<i>Robert Lowell in Context</i> edited by Thomas Austenfeld and Grzegorz Kość

Following her 2014 National Book Award for Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine cites Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) as an influence, before noting, “It’s difficult to find critical work on the construction of whiteness in Lowell, but that is what I am reading in there—a struggle with that” (quoted in Javadizadeh 2019: 477–78). Rankine’s public and ambivalent engagement with Lowell’s work has encouraged readers to reconsider the poet’s oeuvre and his place in the twenty-first century. It is precisely such a reconsideration that Robert Lowell in Context, edited by Thomas Austenfeld and Grzegorz Kość, provides in its broad range of chapters on the literary, historical, and cultural contexts shaping Lowell’s poetry and writing. Like other volumes in Cambridge University Press’s Literature in Context series, Robert Lowell in Context supplies readers a series of short, accessible chapters—twenty-six in total, along with an introduction—across six parts: “Places,” “American Politics, American Wars,” “Some Literary Models,” “Contemporaries: Modernists and Beyond,” “Life, Illness, and the Arts,” and “Reputation and New Contexts.” Many of the chapters offer brief and often insightful moments of close reading, but as the editors’ introduction states, the focus remains on “a traditional approach” (2) to literary history. The editors and contributors provide context for Lowell’s work “on two historical planes, that of the object of study and that of the literary historian’s present moment.” The collection’s series of interventions thus aims at once to synthesize Lowell’s critical reception, accounting for recent research and biographies, and to open new avenues of interpretation, providing scholars and teachers—both of Lowell and of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poetry more broadly—useful frameworks for an important literary figure.For readers unfamiliar with the arc of Lowell’s career and life, the collection’s first part, “Places,” provides a concise biographical sketch organized chronologically of some of the most important places Lowell lived. The contextualizing work of this first part helpfully sets up the chapters that follow by providing readers an overview of Lowell’s life and writing. In the first chapter, “Boston,” Grzegorz Kość maps class onto the urban landscape, showing how the various changes of address by the Lowell family and by Lowell himself reflected their changing class status. In his discussion of the Boston Common and the notion of public space, Kość also suggests that class anxieties appear imbricated with anxieties about race, a topic that returns in later chapters, such as Jeffrey Gray’s “New York,” which shows Lowell’s often ambivalent relation to the Civil Rights era protests: his critique of police brutality, on the one hand, and his “fear of violence and of racial conflict” (37), on the other.Following this more linear, biographical opening series of chapters, the second part, “American Politics, American Wars,” pursues Lowell’s political activism, as well as his poetic celebrity. In “War,” Walt Hunter argues that a focus “on war helps to bring Lowell’s prosodic changes into relief” (56). This comment—repeated in different ways in different chapters—gestures to one of the collection’s strengths: in its provision of context for Lowell, it also provides different lenses—not always perfectly compatible—through which to read and reread his work. One of the pivotal moments in his career that gets referenced throughout the chapters is emphasized in this part of the collection. As Gray notes earlier, because of his anti–Vietnam War position, Lowell rejected President Johnson’s invitation to the White House in 1965 and published a letter of protest in the New York Times. Other poets, writers, and intellectuals signed on to the letter, the public nature of which made Lowell “a celebrity among activists” (33). The chapters on “War” and “US Presidency” thus offer necessary interventions for such a public and political poet, even one whose commitments often revealed a profound ambivalence.Other early chapters offer less intuitive, but welcome, contributions to the contextualization of Lowell and his work. “American Politics, American Wars” ends, for example, with a chapter entitled “Eco-consciousness.” Here Adam Beardsworth begins by acknowledging Lowell as an unlikely subject of a discussion of “ecological concerns,” yet, he convincingly argues, “even if Lowell’s poetry does not fit within the wilderness tradition, its preoccupation with the anxiety in the Cold War era maps concerns about nuclear—and by extension environmental—catastrophe” (74). Reading the “affective politics” (79) of Lowell’s poetry offers readers yet another way into his body of work, including his confessional poetry, whose focus on the personal becomes broadened by Beardsworth to a staging of the effects of environmental destruction on individual subjects. In other words, Lowell’s poetry proves to be an exemplary mode of expressing the affective politics of ecological destruction and nuclear war and states of being that readers would now recognize as “climate anxiety” (78). Beardsworth thus exemplifies a reading of Lowell on “two historical planes” mentioned in the introduction, and his self-conscious treatment of Lowell’s eco-consciousness constructs useful insights into the poetry’s continued relevance.The following two parts address Lowell’s relationship to other literary figures, movements, and genres, including John Talbot’s discussion of Lowell’s preference for the literature of Imperial Rome “rather than Greece” (87), Stephen Matterson’s chapter on his longstanding engagement with Herman Melville, and Meg Tyler’s reflections on his relation to the “complaint,” as well as a series of chapters on Lowell’s engagement with contemporaries: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, and Elizabeth Bishop.1 Cumulatively, these two parts offer a rich literary field within which to situate Lowell’s work. In some cases, his proximity to other literary figures offers revealing insights, such as his generative relationship to Bishop, whose “mastery of indirection and understatement” “directly inspired” (163) Life