The Hand and the Pen: Robert Lowell’s Search for the Unification of Life and Art

Claire M. Cheek Wellesley College

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Prerequisite for Honors in English under the advisement of Dan Chiasson

May 2021

© 2021 Claire M. Cheek

1 Contents

Acknowledgments ...... 3

Introduction...... 4

Chapter I: The Origins of Lowell’s Literary Ventriloquism...... 8

Chapter II: Life Studies and the Quest for the Autobiographical...... 23

Chapter III: Unification through The Dolphin...... 44

Bibliography...... 60

2 Acknowledgments

To Dan Chiasson: Thank you for taking me under your wing and for introducing me to a breadth of transformative and inspiring literature during my time at Wellesley. Thank you for your patience through all my procrastination, scrambled drafts, and frenzied 3 am emails.

To Bill Cain: Thank you for making your office and your class an inviting space during my first year at Wellesley. I truly don’t think I would’ve been an English Major if I hadn’t taken English 262 with you. Thank you for constantly supporting me over various tasks over the years.

To Kate Brogan: Thank you for introducing me to Robert Lowell and the realm of confessional poetry. If I hadn’t taken your Modern Poetry Course, I don’t think I would’ve written this thesis.

To Kim McLeod: Perhaps in another life, I was an astrophysics major. Thank you for serving as my honors visitor, and for teaching one of my favorite non-English classes.

To Anna and Samara: I couldn’t have done this without your support. Thank you for making this difficult year so bearable. I wouldn’t be who I am without our TV dinners, endless sleepovers, bagel frenzies, international adventures, and our four years of terrorizing Boston. I’m so lucky to call you both my friends. Thank you for being my sounding boards in all realms of my life. I’m so excited to see what other crazy adventures the world will throw at us.

To Madeline, for being a wonderful mentor and role model throughout my time at Wellesley. Thank you for all the endless advice, despite graduating so long ago. Sophomore year Claire was so impressed by your thesis, she decided to do one herself.

To José, my biggest cheerleader. Even though you hate Robert Lowell, thank you for reading him with me, and for enduring my ideas, complaints, and excitements.

To my parents: thank you for inspiring my love for reading. Without your guidance and support since pre-school, I don’t think I’d be writing this thesis today, let alone be majoring in English or attending Wellesley. Dad, thank you for reading all of those books with me when I was little. It’s funny to think that The Bob Books and Charlotte’s Web are what shaped me as a reader. Mama, thank you for all of the book recommendations throughout the year, and for passing down your love for literature.

Lastly, thank you partially to Robert Lowell, but mostly to Elizabeth Hardwick. I fell in love with your writing and your voice throughout this project. If I could do this all over again, I’d write about you.

3 Introduction

In 1970 Allen Tate wrote Robert Lowell a letter: “your Napoleonic stance permits you to confess other people…I hope you will not again confess mine.” 1 Tate, a close friend and literary companion to Lowell, never quite forgot or forgave Lowell for an incident that had occurred twenty years earlier. In 1949, during one of Lowell’s first recorded manic episodes, he visited

Tate and his wife, Caroline Gordon, and began to list off the names of the women that Tate had been having affairs with, then “turned on Tate and asked him to repent.” 2 Lowell then proceeded to grab Tate, his mentor, and held him out a window while aggressively reciting Tate’s famous poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” Tate called the police. It took a group of four policeman to subdue Lowell as he shouted obscenities into the streets of Chicago, under the spell of a manic episode. Lowell was then arrested for a brief stint, then transported back to Boston and placed in a padded cell in a hospital outside Boston.

Two weeks after the scene occurred, Tate wrote a bitter letter to Elizabeth “Lizzie”

Hardwick, Lowell’s eventual wife: “Cal is dangerous… there are definite homicidal implications in his world, particularly toward women and children. He has purification mania, which frequently takes place in homicidal form.” 3 Despite tensions in Lowell’s mental health,

Hardwick and Lowell married a mere two months later, in July of 1949. They were married for

23 years. In 1972, Lowell officially left Hardwick for the writer Lady Caroline Blackwood while teaching at Oxford. Despite Lowell’s adultery and abandonment of Hardwick and their daughter

1 Mariani, Paul L. Lost Puritan: a Life of Robert Lowell. (New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), 386 2 Mariani, Lost Puritan, 183 3 Mariani, Lost Puritan, 184

4 Lowell and Hardwick maintained a steady, frequent, sometimes pleasant, but heart-wrenching correspondence.

Their detailed and impassioned letters led to the publication of Robert Lowell’s poetry collection The Dolphin, his most controversial book, and winner of the 1973 Pulitzer Prize.

