieth-
century Boston.”
We might be reminded as well of Florian’s relationship to the portrait that
proudly hung in his childhood home, that of the French court painter Watteau.
Neither the portrait of Mordecai Myers in Lowell’s narrative nor that of Watteau
in Pater’s text can reveal authentic identity. By definition a portrait appears to offer
a fixed and immutable image. Lowell’s description of Mordecai is cliché and un-
fortunately an example of colonial classifications of ethnicity; but, at the same time
Mordecai represented to Lowell an interesting and powerful contrast to the cold,
austere world of Boston.
There was something undecided, Mediterranean, versatile, almost double-

faced about his bearing which suggested that, even to his contemporaries,
he must have seemed gratuitously ci-devant and parvenu. He was a dark
man, a German Jew—no downright Yankee, but maybe such a fellow as
Napolean’s mad, pomaded son-of-an-innkeeper general, Junot, Duc
D’Abrantes; a man like mad George III’s pomaded, disreputable son,
“Prinny,” the Prince Regent. Or he was one of those Moorish-looking dons
painted by his contemporary, Goya—some leader of Spanish guerrillas
against Bonaparte’s occupation, who fled to South America. Our Major’s
suffering, almond eye rested on his luxurious dawn-colored fingers ruffling
an off-white glove.
In spite of the flawed nature of the depiction, Lowell had only his childhood mem-
ory of Mordecai’s portrait to go by.
Major Mordecai Myer’s portrait has been mislaid past finding, but out of
my memories I often come on it in the setting of our Revere Street house,
a setting now fixed in the mind, where it survives all the distortions of fan-
tasy, all the blank befogging of forgetfulness. There, the vast number of re-
membered things remain rocklike. Each is in its place, each has its function,
its history, its drama. There, all is preserved by that motherly care that one
either ignored or resented in his youth. The things and their owners come
back urgent with life and meaning—because finished, they are endurable
and perfect.
The value of Mordecai’s portrait becomes the occasion for Lowell to reflect upon
the meaning of the aesthetic in general. The aesthetic, he surmises, is determined
by looking backwards, toward the past. Lowell’s childhood is marked by a preco-
cious awareness that leads to the development of a sentimental, romantic dispo-
sition. The acute awareness Lowell experienced in regard to his family’s social
status and his parents’ cold mannerisms toward one another tinges his childhood
world with a feeling of melancholy mixed with anxiety. Lowell wrote introspec-
tively, “I was a churlish, disloyal, romantic boy, and quite without hero worship
for my father, whose actuality seemed so inferior to the photographs in uniform

