The American Century: Literature since 1945 557augmented edition 1970), The Dolphin (1973), and History (1973). Talking about
these sonnets, Lowell explained that they were “written as one poem, intuitive in
arrangement, but not a pile or sequence of related material.” They were, he added,
“less an almanac than the story of my life.” As a whole, they are further proof of
their creator’s belief in the power and efficacy of literature: in an almost manic
way, the poet seems intent on metamorphosing all his life into art, in endowing his
every experience, however trivial, with some sort of structure and durability.
They are also proof of his Americanness for, taken together, they constitute another
epic of the self. Less openly responsive to the problems of political society than the
Cantos, less deliberately preoccupied with the future of America than “Song of
Myself,” Notebook and the succeeding volumes nevertheless share with those poems
a concern with the life-in-progress of the protean poet, as representative of his
time and place. Journeying over the blasted terrain of his on life, Lowell is also
traveling over the waste land of his culture; measuring his personal feelings he is,
too, taking the measure of larger events. Writing now becomes an existential act, a
means of establishing presence: as Lowell puts it in one piece, “Reading Myself,”
in Notebook, the poem, the made work, “proves its maker is alive.” By definition, it
is also an act that must go on and on: “this open book,” the poet says, is his “open
coffin.” An epic of personal identity that effectively creates identity must remain
unfinished, available to change. Lowell was continually composing new sonnets
and revising old ones, then scattering the results through different volumes
because, like Whitman, Pound, and others, what he was after was not so much a
poem as a poetic process – something that denied coherence, in the traditional
sense, and closure.
After the sonnets, Lowell published only one further volume, Day by Day (1977).
The poems here, which show him returning to freer, more varied verse-forms, are
elegiac, penitential, and autumnal, as if the poet were trying to resolve ancient
quarrels and prepare himself for death. With storybook neatness, in fact, Lowell did
die very shortly after the book was published: his life and life’s work were completed
at almost exactly the same time. In reading these final poems the reader is likely to
be reminded again just how much faith in the self provided the bedrock value, the
positive thrust in all Lowell’s writing – at times challenged, as in his earlier poetry,
occasionally questioned or qualified, as in the later, but always, incontestably there.
“Sometimes everything I write,” the poet admits at the end of Day by Day, “... seems
a snapshot, / ... / ... paralyzed by fact.” “Yet,” he continues” “why not say what
happened?” “We are poor passing facts /,” he concludes, “warned by that to give /
each figure in the photograph / his living name.” “I desire of every writer,” Thoreau
once said, “a simple and sincere account of his own life.” “Simple” and “sincere” are
not, perhaps, words that we normally associate with a poet as subtle and ironic as
Lowell, but in his own way he tried to fulfill Thoreau’s demand – by confronting his
experience, pursuing the goal of self-discovery, and attempting to achieve some
sense of order, however fragile and evanescent, through the activities of memory
and reinvention. Like other great American poets, Lowell learned how to translate
the poor passing facts of autobiography into what he called “the grace of accuracy.”GGray_c05.indd 557ray_c 05 .indd 557 8 8/1/2011 7:31:31 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 31 PM