The American Century: Literature since 1945 555In his early work, collected in Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), Lowell’s painful
awareness of self, together with his anxiety over a world that seemed to him corrupted
by egotism, led him toward a consciously Catholic poetry. Poems like “The Holy
Innocents” and “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” juxtapose the self-absorption
of the isolated individual with the selflessness of true faith. The introspective and
fragmentary nature of the New England and American traditions is contrasted with
the serenity and coherence of the Roman Catholic order. The short poem “Children
of Light” illustrates this position. It is divided into two, densely imagistic passages,
which offer the reader two historical examples of the crime of Cain, or violence
committed against the brotherhood of man: first, the depredations of the early
Puritan settlers, and then the horrors of World War II. The Puritans, Lowell argues,
were “Pilgrims unhouselled by Geneva’s night.” They were deprived of the support
of Catholicism, a system of beliefs founded on the community rather than the
individual; and their imperialism of the self led them to slaughter the Indians
(“Our fathers ... / ... fenced their gardens with the Redman’s bones”) and claim
absolute possession of the land. World War II is the product of similar single-
mindedness, prompting destruction even of the natural abundance of the earth in
the pursuit of personal power; it also illustrates the primary truth that inwardness
finds its issue, eventually, in the disruption of both the private life and the public.
“And here the pivoting searchlights probe to shock / The riotous glass houses built
on rock,” the poet concludes, in shocked response to global conflict: “And candles
gutter by an empty alter, / And light is where the landless blood of Cain / Is burning,
burning the unburied grain.” Lines like these suggest the characteristic voice of this
early poetry: learned partly from Allen Tate, it is notable for its cold passion, its icy
bitterness and despair. The language is packed and feverish, the syntax often
contorted, the imagery disruptive: all is barely kept in control by the formal patterns
of the verse. Like an unwilling disciple, the poet seems to be trying to force himself
into accepting the rigors of inherited form and faith; he has to will his speech and
spirit into submission. For all the fierceness of his initial conversion, in fact, Lowell
was too much and irrevocably a part of New England – too solitary, introspective,
and individualist – to be comfortable as a Catholic or stay a Catholic for very long;
and it was only his rage for order that made him try for a while to compel himself
into submission.
“It may be,” Lowell wrote once, “that some people have turned to my poems
because of the very things that are wrong with me. I mean the difficulty I have with
ordinary living.” By the time he wrote this, Lowell had had several nervous
breakdowns and left the Catholic Church. More to the point, perhaps, this difficulty
he had with “ordinary living” had helped turn his poetry in a new direction: for in
the hope, apparently, that he might resolve his problems he had begun writing, first
in prose and then in poetry, about his life and family. In part, Lowell was prompted
to take this change of course by his reading of other poets, notably William Carlos
Williams; but in part it seemed a natural turn for him to take, not only because of its
possible therapeutic function but also because it enabled him to pursue his search
for a satisfactory voice and place. In the event, in the poems that were eventuallyGGray_c05.indd 555ray_c 05 .indd 555 8 8/1/2011 7:31:31 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 31 PM