Robert Lowell

After Robert Lowell died, his editor, Robert Giroux, heavily pruned the poet’s prose memoir of 1954–1956, “The Balanced Aquarium,” for Lowell’s posthumous Collected Prose of 1987. This essay considers Giroux’s changes and shows his version, titled “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium,” to be a dialogical and interactional collaborative auto|biography.

This paper situates the work of the Irish modernist Denis Devlin and the mid-century American poet Robert Lowell within a transatlantic literary network that was profoundly shaped by the New Critics, and eliciting comparable aspects of their poetry in the forties in terms of a New Critical aesthetic.

The purpose of this book is to explore the structure of the text as such using a metalanguage derived from quantitative poetics. Grigori Utgof ’s thesis is that texts should be studied statistically. The main problems addressed in his research are the problem of successivity on the formal (syntactic) plane of artistic texts, and the problem of syntactic dissimilarity. Largely prompted by Yuri Tynianov’s famous statement concerning the question of form  (cf.: “The unity of the work is not a closed, symmetrical intactness, but an unfolding, dynamic integrity. Between its elements is not the static sign of equality and addition, but the dynamic sign of correlation and integration. The form of the literary work must be recognized as a dynamic phenomenon”) Grigori Utgof demonstrates the inherent nonidentity of the intratextual order, and proceeds to the problem of measuring some translated texts’ dissimilarities. In particular, his book is an inquiry into the structure of the following eight texts: _Приглашение на казнь_ / _Invitation to a Beheading_ by Vladimir Nabokov, and the novel’s Estonian translation _Kutse tapalavale_ [_Invitation to the Block_] by Rein Saluri; “За гремучую доблесть грядущих веков...” by Osip Mandel’shtam, and two translations of this poem into English: “In the Name of the Higher Tribes of the Future…” by Robert Lowell and “For the Sake of the Resonant Valor of Ages to Come…” by Vladimir Nabokov; “Облако в штанах” (“Cloud in Trousers”) by Vladimir Mayakovsky; “Ballada [Ballade]” by Czesław Miłosz in Natalya Gorbanevskaya’s translation (“Баллада”).

В статье на материале анализа стихотворения Иосифа Бродского «Колыбельная Трескового мыса» показано, как выбранная поэтом стратегия вхождения в американскую литературу позволяет ему преодолеть языковой и культурный барьер и сделать свою поэзию достоянием мировой литературы. Рассматриваются различные подтексты стихотворения, его переклички с американской «поэзией побережья», русской поэзией, а также связь с текстами Бродского второй половины шестидесятых годов. 

In the article, based on the analysis of Joseph Brodsky's poem " Lullaby of Cape Cod " , it is shown how the poet's strategy of entering American literature allows him to overcome the linguistic and cultural barrier and establish his poetry as the part of the world literature. The article deals with various subtexts of the poem, its links with the American seashore poem, Russian poetry, as well as connection with unpublished Brodsky texts from the late sixties.

Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara each depicted the other in their writing, from O’Hara’s conversation about the music of Adolph Deutsch with a hungover Ginsberg through a locked bathroom door in ‘Fantasy’, to Ginsberg’s 1966 elegy to the tragically killed O’Hara, ‘City Midnight Junk Strains’. This essay explores their creative and personal relationships, considering their reciprocated portrayals, their shared influences in Williams, Whitman and Pound, their differing ideologies, and the connections and impediments between the Beats and the New York poets.

This paper is focused on the reconsideration of the limits and advances of the genre of autobiography. Given the recent boom in autobiography and personal narratives this timely topic poses a great challenge to current literary and cultural studies. Autobiography frequently takes the form of a disturbance, upsetting the expectations and classifications of both general public and literary critics. What presuppositions does the genre of autobiography build upon, and how should we respond when more strictly literary genres integrate autobiographical elements? This paper will explore selected, representative examples of how autobiography and autobiographically inclined literary works have challenged pervading norms over the last two centuries. The use of autobiographical elements in literature has repeatedly been part of an estranging revitalization of more or less settled literary forms, in addition to contributing to the reimagining of nationality through the example of representative or marginal identities, such as in the case of W. B. Yeats. The examples will span from the Romanticism of William Wordsworth and Lord Byron, via the 19th century call for uncompromising “sincerity” and the ensuing experiments of Modernism, to more recent instances of confessionalism in writers such as Robert Lowell and Karl-Ove Knausgård. The borders and dialogue between life and writing will be in focus in this paper, and the degree to which critical terms text, context and paratext help us understand and clarify their complex interaction will be subject to discussion.