he once mailed us from the Golden Gate.”
At the center of “91 Revere Street” is the problem of how a lack of security con-
nected with home affects Lowell’s internal, psychological and emotional develop-
ment as a child. Lowell looks for places in his father’s life that would reveal utter
masculinity. Hoping to find a world completely apart from the feminine, a world
where the idealizations of battle and adventure might take their course, he finds
mostly a retreating image of his father. Lowell describes how as a boy he retreated
into a world of material objects, discovering there a few bastions of the masculine
against the feminine. The “rhinoceros hide” chair in his father’s “den-parlor,” with
its “notched, adjustable back,” and its texture “black, cracked, hacked, scratched,
splintered, gouged, initialed, gunpowder-charred and tumbler-ringed” held a feel-
ing of physical beauty, even if the appearance did not. The chair takes on an air of
the romantic and the nostalgic as Lowell describes his mental associations con-
nected to his memories of his father’s chair, “It looked like pale tobacco leaves laid
on dark tobacco leaves.”
The relationship of physical beauty tied to material objects and the realization
that life is not permanent is part of the Paterian aesthetic. Pater hypothesized
“[the] desire of physical beauty mingled itself early [with] the fear of death—the
fear of death intensified by the desire of beauty.” As Pater described the dualities of
the aesthetic temperament, “the relationship between life and death, had been sug-
gested spontaneously in the natural course of his mental growth by a strong innate
sense for the soberer tones in things, further strengthened by actual circumstances.”
With Lowell, we find that the struggle between masculine and feminine energies
(and their various representations) is constant. In the description of listening to his
parents’ war of words, which was perpetual, he observed of himself a loss of self,
“Though I couldn’t be sure that I had caught the meaning of the words, I followed
the sounds as though they were a movie. I felt drenched in my parents’ passions.”
Much of Pater’s “The Child in the House” labored to demonstrate the affections
of Florian for his father. In Pater, the death of the father culminates in an almost
literal form of “hero-worship.” Florian as a boy had no actual knowledge of death
or what the event of one’s passing even looked like. Florian experiences the loss as
vulnerability toward life, “No benign, grave figure in beautiful soldier’s things any
longer abroad in the world for his protection.” When Florian learned of his father’s
death he had no physical reality of death, and so he constructed an idealization.
The child had heard indeed of the death of his father, and how, in the In-
dian station, a fever had taken him, so that though not in action he had yet
died as a soldier; and hearing of the ‘resurrection of the just,’ he could think
of him as still abroad in the world, somehow, for his protection—a grand
though perhaps rather terrible figure, in beautiful soldier’s things, like the
figure in the picture of Joshua’s Vision in the Bible—and of that, round
which the mourners moved so softly, and afterwards with such solemn
singing, as but a worn-out garment left at a deserted lodging.
With both Pater and Lowell, there is a focus upon the father as a soldier. Florian
has no desire to know his father as a man, only as a saint or a conqueror, as mag-
nanimous. Lowell sees all too clearly his father’s emotional frailties and the forced
recognition of his father as merely a man.
Lowell reverses the normal connection between father and son. Instead of ex-
pressing sentimental affections for his father, “91 Revere Street” depicts the ir-
reparable emotional scarring that Lowell experienced as a child. Lowell’s
perception of his father as emotionally weak, psychologically sterile, and financially
ineffective produces the effect of symbolically destroying the image of the father’s
masculinity. But Lowell also created surrogates for his father through an exercise of
the imagination. Lowell noted, “My real love, as Mother used to insist to all new
visitors, was toy soldiers. For a few months at the flood tide of this infatuation,
people were ciphers to me—valueless except for increasing my armies of soldiers.”
And as Lowell wrote, “. . . I enjoyed being allowed to draw Father’s blunt dress
sword, and I was proud of our Major Mordecai . . . I used to stand dangerously out
in the middle of Revere Street in order to see through our windows and gloat on
this portrait’s scarlet waistcoat blazing in the bare, Spartan whiteness of our den-
parlor.” Lowell’s choice of color is deliberate and vivid. Lowell felt suffocated by the
“whiteness” and austerity of the Boston lifestyle. By contrast, Mordecai’s world had
been one of motion and liveliness, a seemingly colorful world of ritual, of histori-
cal tradition. Lowell could find very little of this motion in his parents’ world of
semi-disastrous Sunday dinners with naval officers or in the anti-climactic stories
of the leisured.
chapter eight
Flights of the Mind and

the Limits of Empathy
My soul dried up.

Like a soul cast into fire, but not completely,
not to annihilation. Parched,
it continued. Brittle,
not from solitude but from mistrust,
the aftermath of violence.
—Louise Gluck, “The Garment”
What I have hoped to demonstrate pertaining to Lowell is the possibility of read-