Lowell began writing The Dolphin when he moved to England after receiving a fellowship to teach at Oxford, during his affair and eventual marriage to Lady Caroline Blackwood. The

Dolphin is composed solely of sonnets, and chronicles Lowell’s relationship with both Hardwick and Blackwood. Though the book is dedicated to Blackwood, Lowell incorporated parts of

Hardwick’s letters into his poems. Hardwick is not credited. The words of Allen Tate become haunting. By using Hardwick’s letters in The Dolphin, Lowell appropriated his God-like power as the premier confessional poet, and has confessed the life of Hardwick without her consent.

Here, poetry becomes a tool of destruction and literary violence – homicidal, the word which

Tate used to describe Lowell’s actions. The Dolphin won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, but not without disapproval from the poetry community at the time. Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth

Bishop, both confidents and friends of Lowell, rejected the novel, and his gendered manipulation of Hardwick’s pain. Bishop wrote to Lowell and stated that “art just isn’t worth that much.”

So, then: what is art worth? In my thesis, I will explore the poetic boundaries that Lowell created, destroyed, and blurred. Lowell’s family, lovers, and friends, all are dragged into his poems, some unwillingly. Since his life is uniquely presented on display in his writing, so are the lives of others, creating dangerous precedents in the name of confessional poetry. Lowell’s nonconsensual telling of the personal histories of others became more apparent throughout his poetic reign, culminating into the unthinkable – arguably a new form of plagiarism in the name of art. Lowell was the trailblazer of confessional poetry. He did not follow the artistic rules of the

5 movement – he created them. Lowell also used poetry as a way to reason through his own life, illness, and trauma. He desired a way to unite both his art and life together in one artistic form.

By breaking down Lowell’s past poetic tendencies, I will track Lowell’s tendency to confess the lives of others in the name of art, resulting in the appropriation of Hardwick’s emotions and writing.

Despite beginning his career as a more formal poet, Lowell craved a method that promoted vitality in poetry. From early on, Lowell heavily adhered to Milton’s definition of poetry, writing in 1940 that “I must keep spiritually alive and brilliantly alive, for poetry is, as the moral Milton conceded in practice and precept, a sensuous, passionate, brutal thing.”4 5

Lowell’s quest to keep himself alive through poetry can be tracked through Lowell’s attempt to act as a literary ventriloquist, and verse the lives of himself and others. In Lowell’s early work, he versed lives of historical figures and incidents through dramatic monologues and by heavily referencing other poets, biblical images, and mythology. Lowell also explored his own life through the shield of the dramatic monologue As his career, and his struggles with mental health,

Lowell somewhat dropped the shield and published Life Studies after seeking out a new form of poetry that incorporated “art and the life blood of experience.” From Life Studies, Lowell reached The Dolphin, and finally unified art and life by incorporating direct raw materials into the poems. Lowell wished that “one’s selected poems could keep their figure.”6 By using

Hardwick’s letters in The Dolphin, Lowell injected permanence into his poetry, yet not without a

4 Robert Lowell to A. Lawrence Lowell, February 1940, in The Letters of Robert Lowell, ed. Saskia Hamilton (New York, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) p. 25 5 Milton’s definition of poetry: “Poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less suttle and fine, but more simple, sensuous , and passionate (Of Education, 1644). 6 Lowell, Robert “After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays On Me” in Salmagundi Magazine, (Saratoga Springs, New York: Skidmore College), 114.

6 lasting controversy and heartache that annihilated friendships, marriages, and set the poetry world ablaze with an unprecedented art form.

7 Chapter I

The Origins of Lowell’s Literary Ventriloquism

Throughout his repertoire, Lowell attempted to find a method to incorporate the momentum and permanence of life into his poems. By the general public, Lowell is remembered today as a confessional poet and for his intensely emotional depictions of family, love, and mental health. Lowell was quite successful before his transition to the confessional mode.

Despite his reputation today, Lowell’s early career was mostly dominated by his more formal poems. Lowell’s first three books, The Land of Unlikeness (1944), Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), and The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951), are all formal, metered, use dense language, and allude to classic mythology and religion. Regardless of their formality, Lowell desired, yet was unable to then articulate or grasp, a method of poetry that accurately “versed” life. He grappled with this method throughout the entirety of his career, from The Land of Unlikeness (1944) to Day to Day

(1977).

Lowell cockily expressed his desire for a new form of poetry to the poet Ezra Pound as a freshman at Harvard College in 1939. An admirer of Pound’s work, Lowell began sending Pound letters, begging Pound to take him as a student in Italy. Unabashedly, Lowell provided Pound with criticism of TS Eliot’s poetry in one of his letters: “Eliot’s Ariel poems are closely and skillfully expressed but lack vitality. I would like to bring back momentum and movement in poetry on a grand scale.”7 Even as a nineteen year old student, Lowell directly craved “vitality” in poetry, a form of life.

