556 The American Century: Literature since 1945published in Life Studies (1959), Lowell discovered not just a medium for expressing
his immense, devouring inwardness but a way of fulfilling his desire for spiritual
anchorage as well: something that, besides offering him the opportunity for
emotional release, described a fleeting sense of stability and order.
As the reader compares the poems in Life Studies – like “My Last Afternoon with
Uncle Devereux Winslow” or “Memories of West Street and Lepke” – with the earlier
work, the contrast could hardly be more striking. Gone is the Catholicism; in its
place is a different, more muted and ironic kind of belief in the imaginative and
moral power of faithful speech. Gone, too, are the tortuous language and elaborate
arrangements of line and rhythm; in their place are lines that are limpid and flexible,
a syntax and idiom that play cunning variations on the colloquial, and rhymes that
when they do occur are invariably unexpected and elusive. The poet no longer
begins with a predetermined structure for his material, but instead tries to discover
structure of a kind, and immutability, in the actual processes of remembering
and articulating. The only order now tolerated, the reader surmises, is the order of
literature; the poem recreating the experience becomes the one acceptable means of
refining and shaping it.
The success of Life Studies helped turn Lowell into a public figure, the most visible
American poet of his generation. And it was partly in response to this enhanced status
that he began taking a public stand on some of the major issues of the day, such as the
war in Vietnam. At the same time, his poetry, while remaining profoundly personal,
addressed problems of history and culture: in his own way, like Whitman he tried to
consider what it was like to be an American at mid-century. “Waking Early Sunday
Morning,” discussed earlier, gives one illustration of how Lowell wedded his intense
inwardness of impulse to historical event and contemporary crisis. Another is offered
by “For the Union Dead,” the title poem in his 1964 collection. In this poem, the civic
disorder of the present is contrasted with two alternative ideas of order. One is the
public order of the past: old New England, conceived of in consciously mythological
terms and figured in the statue of a Colonel Shaw, who commanded a black regiment
during the Civil War. Shaw, the poet suggests, had “an angry wrenlike vigilance, / a
greyhound’s gentle tautness” and rejoiced “in man’s lovely, / peculiar power to choose
life and die.” He found perfect freedom in service to civic values, the values of a
culture; the disciplines he accepted enabled him to live, and even to die, with grace
and purpose. But, Lowell suggests, those disciplines are unavailable now. All that is
offered by the present culture is anarchism and servility. “Everywhere,” declares the
poet, “giant finned cars move forward like fish / a savage servility / slides by on grease.”
In seeking to aggrandize themselves, people have lost themselves: the pursuit of power
has generated the greatest betrayals of all – of humanity and community. So the only
possible order for the present and future is a personal one, registered here in the
architecture of the poem. Shaw’s statue, a monument to public principle, has to be
replaced by acts of private judgment which, like this poem, may then furnish others
with the vision and vocabulary necessary to change their own lives.
For many of the last years of his life, Lowell concentrated on a series of unrhymed
and irregular sonnets, collected in books like Notebook 1967–1968 (1969,GGray_c05.indd 556ray_c 05 .indd 556 8 8/1/2011 7:31:31 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 31 PM