ing his poetry through routes other than a confessional framework. Because so much
of the current climate of our poetry is dominated by the persistence of ripple effects
of the mid-twentieth-century confessional school of poets, with Lowell as the pro-
genitor of the movement, the fallacy reigns supreme in our own era that a confes-
sional poem by its very structure and constitution must articulate some component
of a sick self. Rarely is a healthy conception of self expressed in a confessional poem,
perhaps for the fact that a set of assumptions have been made surrounding the role
of poetry as therapy. The source of the confusion is traceable to the role the confes-
sional school of poets —Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, Randall Jar-
rell, Delmore Schwarz, W.D. Snodgrass, John Berryman—played in defining what
it would mean to allow poetry to express the private, the personal, and the emotional.
These poets produced work that came of age in the midst of a climate of social
revolution, but the outcome of the experiment with social revolution was not as lib-
erating as many who sacrificed their lives and interests had hoped it would turn out.
Lowell’s understanding of the confessional poem was quite different from that
of his contemporaries. It should also be kept in mind that the label of confessional
poet was one that Lowell did not particularly like. To read Lowell primarily as such
misses the grand spectrum of what he accomplished as a poet—his subjects were
Christianity, spirituality, Roman History, the regional narratives of New England,
place as an extension of consciousness, time, the psychical self (not the isolated ego
of the consumer society), the existential conditions of humanity, and the phenom-
enological relationship between culture and the formation of personality.
To the extent that Lowell wrote directly and unequivocally about himself, he
treated his own life as an aesthetic object. His technique was derived from an
equally impressive plethora of sources—Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Hart
Crane, Ford Maddox Ford, Eliot, Pound, Gerald Manley Hopkins. Not all of his
sources are agreeable figures for what they individually represented in their world-
views—Allen Tate and Ransom certainly were not. And he drew from his con-
temporaries and was influenced by their innovations as much as they were
influenced by his—Randall Jarrell’s solitude intersects with his own, Charles
Olson’s Maximus Poems seem an extension of Lowell’s New England. It is just that
Olson stripped this New England bare of its Puritan past, preferring instead to re-
place it with the Sumerian and Mesopotamian myths. And, Karl Shapiro’s The
Bourgeois Poet dissected Cold War America before Life Studies. At the simplest of
levels, self-expression is not synonymous with therapy. Confessional poetry was a
new moment in the history of Western ideas about the propriety of art to alter the
value of the aesthetic to psychology. It was not merely that the confessional poets
chose to discuss openly topics that could be deemed as offensive (depending upon
the reader) or were “shameful” and that the poet should see as “honor-bound” to
leave unsaid (as Rosenthal had once claimed in reference to Life Studies).
The problem is that the first generation of confessional poets may have misper-
ceived their own task—the goal of therapy should be (if we may apply imperatives)
the healing of the self. The therapeutic value of the confessional poets is lost when
we consider that their craft did not release them of their anguish, or even neces-
sarily lessen it; in fact, there is some evidence that in the case of Plath the submis-
sion of the mind to a constant repetition of the exploration of the theme of suicide
may have only increased her mind’s flight toward the topic. In “Ariel,” she describes
the feeling of mental illness as a “substanceless blue/Pour of tor and distances.” In
order to overcome the “stasis” that sits, waiting in “darkness” for her, the only imag-
inative route she can envision is to turn herself into an arrow that will shoot
through the blue and the dark, attacking it, and coming out on the other side. But
FLIGHTS OF THE MIND AND THE LIMITS OF EMPATHY | 137
since the blue and dark are in this life for the poet, to surpass and conquer means
to come out on the other side of life.
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child’s cry
Melts in the wall.

And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies

Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Plath believed herself to be capable of surviving suicides the way a stunt person be-
lieves himself to be capable of walking away from an orchestrated car crash on a
Hollywood movie set. The problem with such logic is that if the details of the or-
chestration should go awry, the stunt is over.
The connection between confessional poetry and therapy as a healing solution
to mental illness is erroneous, and consequently dangerous. But there is a distant
connection between art and death, or art and thanatos. At a subconscious level the
interplay of forces between artistic productivity and the sacrifice of self to achiev-
ing creativity can mime a therapeutic value. Derrida in The Gift of Death discussed
what he perceived as the metaphysical relationship between the sharing of a “se-
cret” with another and the effect of such sharing upon the psyche.
A secret always makes you tremble. Not simply quiver or shiver, which
also happens, but tremble. A quiver can of course manifest fear, anguish,
apprehension of death; as when one quivers in advance of what is to
come . . . it is a moment in passing, an intended time of seduction. A
quiver is not always very serious, it is sometimes very discreet, barely dis-
cernible, somewhat epi-phenomenal. It prepares for, rather than follows
the event. One could say that water quivers before it boils; that is the idea
that I was referring to as seduction: a superficial pre-boil, a preliminary
and visible agitation.
On the other hand, trembling, at least as a sign or a symptom, is some-
thing that has already taken place, as in the case of an earthquake [trem-
blement de terre] or when one trembles all over. It is no longer preliminary,
even if, unsettling everything so as to imprint upon the body an irrepress-
ible shaking, the event that makes one tremble portends and threatens still.
It suggests that violence is going to break out again, that some traumatism,
will insist on being repeated.
The apprehension that a violence of the mind will once again overshadow reason,
supplant it, allowing self-destruction to erupt, and mental illness to reappear, is dis-
cernible in Plath’s “Lady Lazarus.”
I have done it again