7 Robert Lowell to Ezra Pound, 6.

8 Lowell articulated this tension and desire to his friends frequently before the publication of Life Studies. In a letter to William Carlos Williams in 1958, Lowell writes “it’s a joy to me that you found [the poems] alive and decently written – art and the life blood of experience can’t live without each other…Dropping rhyme does seem to get rid of a thick soapy cloth of artificiality. The true spoken language beats any scholarly alchemists pseudo-language”8 Here

Lowell indicates the intricacy and dependance of art and experience – and vice versa. In another letter to the poet Anne Sexton around the same time, Lowell describes his own relationship with poetry when commenting upon her work: “You stick to the truth and the simple expression of very difficult feelings, and this is the line in poetry that I am most interested in.”9

Lowell’s belief that “art and the life blood of experience can’t live without each other” can be seen in his early poetry, and in the works and behaviors of his mentors and predecessors.

Like many poets, Lowell had a habit for invoking sort of imitation of and collaboration between contemporary and past poets. In an essay written in 1977, the year of his death, Lowell recognizes the influence of other poets on his work. By following the forms and structures of the greats, Lowell believed he was “imitating the muse of poetry. When I erred, I failed, or accidentally forced myself to be original…How many poets I wish I could have copied, the

Shakespeare of The Winter's Tale, the Wordsworth of the Ruined Cottage, the Blake of "Truly my Satan . . .”, the Pound of the best Pisan Cantos. Baudelaire? Hardy? Maybe I have.”10 Lowell was also heavily influenced by the English poet Robert Browning who “attracts and repels us.”11

Browning was recognized for his elaborate dramatic monologues and his impact on poetry, yet was also, and continues to be, criticized for the ambition and difficulty for his poems. The

8 Robert Lowell to William Carlos Williams, 333. 9 Robert Lowell to Anne Sexton, 326. 10 Lowell, “After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays On Me,” 113. 11 Lowell, “After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays On Me,” 113.

9 Modern poetry critic Harold Bloom stated that Browning is difficult to grapple with, and was

“notoriously badly served by criticism and ill-served also by his own accounts of what he was doing as a poet…yet when you read your way into his world, precisely his largest gift to you is his involuntary unfolding of one of the largest, most enigmatic, and most multipersoned literary and human selves you can hope to encounter.”12 Browning was able to act as a literary ventriloquist for many historical figures: “Napoleon III, St. John, Cardinal Manning, Caliban.”13

Lowell craved Browning’s ability to act to turn people’s lives into verse:

Browning's idiosyncratic robustness scratches us, and often his metrical acrobatics are too good. One wishes one could more often see him plain, or as he might have been rewritten by some master novelist, Samuel Butler or George Eliot, though not in her Italian phase. Yet perhaps Browning's poems will outlast much major fiction. Meanwhile he shames poets with the varied human beings he could scan, the generosity of his ventriloquism. 14

Lowell’s early work faced similar criticism to Browning’s poetry. In a review of Lowell’s early work, Al Alvarez wrote “in much of his earlier poetry the strain was almost unbearable. Only a prodigious effort of poetic will seemed to prevent from splintering into incoherence.” According to Alvarez, Lowell’s incredible use of form and structure save his poems from being unreadable and too complex.

As Lowell’s career progressed, he invoked different and evolving forms of literary ventriloquism in his poems. Like many other artists, he directly collaborated with other contemporaries. He bounced ideas off of other poets, referenced them in his poems, and more.

Just as dramatic monologues, this collaborative nature was an extremely common practice among poets and other artists: “Wordsworth advertised his Lyrical Ballads as incorporating the

12 Bloom, Harold. The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer through Robert Frost. (New York, New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 656-657 13 Lowell, “After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays On Me,” 113

10 “real language” of rural folk. T. S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s modernism is likewise steeped with a “real [though high] language” of received voices.”15 The Waste Land is especially renowned for the amount of references it contains, including Shakespeare, Dante, the Bible, Shakespeare,

Baudelaire, Spenser, and much more. Even the title, epigraph, and dedication all borrow from other works. The title alludes to Jessie Weston’s 1920 book From Ritual to Romance. Weston explores King Arthur’s journey to discover the Holy Grail and the wasteland motif, a Celtic motif that explores the relationship with a cursed barren land and the hero who must lift the curse. The Waste Land also utilizes a fragmented conglomerate of different narrators and dramatic monologues to convey Eliot’s social and cultural anxiety after WWI.

Lowell’s poetic ventriloquism takes place in different forms throughout his writing. He expresses an early interest in representing and versing a wide aspect of human life through dramatic monologues. Lowell’s use of “the life blood of experience” is conspicuously evident in his second book Lord Weary’s Castle, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947. Lowell’s publisher, Robert Giroux, believed that Lord Weary’s Castle was Lowell’s most successful collection. Lowell introduces the book with a note, stating that the title comes from an old Irish ballad about Lord Weary, a nobleman who failed to pay his depts after the construction of his castle. Packed full of intense form, extreme religious symbols, and literary references, Lord

Weary’s Castle is a clear example of Lowell’s early work. Nonetheless, his desire for “vitality” shines throughout the book.

