Salvation Is Reading Robert Lowell Heavily

Why You Should Read Robert Lowell Poems

Reading Robert Lowell is a lot like salvation – something everyone should study, pursue, and perfect on her own terms, but few attempt.

The Basics of Reading Robert Lowell Poems

Forget that the guy had four names (Robert Traill Spence Lowell), suffered severe depression, was imprisioned as a conscientious objector during World War II, and died of a heart attack in a cab in New York City while on his way to see one of his ex-wives. What remains, resonates, and redounds are his poems, which won two Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award.

Concepts most associated with Lowell’s poetry include confessional poetry, imitation as opposed to translation, and the use of form “‘to describe the immediate instant, an instant in which political and personal happenings interacted with a lifetime’s accumulation of memories, dreams, and knowledge.”

What Reading the Poems of Robert Lowell Means to Me

Not knowing any of this, I read 1,200 pages of the collected poems of Robert Lowell some years ago. Akin to sand in yogurt, it was distasteful and hard to understand how it ever happened in the first place. But through these past few years of reading heavily I discovered that, like salvation, what I once damned I now love.

Here’s a poem I wrote back when I first tried reading Robert Lowell:

Dear Mr. Lowell

I want to write but don’t know how.
Vacant delight, dog-eared verse,
Are my coffins stacked in a hearse.

Perhaps I should write about my red
Mosquito bite. Admit what led
To three weddings for two spreads.
Or let slip about my dread-filled head.

Nah. Like broken pencil lead -
Illegible, blunted, and wrecked -
Some things are best left unsaid.

Reading my  poem makes me feel remorse and satisfaction. I feel a sense of guilty responsibility because I used my youthful power to harm a worthy elder. Better to have kept my vexation to myself until I better understood him and myself.

And yet I am satisfied that I pursued and perfected my response to Robert Lowell on my own terms. I was honest with the page to the extent I then knew how to be. And, best of all, I wasn’t afraid to change my map when I realized, years later, it might mislead someone else who came after me.

It is only through reading Robert Lowell, and others, heavily, that the road to salvation becomes apparent. Let this excerpt of his be your next landmark:

Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war—until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.

- From “Waking Early Sunday Morning,” Near the Ocean (1967)

Robert Lowell Poems Online

Lord Weary’s Castle – winner of the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. “The sheer gorgeousness and encrusted bookishness of this poetry startled readers used to the plain talk of Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams.”

Life Studies – winner of the 1960 National Book Award for Poetry. “ Inspired by his battle with mental illness, his marital problems, and war,” Life Studies “launched the Confessional Poetry movement.”

Imitations – winner of the 1962 Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize. “The book has a twofold fascination: it gives access to the private realm of a major poet, showing us how he reads his masters and peers. At the same time it provides the reader with creative echoes to a number of important poems.”

The Dolphin - winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.  ”In his book of sonnets, Lowell attempted a unique and controversial synthesis; he associated the imagined and the recalled with the two women he loved …”

Day by Day – winner 1977 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. “… in the wake of the poet’s ugly, anonymous death, must have been a strange experience–like reading a last will and testament, or a suicide note. For there are few books of poetry, by Lowell or anyone else, more saturated with death and the expectation of death.”

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