One year in every ten
I manage it—
And yet, she believes herself impervious to the final consequence, that she can out
cheat her own illness.
Dying,
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
Derrida’s statement (although he never intended it in regard to poetry) if ap-

plied to the confessionals brings the puzzle of their art around to the question of
“secrecy” and “trembling.” Derrida’s statement is not that different from Freud’s
theory about trauma. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud had conjectured that
reliving psychically traumatic events could both cause further forms of neurosis
while also temporarily relieving repressions.
It is clear that the greater part of what is re-experienced under the com-
pulsion to repeat must cause the ego unpleasure, since it brings to light ac-
tivities of repressed instinctual impulses. That, however, is unpleasure of a
kind we have already considered and does not necessarily contradict the
pleasure principle: unpleasure for one system and simultaneously satisfying
for the other.
In 1963, Plath gassed herself while her children lay asleep in their English flat.
In 1965, Randall Jarrell was hit by a car but it is believed by most that it was a sui-
cide. Delmore Schwartz, although he did not commit suicide, when he died in 1966
in New York it came at the end of his suffering from extreme, prolonged periods of
intense paranoia. In 1972 John Berryman walked along a Minneapolis bridge and
threw himself off it. In 1974, Anne Sexton decided to incarnate her poems about
Plath’s suicide “Sylvia’s Death” and “Wanting to Die.”
In 1977, Lowell was still searching for love from two women, one his wife and
the other his ex-wife, when he died of natural causes—a heart attack—in a taxicab.
It is tempting to apply the contemporary poet Louise Gluck’s (often labeled a con-
fessional poet) comment about death and love to Lowell. Although Gluck was en-
visioning her own life in the poem, “The Queen of Carthage” (Vita Nova), in a
retelling of the myth of Dido and Aeneas, her words create a metaphor for under-
standing the confessional poet’s plight.
Brutal to love,
More brutal to die.
And brutal beyond the reaches of justice
To die of love.
Is the act of suicide one that involves dying from a lack of love, self-love perhaps?
Most likely not. But when we read the poems of the confessionals against their lives
we are tempted to think so.
While Lowell did not succumb in the end to suicide, he spent the majority of
his adult life dying to love while locked into the incapacity of actually seeming to
do so at a level that met his own self-created ideals. It might be said, twisting
Gluck’s words, that for the confessional poet it was brutal to live, more brutal to
create poetry, “and brutal beyond the reaches of justice” to live for poetry.
One question to ask might be how did Lowell outlive his fellow confessionals
in spite of the severity of his manic depression? Roethke, never labeled truly as a
confessional poet, died in swimming pool in 1963, also of a heart attack. Roethke’s
mental illness was at times extreme, and more than once he had to be hauled off in
his lunacy by the police. It is not by any means an empirically provable argument,
but it is tempting to conjecture that Lowell and Roethke, although each racked by
mental illness, may have avoided the ultimate self-defeat of suicide as a result of
their poetry. Unlike Plath who became by the time of the Ariel poems almost com-
pletely self-absorbed in keeping track of her psychical wounds, Lowell and
Roethke to a greater extent than several of their contemporaries of confessional
poetry found other themes besides confession to embrace, and in fact believed
these themes to be of greater pleasure and significance. It may not be entirely a
sound argument, but it is plausible that too much attention given over to psychical
suffering and the self as a fallen object may have only exacerbated the conditions
of mental illness of Plath and others.
It is a question to be asked, although one that is impossible to answer, if the
constant reliving of the psychical trauma or traumas through the act of recreating
the event(s) through art and/or writing/poetry may not ‘block’ in some sense re-
covery from the past. If the past could be written about, left behind in the realm of
art, and then transcended, the confessional poem as a work of therapy might have
then genuine therapeutic value and cathartic benefits.
W.D. Snodgrass in “Reconstructions” (After Experience) described his relation-
ship with his daughter, through the prism of her worried but happy condition of
childhood, as that of patients who tend to each other.
We are like patients who rehearse