“The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” is perhaps the most famous of the poems that appear in Lord Weary’s Castle, and is a unique study in both the poetic and the personal. The poem is dedicated to Robert Lowell’s cousin “Warren Winslow, Dead at Sea,” whose body “was

15 Gewanter, David S. “Child of Collaboration: Robert Lowell's "Dolphin.” Modern Philology 93, no. 2 (1995): 178- 203.

11 never recovered after his Navy destroyer, Turner, sank from an accidental explosion in New

York harbor during World War II.”16 Lowell uses his cousin’s death to explore his own guilt of not enlisting in World War II, and his views towards death and afterlife. Unlike Lowell’s confessional poems, the speaker is not clearly Lowell himself. However, a good chunk of the poem feels autobiographical, given that the poem discusses his cousin’s death, and that the poem takes place in Nantucket, a place where Lowell frequented often.

Despite the dedication, the poem is not only about Winslow. It is also about God’s unstoppable domain over the ocean, humanity, and death. During the first section, the speaker is an unnamed Navy shipman who watches a sailor drown near the boat:

A brackish reach of shoal of Madaket, – The sea was still breaking violently and night Had streamed into our North Atlantic Fleet, When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light Flashed from his matted head and marbled feet, He grappled at the net

The poem then shifts, and directly addresses Warren Winslow:

All you recovered from Poseidon died With you, my cousin, and the harrowed brine Is fruitless on the blue beard of the god, Stretching beyond us to the castles in Spain, Nantucket’s westward haven.

Lowell now implicates himself in the poem by using the word “us,” signifying that he personally has entered the poem. The poem is composed of seven different sections, and Lowell interchanges iambic pentameter and trimeter, which contribute to the dark, violent, and unpredictable descriptions of the ocean. While subtle, Lowell attempts to create the effect of life

16 Bidart, Frank, David Gewanter, and DeSales Harrison. Robert Lowell: Collected Poems. (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 1008.

12 within the poem by using form and rhyme to create a sense of a dense and volatile danger that mimics the sea.

While Lowell does use a rhyme scheme, the rhyme is not consistent throughout the poem and varies through different patterns of A, B, and C rhymes. The speaker spends the bulk of the poem visiting a Quaker graveyard on the Massachusetts island of Nantucket, comparing the death of the sailor to the death of Quaker fishermen. The poem opens with a quote from the

Book of Genesis: “Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the foals of the air and the beasts and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.” Lowell grieves for the loss of his dead cousin in the poem, yet compares Winslow’s death to the death of the Quaker fisherman, and their acceptance of their fate:

I see the Quakers drown and hear their cry: “If God himself had not been on our side, If God himself had not been on our side, When the Atlantic rose against us, why, Then it had swallowed us up quick.”

Just as the Quakers understood their death as a sign from God, Lowell works to address

Winslow’s death through the eyes of religion. During the seventh and last section of the poem,

Lowell describes the torturous and cruel nature of the ocean:

Atlantic, you are fouled with the blue sailors, Sea-monsters, upward angel, downward fish: Unmarried and corroding, spare of flesh Mart once of supercilious wing’d clippers, Atlantic, where your bell-trap guts its spoil You could cut the brackish winds with a knife Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time When the Lord God formed man from the sea’s slime And breathed into his face the breath of life, And blue lung’d lumbered to the kill. The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.

13 According to Lowell, God created mankind from the slime of the same ocean that killed his cousin, the Quaker fisherman, and many others. The ocean will continue to make and kill men, and to challenge the ocean is to challenge God himself. The poem ends with the ambiguous and transcendent line “The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.” Here Lowell provides a universal finality unlike in many of Lowell’s later poems. Readers of “The Quaker Graveyard in

Nantucket” are left with an eternal, cyclical, and unstoppable image of God creating life and then taking it away. The end of the poem does not focus on Lowell. Instead, it connects Lowell’s grief into a larger meaning, reminiscent of both the Romantic and metaphysical poets, and especially

John Milton’s poem “Lycidas.” Similar to “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” Milton’s

“Lycidas” is about the Milton’s childhood friend who drowns. Full of biblical and mythological allusions, Milton ends the poem with a religious acceptance of death and renewal:

And now the sun had stretch'd out all the hills, And now was dropp'd into the western bay; At last he rose, and twitch'd his mantle blue: To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

Milton was one of Lowell’s biggest influences, and his poetry continued to inspire Lowell’s own, making it unsurprising that “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” and “Lycidas” have similarities.