Literary scholars have long-identified references to alchemy, gnosticism, and forms of the occult woven into the fiber of literature as old as Dante and Shakespeare. In fact, the word occult means hidden, and what better way to hide a spell than within the incantation of a prayer, hymn, or poem? In pre-common era South Asia, the word for poet, kavi, meant seer (Longman, 15). Jumping ahead centuries, one can see mysticism illuminating the work of the great Persian poet Rumi, the transcendentalism of Blake and Emerson, and the hermeticism of Yeats and Eliot, to name only a handful. Sylvia Plath, as well as her husband Ted Hughes, were probably known best for their tragic marriage and Plath's suicide. However, the couple was also widely acknowledged to have played with the occult, and scholars such as Keith Sagar, Dr. Ann Skea, and Ekbert Faas have found definite, intentional poetic structure and references to alchemy and hermeticism in Hughes' work, as well as Hughes' own ...

DATE IN POETRY: TEXT AND PARATEXT

The aim of this paper is to analyze the presence and significance of dates in the poetic text proper, as well as in its peripheries; the poem’s title or its end. The function and the semantic potential of the date depend on various factors, such as specific poetic and stylistic preferences. Dates are also often connected with the poet’s biography and contemporary historical events. Accordingly, a date in the poem’s title can suggest or emphasize some historical or political context (Yeats, Auden), but it can also have a completely individual, personal relevance, not unlike a journal entry. Sometimes, it is related to the poet’s own or someone else’s birthday, or the death of a loved one (Lowell,  Levertov). Regardless of whether their distinctiveness can be considered
universal or individual, dates bind poetic works to particular moments in time and thus directly refer to the material and social involvement of the author, even though they may be only abstractly present in their own text.

Isolati e perseguitati in patria prima che esiliati nel Nuovo Mondo, i puritani inglesi predilessero una lettura di Dante politica e antipapale, incline storicamente a porre l’accento sul tema dell’esilio, reale o figurale, che rimarrà motivo di interesse nella letteratura di ispirazione dantesca in area anglosassone. Questo Dante moderno, antistorico ma di grande forza morale, arrivò in America a bordo del Mayflower, portato dai padri pellegrini insieme alla Bibbia, e da quel momento avrebbe contribuito alla costruzione della cultura americana. Nella madrepatria, all’inizio dell’Ottocento, altri espatriati, di nazionalità italiana, tra cui  Ugo Foscolo che nel decennio 1817-1827 poneva le basi della nascente e più consapevole critica dantesca, si confrontavano con l’acceso impegno politico di Dante. Era in gioco non solo la fortuna poetica del poeta oltremanica, ma tutto ciò che il nome del grande italiano rappresentava in un’interpretazione ideologico-morale in grado di legare simbolicamente le idee e gli sforzi di esuli e oppositori. Per questa ragione Foscolo e Byron insistevano su una lettura politica della vita e dell’opera di Dante, esempio guida della lotta risorgimentale, contro le accuse mosse da Friedrich Schlegel alla sua eccessiva “durezza ghibellina”. Ma fu soprattutto Byron, esule anch’egli, sebbene per scelta, a sfruttare il tema dell’esilio dantesco in Childe Harold e in The Prophecy of Dante, ispirando, tra gli altri, il primo filosofo americano, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Per arrivare fino a Ezra Pound, volontario esule in Italia, che trovò in Dante congeniale ispirazione per il suo moderno poema epico, i Cantos, e che negli anni del suo soggiorno nella penisola preferì le città in cui il poeta fiorentino visse in esilio a quelle che l’avevano esiliato. E a Robert Lowell, che nel suo Exile’s Return prende in prestito le parole di Dante per cantare, da una prospettiva rovesciata, il dolente ritorno dell’americano alla sua antica patria d’origine, l’Europa postbellica.

This article argues that Robert Lowell’s employment of techniques of poetic "imitation" - a liberal form of translation - during the composition of the Life Studies poems allows him to simultaneously stage and to conceal his reliance upon foreign poetic sources. Lowell’s Life Studies imitations thus represent an attempt to “cover-up” poetic collusions with foreign sources at a time when cold war “containment culture” and the specter of McCarthyism threatened to render any such collusion increasingly suspect, if not entirely “Un-American.” The Life Studies imitations, by this account, offer furtive testimony to Lowell’s potentially subversive poetic preoccupation and engagement with cold war cultural anxieties circulating around terms such as containment, conspiracy, domesticity, paranoia, security, secrecy.