Old unbearable scenes
Day after day after day.
I memorize you, bit by bit,
And must restore you in my verses
To sell to magazines.
This problem the first generation of confessional poets faced—their identification

of their psychological maladies with art, and the line between the internal and the
external having been smudged to such a degree the present was rendered indistin-
guishable from the traumatic past—wove its way into the second generation of
confessional poets (those poets writing in the 1970s, 1980s). The collapse of neuro-
sis into poetry, and the conflation of self-expression into the reliving of forms of
personal victimization, brings us to an ethical consideration. If the poet is reduced
to the expression of neurosis rooted in psychical trauma, and because the manifes-
tations of neurosis repeat as patterns of thought and behavior in the sufferer, the
confessional poem can then be transformed (too easily) into a medium by which
neurosis may be endlessly reenacted. The result is that so long as the confessional
poet is unable to conceptualize a reality outside his or her own trauma, the poet no
longer is a visionary of the future but a failed oracle who can only speak in frag-
mented symbols of the past.
One of the great flaws the confessional poets collectively held was that they gave
the impression in their poems of living chained to the past. As Simone de Beauvoir
in The Ethics of Ambiguity put it, the individual cannot withstand a life held to the
past, for it goes against the finer components of the self. She wrote, “But the present
is not a potential past; it is the moment of choice and action,” and as such it requires
our active volition and choice. We need a sense of self-initiated agency that extends
or projects the individual into the world of living activity and makes the individual
a part of a larger web of social connection. As Beauvoir said, “We cannot avoid liv-
ing it [the present] through a project; and there is no project which is purely con-
templative since one always projects himself toward something, toward the future; to
put oneself ‘outside’ is still a way of living the inescapable fact that one is inside ...
One can not justify all that is by asserting that everything may equally be the object
of contemplation, since man never contemplates: he does.” For the confessional poet
tied to creating an art bound to the perpetual of psychical traumas of the past, the
“project” of the future becomes a prison, if not also a prism and a glass house. Glass
houses break, prisons require release, and prisms skew the sight and vision.
If we return to Lowell, if he was a confessional poet he was so in a very limited
context of his own work. His greatest contribution to poetry was the break he cre-
ated within high modernism away from formalism and toward the expression of
the personal and the emotive, but how the first generation of confessional poets
chose to interpret that freedom and license was an open experiment. The greater
examination of the human propensity toward violence occurred in his poetry at the
level of the historical, the collective, and the cultural, not at the level of the autobi-
ographical. There is no denying that Lowell was qualitatively of a different caliber
than the other confessional poets of his generation. If he accepted his psychologi-
cal condition as a fact of his biology, he did not embrace it as a personal myth to
wrap his identity in. His real identity, he seemed to say, still lay buried beneath the
ridiculousness of his situation. Much of his autobiographical poetry is his quest to
discover a sense of self apart from the external trappings of his manic and depres-
sive patterns of behavior. The better self he hoped might still be found.
In “Waking in Blue” Lowell describes what appeared to him as the foolishness
and absurdity of his own condition. Rosenthal in Sailing into the Unknown, called
the confessional poem a direct expression of “psychical nakedness.” This one poem
may very well be the only in Lowell’s corpus that truly reflects such a state of being.
The opening stanza, sets the scene for the poet’s waking up in a mental hospital and
realizing that while, on the one hand he must belong there as he has suffered yet
another manic episode and been brought there, nonetheless, he perceives himself
as not belonging to his clinical surroundings because he is, after all, above having
been reduced to the level of illness. The poet is essentially right—he is superior to
the hospital conditions. In a sense he does not belong there, and yet, there he is.
The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,

rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head
propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My heart grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)
His awareness is keen and heightened as he takes in his surroundings while mus-
ing on his placement among the truly insane; but, the poet resists wrapping his
mind around a complete embrace of the experience, looking instead for ways of
imaginative escape. The string of comparisons established throughout the re-
mainder of the poem keep the poet at a rational distance from the event of his
breakdown.
The comparisons involve the poet’s measurement of self against those he per-
ceives as belonging to their surroundings, despite their once elite status in life.
There is Stanley, a roommate at the hospital, “once a Harvard all-American full-
back,” now reduced to wearing the same “crimson gold-cap, worn all day, all
night,” who suffers from anorexia and so “he thinks only of his figure,/of slim-
ming on sherbet and ginger ale.” The loss of words that go hand in hand with the
extremity of being removed from society is the poet’s greater fear (not his mania),
and the fear is triggered as he watches Stanley soaking in an old tub, “vaguely uri-
nous from the Victorian plumbing” who has become detrimentally “more cut off
from words than a seal.” There is “Bobbie,” too, who “swashbuckles about in his
birthday suit/and horses at chairs.” The poet considers himself against the reflec-
tion of these cut figures of real lunacy, coming to a stance of ironic remoteness. The
final lines of the poem, “We are all old-timers,/each of us holds a locked razor,”
may signify inclusion, but the poet does not really mean it. Against the swash-
buckling and the empty soaking of men in their decline, having descended to an-
imal like existences, the poet finds some room for hope—“Cock of the walk,/I
strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey/before the metal shaving mirrors.”
A strut may not mean much in the mental ward, but in the instance of the poet’s
predicament it may mean a lot. He is still in firm grip of what the others have
lost—rationality and irony.
The greater number, however, of Lowell’s confessional poems, particularly those
dealing with themes of marriage, self-seclusion and the incapacity to love, are often
at times more lyrical in structure and content that they are conveyances of “psychi-
cal nakedness.” If we accept Rosenthal’s definition of the modern lyric, poems like
“Man and Wife” and “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” become renditions
of crises that spark in the poet a desire to create a sense of harmony denied by the
reality of the circumstances.
The characteristic lyric poem of the past two centuries begins with recog-
nition of a real situation that has perhaps elusively melancholy overtones,
or with a direct statement of a feeling of sadness or precarious balance. It
moves into a sense of the complexity of the relationships and feelings it is
contemplating, often marked by a sense of confusion and of the breaking
down of normal distinctions. It ends with something like reconciliation,

but on a closer examination the reconciliation consists in the speaker’s
recognition of a drastically and tragically unchangeable reality.
In “Man and Wife,” Lowell describes a sleepless night with his wife, after hav-
ing spent a fourth round at hospitalization for his mania. There, Lowell tells of the
mental drama shared between him and his wife, and how after she has rescued him
yet again, they have both calmed down, artificially, with the aid of miltown (a tran-
quilizer that was introduced in the 1950s). But, the sedate state the poet finds him-
self in does not really calm him or take the edge off of his thoughts, mingled as they
are with guilt and observation.
Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed;

the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,
abandoned, almost Dionysian,
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five days’ white
All night I’ve held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—
Nature plays an interesting role in the lines, as the poet’s subjective inner aware-
ness merges with the landscape outside his window. The rising sun has taken on the
affective state of sinking into the couple’s emotional storm. Still, the light shines
through and brings into focus for the poet the reality of the room and as his eye
rests upon the magnificence of the bed-posts, his mind carries him into a vague
(yet, present) remembrance of his mother’s emotional coldness. The natural world
of the magnolia blossoms “ignite” with the fire, too, blending with his manic ram-
page of five days, which in the poet’s sedated mind have become not a blur but a
blank—white.
In spite of the tremendous destruction the poet has wrecked upon his wife, and
she now “hollow” from the numerous bouts of his near “homicidal” rants, the poet
tries to give comfort, although he is himself comfortless. The lines evoke the lyri-
cism of Pound’s “The House of Splendour” (Personae). In Pound, the poet’s love in-
terest is likened to a rising sun, hellish for the redness of her light—not angelic. She
is unattainable for her being beyond the realm of the literal four walls of the room,
walls that have enclosed both her and the poet.
And I have seen my Lady in the sun,