“The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” can be dissected and understood from a New

Criticism perspective. At the same time, however, Lowell’s own life and history play a role in the poem as well. Readers are straightly given that his cousin died at sea, and the poem is full of elaborate and complex forms of meter, structure, and rhyme that all contribute to the poem’s theme and message. When closely analyzing the text, readers find allusions to other literary texts such as Moby Dick, Greek mythology, and the Bible. While Lord Weary’s Castle is not

14 considered a Confessional book, many of its other poems are on the precipice of being confessional.

The poem “Rebellion” in Lord Weary’s Castle is confessional adjacent, and can be viewed as a precursor to Life Studies. In the poem, Lowell describes an encounter that occurred between him and his father during his youth. During an argument about a girlfriend, Lowell punched him in the face:

There was a rebellion, father, when the mock French windows slammed and you hove backward, rammed Into your heirlooms, screens, a glass-cased clock, The highboy quaking to its toes. You damned My arm that cast your head upon your head And broke the chimney flintlock on your skull. Last night the moon was full: I dreamed the dead Caught at my knees and fell: And it was well With me, my father.

Quite different than “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” Lowell’s confessional urges are more apparent here. He writes about a specific incident that occurred, and there is no bombastic attempt to connect this experience with the universe. Lowell also eulogizes more of his dead family members in Lord Weary’s Castle, specifically his maternal grandparents in the poems

“Mary Winslow,” and “In Memory of Arthur Winslow.” In Life Studies, Lowell more directly details their lives and his relationship with them.

Inspired by Robert Browning, Lowell wrote several dramatic monologues in an attempt to bring life to verse. The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Lowell’s third published book, is composed of a long dramatic poem of the same title. In the book, and the title-poem, Lowell uses the mask of the dramatic monologue to give life a voice. He shuffles around and edit his own conflicts and memories until truth and art are intertwined. Similar to “The Banker’s Daughter” in Life Studies,

15 Lowell is writing from the perspective of a woman to explore his own trauma and relationships.

This time, Lowell writes from the voice of the fictional Anne Kavanaugh. Lowell describes Anne and her environment before the poem begins:

An Afternoon in the fall of 1943; a village a little north of Bath, Maine. Anne Kavanaugh is sitting in her garden playing solitaire. She pretends that the Bible she has placed in the chair opposite her is her opponent. At one end of the garden is the grave of her husband, Harry Kavanaugh, a naval officer who was retired after Pearl Harbor. The Kavanaughs are a Catholic Family that came to Maine in the 17th century. Their house is called Kavanaugh; it is on a hill, and at its food there is a mill pond, and by it a marble statue of Persephone, the goddess who became a queen by becoming queen of the dead. The Abnakis, or Penobscots, are almost extinct Maine Indians, who were originally converted by the French. Anne comes of a poor family. She was adopted by the Kavanaughs many years before she married. Most of the poem is a revery of her childhood and marriage, and is addressed to her dead husband.

The scene Lowell sets for the reader is similar to his own surroundings and experiences.

Lowell’s father was a naval officer, and Lowell spent much of his time living in Maine with his first wife Jean Stafford. Lowell was obsessed with Catholicism when writing this poem, and had recently converted, dragging Stafford along with him. Unlike “The Banker’s Daughter,” Lowell is not writing from the perspective of a deceased queen. He uses the voice of a fictional woman modeled after a very real woman: Jean Stafford, his own wife.

Lowell’s book The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951) is considered a dramatic monologue in its entirety. In the book, Lowell tells the story of the widow Anne Cavanaugh, who throughout the poems, reflects upon her tumultuous relationship with her deceased husband:

Anne [grew up as] a poor girl from a family of thirteen children, who [was] first adopted by the Kavanaughs and then [got] married to the youngest son, Harry…joining the Navy prior to Pearl Harbor her husband returns from the war on the verge of a nervous breakdown; he attempts and fails to suffocate his wife in bed one night because she

16 speaks aloud, while asleep, to a man in a dream; Harry fears that she has committed adultery. Shortly thereafter, greatly distraught, he [dies].17

While the characters in The Mills of the Kavanaughs are fictional, they are based off of Lowell’s own life and marital problems with his ex-wife Jean Stafford. In the poem “Her Dead Brother,”

Lowell alludes to an incestual relationship between Anne Kavanaugh and her brother. In reality,

Jean Stafford’s brother had died recently and the two were rumored to have an intimate relationship as children. Like Harry Kavanaugh, Lowell strangled Jean Stafford in her sleep after she mentioned the name of a former lover. Lowell frequently uses dramatic monologues as a mask to explore his own turmoil. However, in his review of The Mills of The Kavanaughs, poetry critic – and Lowell’s friend – Randall Jarell was critical of Lowell’s use of dramatic monologue, and believed that the characters in The Mills of the Kavanaughs melted into unbelievable voices. Despite Lowell’s use of the dramatic monologue, their literary circle was small, and it was relatively obvious that The Mills of The Kavanaughs was a thin shield to describe Lowell and Stafford’s tumultuous marriage.