Studies and its famous poem, “Skunk Hour”; but his relationships, often ambivalent, also help generate new appreciation of his poetics. For example, according to Philip Coleman, common groupings of Lowell and Berryman as confessional poets wrongly assume that they “share the same poetics, but this is not borne out by a close reading of their work” (144). Coleman’s chapter instantiates the way the collection carefully rehearses familiar readings of Lowell while also providing nuanced qualifications and correctives.The most polemical chapter in the collection appears in the fourth part on contemporaries. In “Warren and Jarrell,” Joan Romano Shifflett argues against the confessional label for its “inaccurate representations of Lowell’s career” (149). For Shifflett, “it is problematic to conceptualize the arc of Lowell’s work as merely a chronological shift between mutually exclusive binaries: closed to open, formal to free, rigorous to loose, objective to subjective, and ‘cooked’ to ‘raw,’ to employ Lowell’s words” (150); instead, she wants readers to recognize the nuanced overlaps across his oeuvre. Arguably—and commendably—none of the chapters in this collection succumb to the misrepresentations criticized by Shifflett. The chapter develops an alternative reading by showing that Warren, Jarrell, and Lowell influenced one another, but they were also all influenced by the work of Robert Frost. Shifflett therefore positions Frost rather than William Carlos Williams as a central influence on Lowell’s work in the 1950s. One of the most productive insights in this chapter is its demonstration that Lowell’s “artistry” “was merely taking on a new shape” (153) in Life Studies. In other words, Lowell—along with Warren and Jarrell—insisted on the imbrication of form and content while constantly searching for new configurations that could achieve their desired effects. There is, then, a continuous, if nonlinear, development both internal to Lowell’s career and with respect to midcentury American poetry.The collection’s critique of the “confessional” label often considered synonymous with Lowell’s poetics and exemplified by Life Studies represents one of its most insightful contributions across its chapters, and this critique occurs most pointedly in parts three and four. For example, in “Plaints,” Tyler suggests “complaint” rather than “confessional” as a generic label for Lowell’s poetry: “There is a ritualistic aspect, a dignity, and a formal investment to plaints that the word confession has not perhaps hinted at since the time of Augustine” (108). The complaint, according to Tyler, emphasizes the “formal, mannered” style that constructs a sense of authenticity. This point is especially crucial today in the era of the memoir and autofiction, genres that often produce an illusory sense of immediacy.2 In his contribution, Stephen Regan offers the most persuasive critique of the confessional mode when applied to Lowell, arguing that reading his work with and through T. S. Eliot enables “a deeper appreciation and understanding of a poetic process that is sometimes too neatly and too simply conveyed as an opposition between impersonality and confessionalism” (124). According to Regan, “Lowell himself did not see any contradiction in writing a poetry that was both ‘impersonal’ in the manner prescribed by Eliot and ‘confessional’ in drawing on the most troubling personal experience” (125).Such a conjunction—or perhaps a disjunctive synthesis—can be helpful for teachers of poetry associated with the confessional label. When reading a Lowell poem like “Waking in the Blue,” or a poem by confessional poets such as Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton, the temptation is to be seduced by the first-person, lyric speaker such that the reader conflates the poetic voice with the authorial voice. For Lowell, this is especially the case in poems in which he offers a seemingly direct representation of his own struggles with mental illness, a topic most elaborately treated by Astrid Franke’s contribution, “Desensationalizing Madness.” When teaching such poems, however, part of the reward comes from showing students how the poetic form carefully shapes and mediates intimate and personal details. It is a mistake, as Coleman argues, to see confessional poetry as “not only personal or autobiographical but solipsistic and disengaged” (145). Recognizing Lowell’s poetic mediation of the personal can be emphasized by attending to details in the poems that have been invented for poetic effect or those that deviate from biographical facts, but, more significantly, the difference between author and lyric speaker can be shown through an attention to the form, style, and figurative economy of the poetic text. In other words, the “authentic” representation of the self is produced through carefully manipulated poetic artifice. As Regan puts it, Lowell himself admired poetry—like Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday”—“that gave compelling artistic form to complex states of thought and feeling” (125).After the two parts devoted to his influences, part five turns to themes particularly significant for interpreting the specific and general concerns of Lowell’s poetics. Thomas Austenfeld’s “Religion,” for example, explores the topic of Lowell’s religiosity to speak to two persistent claims made throughout Robert Lowell in Context. The first is the insistence that Life Studies did not mark a linear break in Lowell’s career, from the dense formalism of the early work to the looser confessionalism of the later work. Instead, as many of the contributors argue, Lowell’s career can be read as a continuous, if often surprising, series of developments; early preoccupations persist just as later confessional gestures can be read in his early interest in drawing on the personal for his poetry, as in “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” (CP 14–18). Austenfeld similarly argues for a continuity across Lowell’s career by following his persistent attention to religion and its ethical implications, in various guises, from his early conversion to Catholicism to his later return to his New England Puritan and Protestant heritage. The second claim has to do with Lowell’s ever-shifting search for a poetic form that can give expression to