Her hair was spread about, a sheaf of wings,
And red the sunlight was, behind it all.
She has taken on flight, guided by her hellish light. Rosenthal writing of the
qualitative nature of the poetic lyric once said, “Hardness is not always a value in
human thought and feeling, not when it precludes sensibility to reality and open-
ness to change.” In both Pound and Lowell, the “hardness” of the poet’s condi-
tion is broken in upon by a feminine essence. In the resolution of “Man and
Wife,” the image of the feminine is hellish for its “merciless” emptiness, and yet
this essence seduces, too, with the absence that she creates even while present.
She is like the sun in its war paint, filling the room, but turning her back on the
poet’s aching need.
Now twelve years later, you turn your back.

Sleepless, you hold
your pillow to your hollows like a child;
your old-fashioned—
loving, rapid, merciless—
breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.
The image of the feminine as a force likened to the sea that breaks the poet’s
“head,” the place of his worst dramas unfurled, in turn breaks the poet out of his
madness and forces in a sense his return to the land of the living. The image pro-
duces a resonance with Pound’s “Song From ‘Die Harzreise’” (Personae).
Thy head I will cover over

With my waves’ clarity
Till though forget thy sorrow,
O wounded sorrowfully.
The whole of “Man and Wife,” that it takes place in a bedroom filled with mar-
ital disturbances, and the intimacy concealed by the mother’s bed (and the mother’s
emotional coldness configured as the poet’s heirloom or the poet’s own personal
sense of inheritance), too resonates with the final stanza of Pound’s “The House of
Splendour.”
Here I am come perforce my love of her,

Behold mine adoration
Maketh me clear, and there are powers in this

Which, played on by the virtues of her soul,
Break down the four-square walls of standing time.
In Pound, the room itself is broken down, and consequently the seductive move-
ment of time is made to halt. With time motionless, transcendence is not achieved
(as one might expect). Rather, the poet must confess that there are some “powers”
his soul cannot withstand, just as there are some “powers” that move him beyond
a point of reason.
Lowell’s “Man and Wife” imitates such lyrical movement, wherein the resolu-
tion is infinitely deferred by the reality of the poet’s mental condition. In “To Speak
of Woe That Is in Marriage,” there, the poet attempts to imagine sympathetically
what his wife must see when she envisions him. She makes him much worse than
he is, but he cannot deny, that although an imperfect mirroring, the image holds a
degree of truth.
The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.

Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen.
My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
And hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
Free-lancing out along the razor’s edge.
Kafka once wrote (Blue Octavo Notebooks), “We were expelled from Paradise,
but it was not destroyed. The expulsion from Paradise was in one sense a piece of
good fortune, for if we had not been expelled, Paradise would have had to be de-
stroyed. Lowell approached the question of the ideal versus the real from a slightly
different perspective—because we try to create paradise we destroy ourselves.
Marriage was for Lowell perhaps the greatest paradise of humanly contrived
form; for, it is there within it he seemed to imagine an earthly Platonic ideal. And
yet, as his confessional poems testify it was just this paradise that in the end always
seemed to fail and offer only destruction for the soul, not the soul’s redemption
from itself.
Elsewhere in “Skunk Hour,” Lowell fantasizes about a marriage he never had
with the poet Elizabeth Bishop. The poem “Skunk Hour,” dedicated to Bishop, en-
visions love from a distance. Because the poet cannot participate in love but only
watches others partake, so the poet’s mind becomes cut off from the surrounding
world and becomes its own hell. It is all so rather Miltonic of the poet. For in total
absence, there is privation, as Augustine said, and so living in absence the poet is
swallowed up by the void of night.
A car radio bleats,

“Love, O careless Love . . .” I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody’s here—
That so much of his poetry is swallowed up like Christ’s grave is in “As a Plane Tree
by the Water” by apocalyptic imagery, generative violence, and genealogical vio-
lence does not mean that in the end Lowell was a violent poet (as Adam Kirsch has
suggested in The Wounded Surgeon). The answer to why Lowell concentrated so
heavily on the theme of violence has more to do with his recognition that human-
ity will always, as it always has, set ideals in place for the collective organization of
the individual and society, and that these ideals will inevitably deconstruct them-
selves given time. The process of that deconstruction has typically been violent as
history attests. To paraphrase Emil Brunner in Man in Revolt, the history of hu-
manity has been the attempt of measuring itself against God. For Lowell, human-
ity has measured itself against its ideal projections of God, but also authority,
fatherhood, motherhood, marriage, and finally the self as a measure of its own
shadow. Even absence and distance can be useful places for a poet to visit so long
as the way back from them is known.
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Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following:

Various extracts from The Complete Poems and Plays by T. S. Eliot

© 2013 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

All rights reserved.