Stafford was humiliated by Lowell’s depictions of abuse, sex, and incest. “Her Dead

Brother.” The poem was published The Nation around the same time as copies of her newest novel The Mountain Lion were released. Both the poem and the book discussed themes of incest between family members, and Stafford was frustrated that Lowell had written a poem with similar content, and that he confessed her own story and history. Stafford furiously wrote to

Lowell that his poem “was an act of “so deep dishonor that it passes beyond dishonor that it passes beyond dishonor and approaches madness. And I am trembling in the presence of your hate.”18 Like many other poets, novelists, and artists, Stafford and Lowell borrowed heavily from

17 Bidart, Robert Lowell: Collected Poems 18 Mariani, The Lost Puritan, 151

17 each other. Stafford believed Lowell’s descriptions of their marriage and her relationship with her brother were unconsented and harmful. However, due to the accepted nature of borrowing and dramatic monologues, Lowell was left unscathed. Despite committing no literary crimes,

Lowell continued to seek out methods that allowed him to depict highly personal stories and construct them to fit a certain story continued.

“The Mills of the Kavanaughs” follows a variety of rigid rhyme schemes. Each stanza is

16 lines. Some stanzas are composed of 8 rhyming couplets, yet some stanzas subtly break the pattern, while still maintaining a clear rhyme. Throughout the poem, Anne Kavanaugh reflects upon her childhood and troublesome relationship with her deceased husband Harry through stream of consciousness. Behind the mask of Anne and Henry Kavanaugh, Lowell references specific troubles and incidents within his relationship with Stafford. Lowell’s devotion to

Catholicism resulted in a tense sex life between him and Stafford. Lowell viewed sex as form of sin. The two rarely slept together – Stafford had a permanent case of gonorrhea that left her sterile.19 Stafford

had been frightened in childhood by intrusive boarders and was so shy with Lowell that she always undressed in the closet. Her venereal disease, which made her fearful of infecting her lovers, had permanently warped her attitude towards sex. She wrote James Hightower that she was frigid and sadly confessed that “no aphrodisiac has yet been devised to make me desire; to make me submit yes, but not to desire.”20

The two would both heavily drink in order to tolerate sex and each other’s presence. Lowell directly describes their sex life in “The Mills of the Kavanaughs”:

“You went to bed, Love – finished through, through, through. Hoping to find you useless, dead asleep, I stole to bed beside you, after two As usual. Had you drugged yourself to keep

19 Meyers, Robert Lowell in Love, 48 20 Meyers, Robert Lowell in Love, 57

18 Your peace? I think so. If our bodies met, You’d flinch, and flounder on your face.

Their relationship was abusive, pathological, and riddled with violence, both physical and emotional. During the early stages of their courtship, Stafford was told by Lowell’s mentor Ford

Maddox Ford that Lowell was “really pathological and capable of murder.”21 In a letter to a friend, Stafford wrote that

Lowell kept saying if I didn’t marry him he would just run the car off the road, etc,. so I said he could go to hell… and he got savage and I got scared so I said well I will see you once more but only in the company of other people….[He said he] he wanted me more than anything else in his life and that I would never be free of him, that he will continue to track me down as long as I live, a very unpleasant thought. It makes me perfectly sick because he is an uncouth, neurotic, psychopathic, murderer-poet.22

Regardless of Lowell’s troubling tendencies, the two got married on April 2nd of 1940. Stafford was rejected by Lowell’s family, despite her success as a novelist. She published her first novel

Boston Adventure in 1944, around the same time that Lowell published his first poetry collection

Land of Unlikeness. Boston Adventure was highly praised, and at the time, Stafford was arguably more successful than Lowell. Stafford’s extreme success and national acclaim made Lowell envious. His jealousy infiltrated their marriage, causing both to become unhappier.