the inexpressible. “The spiritual nature of the craft of poetry,” Austenfeld writes, “its attempt to express the ineffable in recognizable form, attracted the young Lowell and stayed with him beyond his active participation in the Catholic Church” (176).3 Religion therefore offers a useful heuristic through which readers can trace the ongoing concerns of Lowell’s work across their changing manifestations.The final part of the collection, “Reputation and New Contexts,” addresses Lowell’s relation—personal and poetic—to both gender and race. While both topics appear throughout the collection, they are most extensively addressed in Nikki Skillman’s “Whiteness” and Hannah Baker Saltmarsh’s “Appropriation.” While Lowell’s relationship to racial (mis)representation appears in a variety of chapters—as when Coleman acknowledges, “In some ways, Lowell and Berryman represent the worst excesses of white male institutional privilege in American poetic culture in the second half of the twentieth century” (146)—Skillman’s explicit treatment of this subject offers a necessary contribution. For Skillman, Lowell proves to be aware of race in ways his critics have not always recognized, even if this awareness appears limited and incomplete. His poetic representations of race include the use of a racist epithet in “Colloquy in Black Rock” (CP 11), as well as his (in)famous “blackface” poem, “A Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich” (118). As Skillman and others in the collection acknowledge, Rankine’s “ambivalent allusions to Lowell” (239) in Citizen and in her subsequent interviews have led to an increased attention to his work in relation to race.4 Part of Rankine’s ambivalent attitude has to do with a critical blindness in Lowell’s readers, rather than an inattention by Lowell himself, for failing to recognize “a striking pattern in Lowell’s literary configurations of whiteness in terms of suspended states of liminal awareness” (240). The most extensive textual example offered by Skillman is Lowell’s dramatic adaptation of Melville’s “Benito Cereno.” Matterson’s earlier chapter on Melville helpfully anticipates this reading, providing readers more context for this lesser-known text by Lowell. In a “self-incriminating” move, Lowell identifies most with “the murderous white supremacist Delano,” which reveals a “striking self-awareness about the fragility of his own racial identity and his conflicted views on civil rights” (243). Skillman then rereads Life Studies through the lens of Lowell’s Melville adaptation, which enables her to argue that “Lowell links white power and violence with psychic circumstances . . . that he perceives brewing in the halls of his childhood home and in the fenced-in Public Garden” (246) in Boston. Skillman thus shows that Lowell performs, despite his limited self-awareness, what his critics often fail to recognize, namely, an attention to “the chaotic phenomenological and emotional territory into which the psychic drama of white racialization extends” (247).In the following chapter, “Appropriation,” Saltmarsh continues this critical rereading of Lowell’s work in terms of gender. She considers Lowell’s practice of repurposing language from his private correspondence into the material of his poems, a practice discussed in different ways in many of the earlier chapters. Matterson, for example, claims, “No poet ever had less anxiety about influence than Lowell” (98). The negative implication of Lowell’s method appears to be his ethically fraught recycling of others’ words for his own poetry. The most controversial example of this form of appropriation is Lowell’s manipulation of the words of Elizabeth Hardwick, his second wife, in his late collection, The Dolphin, which addresses the breakdown of their marriage and the beginnings of Lowell’s life with his third wife, Caroline Blackwood, in England and Ireland. On this decision to manipulate Hardwick’s voice, Elizabeth Bishop famously wrote to Lowell, “Art just isn’t worth that much” (quoted in Austenfeld and Kość 251). While Bishop and Lowell remained close, the controversy of The Dolphin, which won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, ended the friendship Lowell had with Adrienne Rich, who published a scathing review of the collection and Lowell’s conflation of art and life. Saltmarsh rereads Lowell’s poetic methods of appropriation “in the wake of #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and #ownstories” to respond to the following question: “How has male privilege and artistic agency perpetuated women’s historic dispossession of their own life stories?” (250–51). The chapter thus returns to a fundamental ethical question raised by Lowell’s poetry and his decisions concerning poetic voice. Although Saltmarsh acknowledges her desire “to vindicate Hardwick from the choke hold of the letter-poems,” she recognizes that “there is no end to this literary-historical entanglement” (258). Nevertheless, the chapter ends with an attempt to center Hardwick as “a subject unto herself.” While readers may desire more work on Lowell in relation to gender and race, these chapters, along with their suggestions for further reading, offer important starting points.The collection concludes with Kacper Bartczak’s “Language and Post-Language Poets,” which contrasts Lowell’s humanist, confessional mode with the posthumanist, Language poetry that challenges the subjectivity and ideas of authorship that organize Lowell’s aesthetic practices (286–88). Because the editors’ introduction concludes with references to contemporary authors, such as Wanda Coleman and Olena among who Lowell as a troubling but this final chapter offers a to the collection as a the collection does could a treatment of Lowell’s work. For example, readers from a chapter devoted to the Lowell’s longstanding and complex engagement with that poetic the collection does an of attending to many topics and concerns fundamental to Lowell’s writing. While many of the chapters focus on Lowell’s most famous collection, Life they also its place by arguing it is not the of Lowell’s poetic career other critics have it to a that his oeuvre for readers less familiar with his range of work. its and suggestions for further both and new readers of Lowell’s poetry find a of material in this collection.