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Lowell on Lowell, and Friends
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11855 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1987 |
3,440 Words |
| Author
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David Hallman
David Hallman teaches English at James Madison University |
ROBERT LOWELL
Collected Prose
Robert Giroux, ed.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
377 pp., $25.00
Poetry readings are usually more notable as ceremonial occasions than as memorable events, opportunities to tell one's children, students, or distant friends later that one actually heard so-and-so in the flesh reading from his own work. It doesn't really matter that many of our best poets have been poor readers of their own verse - I think immediately of John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Wallace Stevens - or that, given the difficulty of much modern poetry, one must often listen to unfamiliar works without comprehension and, after a modest passage of time, probably not be able to remember even the titles of the poems one listened to. But during my graduate studies at Duke University (around 1967 or 1968), Robert Lowell came to campus for a formal reading of his own poetry. I attended as much out of curiosity as respect. Lowell's tempers and erratic conduct were already legend, and gossip had it that his audiences could never predict just what he might say or do, or even whether he might perform. There was a kind of notoriety that Dylan Thomas or the younger James Dickey had cultivated. But on this hot afternoon, Lowell was on his best behavior; impeccably dressed in a dark blue suit, he looked and sounded as I imagined a Boston aristocrat should. Speaking in a rich, beautifully modulated voice as he chain smoked, he introduced each poem to place it clearly in perspective for the audience. His readings themselves were elegant and moving, although - true to form - I have forgotten the exact selections. The occasion was probably the most effective reading I have ever attended and certainly did more to introduce me to Lowell's poetry than any classroom study or independent reading would do. I begin with this modest story because, although I would never meet Lowell or even see him again, it revealed to me an attractive, sympathetic gentleman poet quite different from the wild figure that rumor had established. And while the legend certainly had its truths, as we can learn from Ian Hamilton's fine biography, it is the restrained, sensitive, and intelligent figure of that afternoon some twenty years ago that we meet in this interesting collection of Lowell's Collected Prose, edited and introduced by Robert Giroux.
If Lowell's place in American literature as a poet is secure, his occasional prose and literary criticism are almost unknown. In a 1961 Paris Review interview by Frederick Seidel, included in this volume, he responded
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