American Poet

This volume, published in England by one of the leading contemporary American poets, should interest many if only as a barometer to gauge the present climate of American letters. Robert Lowell has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and has accumulated other honours. But unlike his great last-century namesake he has in the last analysis no new thing to say:

How dry time creaks in its fat axle-grease,
As spare November strikes us through the ice
And the Leviathan breaks water in the rice
Fields, at the poles, at the hot gates of Greece . . .

The terse, wisecracking language, the machine-gun rattle of metaphor never slacken. This juggling resembles superficially the strained language and compression of symbolist masters. But in Lowell’s hands it is an expression of hysteria, not of the profound impulse which alone justifies and sustains a warping of speech. The same fault can be observed in the work of other modern Americans. It stems perhaps from an abundance of hair-splitting criticism and dearth of creative talent in American literary periodicals.

Though most of his poems contain allusions to Church ritual, Lowell ispage 63 not a religious poet. His dominant mood is closer to the baffled nihilism of Kenneth Patchen. His best integrated poems, ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’, ‘The Drunken Fisherman’, ‘Katherine’s Dream’, show the full force of an imagination obsessed with images of guilt and death, and attain the coherence of a vivid dream

. . . 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?

while elsewhere this imagination loses itself in stereotypes, mirroring a stereotyped culture. There is no Spoon River Anthology in contemporary American literature.

1951 (43)