This paper appeared in English Studies in Africa, 57.2 (2014).

Robert Lowell's earliest volumes, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (1946), anticipate William Appleman Williams' (1973) argument that America exploited the myth of the frontier in order to execute and authorise policies of transatlantic expansion in the postwar and Cold War years. In Land of Unlikeness, Lowell's conscious alignment with a form of Southernist politics, curiously inflected by Max Weber's remarks on the kinship between the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, reinforces his scathing critique of the industrial, commercial, and martial excesses of the American North. Lord Weary's Castle, by contrast, is less explicitly censorious of America's expansionist impulses. Lowell's liberal translation of a variety of cultural and poetic resources derived from a wide range of European inter-texts, however, serve to display the complex interests and potential consequences of an American imperium deeply invested in laying claim to the political, cultural, and poetic resources of a transAtlantic frontier.

Les éléments autobiografiques et documentaires dans la poésie de Robert Lowell

Le livre Life Studies (1959) du poète américain Robert Lowell est considéré comme lʼune des œuvres les plus influentes de la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle. Comme le poète y inclut des éléments biographiques et traite des sujets tabou, le critique M. L. Rosenthal a inventé le terme «poesie confessionnelle», quʼil appliquait ensuite à un grand nombre de poètes. La stratification discursive dans la médiation de lʼexpérience est soulignée par le fait que ces auteurs souffraient de maladies mentales et que cette problématique apparait, dʼune manière ou dʼune autre, dans leur mondes poétiques. Dans les recueils de Lowell nous nous confrontons le plus souvent au rapport dynamique entre le dépersonnalisé et le personnel, tandis que les données personnelles, les descriptions de la famille, les documents, sont introduits dʼune telle manière que lʼon sent souvent une certaine distance, le sujet lyrique est séparé des expériences et des événements dont il parle. Ce dédoublement et cette problématisation de la voix poétiques correspondent au projet poétique de Lowell, qui est dʼétablir les parallèles et des correspondances entre lʼintime et le public, le particulier et lʼhistorique.

An analysis of Robert Lowell's Notebook grounded less in biography than on an analysis of Lowell's style and  identity (and their indebtedness to symboliste models), in a work from the late 1960s that he described as a "short, difficult novel in verse."

This essay unpacks the images and references from three of Robert Lowell’s sonnets from Notebook 1967-68; “Window-Ledge 2. Gramsci in Prison,” “For Robert Kennedy 1925-68,” and “Five Hour Political Rally.” In order to show the unified theme of the three sonnets I will re-weave the lines and the poems.  By this re-ordering, this essay will show Lowell’s ability to connect antiquity to 1968 America. He does this first through positioning himself as stuck indoors and in solitude ruminates on men of light such as the early 20th century Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci. Then, through Plutarch, Robert Kennedy’s life and death as a member of the ill-fated Kennedy clan, the impression of a rug from a political rally, he concludes, “I saw the world is the same as it has been” (Window-Ledge 2. Line 14). Lowell comments on the lives, ideologies, and actions of others in order to demonstrate his own philosophy of despair.

The article describes an attempt to conduct an experimental translation of a self-ref-erential poems with the conversion of the subjective “I who write” into the subjective “I  who  translate”.  It  contains  numerous  translations  of  three  poems  (written  by  Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara and Jane Kenyon). They are interpreted and compared with  the  original  works  and  provided  with  commentary,  which  situates  them  in  a broader translatological and theoretical context. The translations were made by the students of the translation speciality (Wydział Filologii Polskiej i Klasycznej, Adam Mickiewicz Univeristy in Poznań).

This article reads Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959) against the “confessional” grain for which it is widely celebrated. It argues that Lowell’s appeal to techniques of poetic "imitation" - a liberal form of translation - during the composition of the Life Studies poems allows the poet to simultaneously stage and to conceal his reliance upon foreign poetic sources. In this way, Lowell’s Life Studies imitations betray an attempt to “cover-up” poetic collusions with foreign sources at a time when cold war “containment culture” and the specter of McCarthyism threatened to render  any such collusion increasingly suspect, if not entirely “Un-American.” The Life Studies imitations, by this account, offer furtive testimony to Lowell’s potentially subversive poetic preoccupation with cold war cultural anxieties circulating around terms such as containment, conspiracy, domesticity, paranoia, security, secrecy.

