Robert Lowell: A Biography Read Online Free PDF

sorcery and death. I think “Cousin Annie” deserves a sound spanking. I don’t know how much Anne has told you, but we are engaged. Reality and time crawl on us fast before we know it. 2 months ago marriage, working for a living ect. seemed far away at least 3 or 4 years in the future and now the curtain appears to have fallen almost overnight. I love her and know her as deeply and as much as anyone could in a few weeks, but must admit that she has not yet the same reality to me as you have and that the trial and tempering of the blade all lie in the future. The realities and problems are extremely powerful perhaps glorious, but at the same time infinitely sober. Can she or should she burn thru her neurosis? My indirect work with her this summer will partially answer the question perhaps. Will we be able to float our feather against the winds. All I should like to consider definite about the future is that you and I and Anne (Bobo? More?) will live and fight thru life together always working toward realizing our ideals. We have got to think about living conditions, making money; we must not compromise and sink into school teaching, we must break away from our relations and throw aside all convention that we cannot believe in. I want you to think on these things, to be a friend of Anne’s just as you are mine, to help her and tell me what is happening and to realise that you are and always will be a definite and imperative factor. I am afraid this letter has the tone of a campaign speech, but after all that’s just what we are beginning.
    Could buy a cheap one volume Shakespeare for Bobo [Blair Clark]. The Oxford (Cambridge) at Grolier also Marlow complete you can get one of those green volumes in Cambridge for a dollar or two. Let me hear from you in a day or two.
    Cal.
    P.S. Try and persuade Anne to come down to Nantucket with you. 8 [All misspellings are in the original]
    Lowell himself intended to spend the summer “wrestling with technique” and would try his hand at “satire and prose.” He was also dabbling in the fashionable moderns: Aldous Huxley he was to find “so insipid and dull that I could endure but sixty pages,” but Wyndham Lewis’s Snooty Baronet won marks for “ rough-hewn craftsmanship.” There is no evidence that he was reading Auden at this time, but who else might have caused him to “ wonder if the Old Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry isn’t coming back, loosened up a bit and strengthened by assonances and off-rhymes ”? 9
    What is certain is that Lowell had been deep in Eliot and Pound during his year at Harvard (and also William Carlos Williams, under the encouragement of James Laughlin), and a comparison between the work he was sending to Richard Eberhart in the summer of 1935 and his work in 1936 shows an immense gain in directness and self-confidence. In 1935 he was blusteringly Miltonic, and most of his verse was, as he later called it, “grand, ungrammatical and had a timeless, hackneyed quality”: 10
    Turn back, look down, then turn thy face away
    Look up, away, thy eyelids to the ground
    See! God is shining forth in midst of day
    There see! He stands on yonder sloping mound
    The air is vibrant, swollen with the sound;
    His voice is sung by birds, the song of mirth,
    Of Eden lost and now forever found,
    Of love immortal, Spring, and mercy’s birth
    Of Lord and Savior wandering on the earth.
    All the 1935 poems are in this vein: awesome revelations of the deity (“a gleaming face is bursting through the clouds,” “a mighty soul was sailing out to sea”) or prostrated hymns to the potency of Art (“O Art, I am a beggar at thy shrine”). The voice is always mechanically grandiloquent; archaisms and inversions abound and the meter has a textbook regularity. By the following year all this has changed, and there is a pervading caution in Lowell’s poems, as if he genuinely has become humble about the difficulties of his art: his modest aim now is for accuracy of