To my parents, my son, my husband

Those blessed creatures, plot and rhyme—

1. Robert Lowell, the Puritan Past, and a World of Evil 1

Robert Lowell, the

I am moved by fancies that are curled

2 | ROBERT LOWELL AND THE CONFESSIONAL VOICE

ROBERT LOWELL , THE PURITAN PAST, AND A WORLD OF EVIL | 3

4 | ROBERT LOWELL AND THE CONFESSIONAL VOICE

ROBERT LOWELL , THE PURITAN PAST, AND A WORLD OF EVIL | 5

What placed in the Sun: and yet my ware,

6 | ROBERT LOWELL AND THE CONFESSIONAL VOICE

Shall ardent love to Christ enfire the Heart?

But listen, Soule, here seest thou not a Cheate.

ROBERT LOWELL , THE PURITAN PAST, AND A WORLD OF EVIL | 7

Make me, O Lord, thy Spinning Wheele compleate.

In “Huswifery,” the spinning wheel leads to metaphysical understanding: “Then

Wallowing in this bloody sty,

8 | ROBERT LOWELL AND THE CONFESSIONAL VOICE

perimeters of Christendom. The fisherman discovers there is violence, not mercy, in

Is there no way to cast my hook

ROBERT LOWELL , THE PURITAN PAST, AND A WORLD OF EVIL | 9

A brackish reach of shoal oﬀ Madaket,—

10 | ROBERT LOWELL AND THE CONFESSIONAL VOICE

This is the dead land

ROBERT LOWELL , THE PURITAN PAST, AND A WORLD OF EVIL | 11

12 | ROBERT LOWELL AND THE CONFESSIONAL VOICE

ROBERT LOWELL , THE PURITAN PAST, AND A WORLD OF EVIL | 13

identification and partial non-identification of the church with the kingdom of

Destiny waits in the hand of God, shaping the still unshapen:

14 | ROBERT LOWELL AND THE CONFESSIONAL VOICE

ROBERT LOWELL , THE PURITAN PAST, AND A WORLD OF EVIL | 15

16 | ROBERT LOWELL AND THE CONFESSIONAL VOICE

ROBERT LOWELL , THE PURITAN PAST, AND A WORLD OF EVIL | 17

18 | ROBERT LOWELL AND THE CONFESSIONAL VOICE

ROBERT LOWELL , THE PURITAN PAST, AND A WORLD OF EVIL | 19

myth could anchor the individual in a society uprooted by a loss of tradition. In

20 | ROBERT LOWELL AND THE CONFESSIONAL VOICE

ROBERT LOWELL , THE PURITAN PAST, AND A WORLD OF EVIL | 21

22 | ROBERT LOWELL AND THE CONFESSIONAL VOICE

taken up the question of whether the patient-psychologist relationship could ever

It is a recognition of this fact which has led some psychoanalysts to intro-

ROBERT LOWELL , THE PURITAN PAST, AND A WORLD OF EVIL | 23

24 | ROBERT LOWELL AND THE CONFESSIONAL VOICE

A very little thing, a little worm,

On Windsor Marsh, I saw the spider die

In a short review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, “Poetry as Confession,” written

26 | ROBERT LOWELL AND THE CONFESSIONAL VOICE

One thinks, “Behind everything

28 | ROBERT LOWELL AND THE CONFESSIONAL VOICE

30 | ROBERT LOWELL AND THE CONFESSIONAL VOICE

which the libido is constantly being transformed into object-libido, and

Translating Lowell’s fascination with Jarrell’s exploration of the theme of soli-