While dating, Lowell drunkenly crashed his car while speeding. The incident crushed

Stafford’s face and nose, resulting in a very extensive and expensive facial reconstruction surgery. Lowell was left unscathed while Stafford suffered from embarrassment and insecurity throughout the rest of her life. In a cruel replay of the crash, Lowell punched Stafford in the nose during an intense argument in 1941. Stafford again required surgery at the cause of Lowell’s violence. In another abusive incident, Lowell jealously attempted to strangle Stafford in her sleep

21 Meyers, Robert Lowell in Love, 49 22 Meyers, Robert Lowell in Love, 49

19 after he heard her utter the name of a former lover in a dream. Similar to the segment about the sex, or lack thereof, between Anne and Henry Kavanaugh, Lowell brings this experience to verse, sealed behind the dramatic monologue:

“I couldn’t tell you; but you shook the bed, And struck me, Harry. ‘I will shake you dead As earth,’ you chattered, ‘you, you, you, you, you…. Who are you keeping, Anne?’ you mocked me, ‘Anne, You want yourself.’ I gagged, and then I ran. My maid was knocking. Snow was chasing through The open window. ‘Harry I am glad You tried to kill me; it is out you know; I’ll shout it from the housetops of the Mills; I’ll tell you, so remember, you are mad; I’ll tell them, listen Harry: husband kills His wife for dreaming. You must help. No, no! I’ve always loved you; I am just a girl; You mustn’t choke me!’

Stafford was embarrassed by Lowell’s public portrayal of their relationship, Lowell’s abuse, and their sex life. Stafford was never directly named in “The Mills of the Kavanaughs” yet it was obvious to many that Anne and Henry were modeled after Stafford and Lowell.

The Mills of the Kavanaughs faced both praise and pushback from Lowell’s literary circle. William Carlos Williams wrote primarily on the form used in the title poem: “In this title poem, a dramatic narrative played out in a Maine village, Mr. Lowell appears to be restrained by the lines; he appears to want to break them. And when the break comes, tentatively, it is toward some happy recollection, the tragedy intervening when this is snatched away and the lines close in once more.”23 Williams’ diagnosis of the structure of “The Mills of the Kavanaughs” shows a tension in the form. Like “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, Lowell’s dark subject matter

23 William Carlos Williams, Review of Robert Lowell, The Mills of the Kavanaughs (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1951) in The New York Times Book Review, 56, 6 (April 22, 1951).

20 places a forced intensity on the rigid rhyme scheme of the poem. It feels as if the words are going to erupt on the page. Lowell’s form here could be seen as reflective of his relationship with

Stafford: brimming with violence and dangerous potential. In Life Studies, his next book, Lowell directly manipulated form in order to express his turmoil and emotions.

Randall Jarrell, Lowell’s college friend, was quite critical of the poem, and wrote that

“The Mills of the Kavanaughs” was “too much a succession of nightmares and daydreams that are half nightmare; one counts with amusement and disbelief the number of times the poem becomes a nightmare-vision or its equivalent.”24 Jarrell proceeded with his assessment of the poem, writing that

there is a sort of monotonous violence and extremity about the poem, as if it were a piece of music that consisted of nothing but climaxes. The people too often seem to be acting in the manner of Robert Lowell, rather than plausibly as real people (or implausibly as real people act). I doubt that many readers will think them real; the husband of the heroine never seems so, and the heroine is first of all a sort of symbiotic state of the poet. (You feel, “Yes Robert Lowell would act like this if he were a girl”; but whoever saw a girl like Robert Lowell?)25

Jarrell’s criticism of the poem presents a dilemma that Lowell enacts within many of his other poems: “a succession of nightmares and daydreams that are half-nightmares.” In “The Mills of the Kavanaughs,” Lowell presents readers with a blurred sense of art, fact, and fiction that are a representation of Lowell’s own fears, his formal background in poetry, and his relationships and existence. Through the mask of the dramatic monologue and a rigid form, Lowell shuffles around fact in order to explore his own self and melodrama. While hair-raising, Lowell’s use of

Stafford’s voice and experiences were not revolutionary. However Lowell’s constant tendency

24 Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: a Biography. (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), 178

25 Hamilton, Robert Lowell: a Biography, 179

21 for “shuffling, restating the terms, revising them as he lived, rewriting them from memory and imagination” resulted in his belief in an “involved impulsive transference, a belief in community, and a shared – or blurred – agency.” Lowell subscribed to this belief in a “shared agency.”

Nonetheless, he had a tendency to confuse the underlying boundary where he ends, and another figure begins. The puppets he generates from his own memory act how Lowell wants them to act. The world he creates in “The Mills of the Kavanaughs” is his own world – not the world of the voiceless “collaborators.”

“The Mills of the Kavanaughs” is an early case of Lowell’s attempt to reflect experience through poetry – a collaboration between his poetic self and his personal self. The poem is not what critics consider “confessional.” However, it provides direct evidence of Lowell’s movement towards confessional tendencies. From this poem, readers can track this tension between the personal and the poetic. Lowell’s transition from a more rigid style of poetry towards the confessional did not provide a clear resolve between Lowell’s split between the personal and poetic. The characters in Life Studies act less obviously in “the manner of Lowell,” and he appears to be more transparent with the persona he incorporates into his poems. However, life does not become art in Life Studies, despite Lowell’s intention to frame the book as autobiographic. There are still distinctions between the two, yet Lowell’s experimentation and process throughout Life Studies and later poems show a more clear movement towards the unification of life and art.