(Full text, 21 pp., in link)

Elegies II 29 b (Mane erat), II 26 a (Vidi te in somnis) and IV 7 (Sunt aliquid manes): translations & comments. 

A closer analysis of IV 7 with its underlying cosmology based on the precarious balance of the Four Elements and its (original?) vision of the Afterlife, which forebodes Dante's Purgatory.  Special attention is paid to the enigmatic expression "sanamus amores" (v. 69) and the (probably erroneous) conjecture "sancimus amores".

Also a discussion of old & newer translations by Ingvar Björkeson (Swedish, 20th century), Robert Lowell (English, 20th century), Karl Ludwig v. Knebel (German, 18th century), M. de Longchamps (French, 18th century) and Axel Juel (Danish, 1940's).

Frank O’Hara possessed a lingering distaste for the work of Robert Lowell, seen as the father of the confessional mode. In 1965, in an unusually acerbic outburst, he savaged ‘Skunk Hour’, one of Lowell’s most famous poems, disparaging its subject matter, content, and metrics. Lowell’s work appears to have touched a raw nerve in O’Hara, whose atypical outburst seems to have been about more than mere temperamental aversion: it exposed the similarities in their creative processes, uncovering in O’Hara the poetic devices he concealed not just from his audience, but also, as far as possible, from himself.
Anne Hartman suggests that O’Hara’s objection to Lowell stems from the latter’s ‘spurious claims to sincerity and cathartic release from a guilt that is in fact its precondition’, arguing that Lowell’s poems are ‘characterized by controlled spontaneity or feigned carelessness […] a self-conscious, composed style of self-narration we have come to expect from models of confession descending from Augustine and Rousseau’.  Since the days of his early experimentation with collage in poems like ‘Second Avenue’, O’Hara had been practicing the art of disguising his poetic devices, so as to make his poetry seem as spontaneous and as improvisational as possible. As an artist, O’Hara’s spontaneity and literary dirtiness are arguably just as much a subterfuge as Lowell’s decontaminated metrics. The stylistic purity of ‘Skunk Hour’ juxtaposed with its images of skunks and garbage pails forces O’Hara to confront his own artifice, unsettling the view he espouses in ‘Song (is it dirty)’, in which he justifies his lover’s bad character by comparing it with the dirty city air, which ‘you don’t refuse to breathe do you’ (CP, 327). The spontaneous impurity of O’Hara’s work is a natural impulse first, and a poetic tactic second, whereas in Lowell the reverse seems true, and recognition of this may have rather unnerved O’Hara.
This paper will explore O’Hara’s desire to conceal his own artifice, juxtaposing it with Lowell’s ‘spurious [...] sincerity’, in order to more fully understand the writerly disguises of each.

This article reads Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959) against the “confessional” grain for which it is widely celebrated. It argues that Lowell’s appeal to techniques of poetic "imitation" - a liberal form of translation - during the composition of the Life Studies poems allows the poet to simultaneously stage and to conceal his reliance upon foreign poetic sources. In this way, Lowell’s Life Studies imitations betray an attempt to “cover-up” poetic collusions with foreign sources at a time when cold war “containment culture” and the specter of McCarthyism threatened to render any such collusion increasingly suspect, if not entirely “Un-American.” The Life Studies imitations, by this account, offer furtive testimony to Lowell’s potentially subversive poetic preoccupation with cold war cultural anxieties circulating around terms such as containment, conspiracy, domesticity, paranoia, security, secrecy.

THOMAS AUSTENFELD
Interviewed by Jiří Flajšar and Pavlína Flajšarová
Thomas Austenfeld is Professor of American Literature at the University
of Fribourg, Switzerland. He holds a PhD from the University of Virginia.
Before moving to Switzerland, he taught at Drury University and at North
Georgia College and State University (U.S.). He is the author and editor of several books and many articles and reviews on Anglophone, especially American, literature and culture. His major specializations are American women writers, Southern writers, and American poetry of the twentieth century. This conversation took place at Palacký University on March 19, 2015, after Professor Austenfeld gave a lecture on the fiction and life of Katherine Anne Porter.