22 Chapter II

Life Studies and the Quest for the Autobiographical

“In these poems, heart-breaking, shocking, grotesque and gentle, the unhesitant attack, the imagery and construction, are as brilliant as ever, but the mood is nostalgic and the meter is refined,” wrote Elizabeth Bishop in her blurb of Robert Lowell’s genre-defying book Life Studies

(1959).26 Lauded by Stanley Kunitz as the most influential collection of poetry since T.S. Eliot’s

The Wasteland, Life Studies was Lowell’s fourth published poetry book, and was starkly different than his previous three.27 Lowell was a student under the New Critics Allen Tate and

Ransom Crowe, and studied meter, form, and rhyme scheme, devoting himself to the works of

“the greats.” A rigid and dedicated scholar, Lowell worshipped Milton, Shakespeare, and Keats, and dedicated himself to studying and imitating their poetic form. When first exploring his poetic abilities, Lowell “tried everything: blank verse, heroic couplets, sonnets, free verse, imitations of

Spenser, Milton, Keats, Wordsworth, William Carlos Williams. He even tried a world-weariness derived from Eliot, LaForgue, and surrealism, anything to locate his own voice.” 28 His earlier poems lack the profound sense of self-actualization that his later poems contained. Most things he wrote were in the image of another famed poet, and his poems dealt with intense subject matter such as epics on God and religion, the apocalypse, and dark oceanic folklore, a “rare feast for the New Critics.”29 Lowell also tended to mask his own turmoil and emotions behind vivid metaphors and structures, including dramatic monologues such as The Mills of the Kavanaughs.

26 Bishop, Elizabeth, Robert Lowell, and Stephen Corey. ""It Is a Marvelous Book": Correspondence." The Georgia Review 62, no. 3 (2008): 507-18. 27 Mariani, Lost Puritan, 262. 28 Mariani, Lost Puritan, 53. 29 Meyers, Robert Lowell in Love, 52.

23 Lowell desired a new style of writing as his career progressed. He sought to escape the rigid poetic guidelines that the New Critics, especially Ransom and Tate, imposed upon him. The

New Critics movement was spearheaded by John Crowe Ransom, a southern poet and one of

Lowell’s first mentors. In Ransom’s movement-defining essay “Criticism, Inc” he argues that poetic criticism “must become more scientific, or precise and systematic, and this means that it must be developed by the collective and sustained effort of learned persons.”30 The New Critics believed that the structure and form of a poem directly contributed to the poem’s message, and that they should be considered as a unit: “All his technical devices contribute to it, elaborating or individualizing the universal, the core-object; likewise all his material detail. For each poem even, ideally, there is distinguishable a logical object or universal, but at the same time a tissue of irrelevance from which it does not really emerge.”31 Ransom proceeds to argue that when analyzing a poem, a critic must disregard the poet’s personal history and experiences within the poem, and that honorable poets focus their attentions on the relationship between form, aesthetics, and message in the poem, instead of their own tumultuous emotions. He writes

The character of the poet is defined by the kind of prose object to which his interest evidently attaches, plus his way of involving it firmly in the residuary tissue. And doubtless, incidentally, the wise critic can often read behind his poet’s public character his private history as a man with a weakness for lapsing into some special form of prosy or scientific bondage.32

New Criticism was believed by many to be too clinical and that its followers were “uninterested in the human meaning, the social function and effect of literature.” 33 Poets, readers, and critics are not machines, and are unable to separate our biases from the content human beings create and

30 Ransom, John Crowe. “Criticism, Inc” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. (New York, New York: W.W. Norton CO., 2001). 31 Ransom, “Criticism, Inc.” 32 Ransom, “Criticism, Inc.” 33 Wellek, René. "The New Criticism: Pro and Contra." Critical Inquiry 4, no. 4 (1978): 611-24.

24 process. Turning poetry and its interpretation into a scientific process disregards humanity’s natural emotional responses. Confessionalism, or what Lowell considered his later work to be, provokes quite the opposite.

As Lowell grew older and became a more experienced poet, he desired a different poetic outlet, and gravitated to new more contemporary poets. Lowell’s new style was inspired primarily by the Beat poets and William Carlos Williams. He wrote in 1958 to his friend R.W.

Flint, lamenting that

My old way of writing wore out for me, and it seemed Sisyphean to continue. And I felt nettled and too crisply labeled when a writer on metrics in the Kenyon found that all younger poets except me required new more flexible laws to be scanned. Also I found reading aloud that I wanted more humor, more immediate clarity, fewer symbols, more of the good prose writer’s realistic direct glance. Then so much of my direct experience seemed ruled out. So, there were [a] few years of silence. Now I have an extra string to my fiddle and can go on.34

Lowell’s previous mentors tended to disregard human experience within poetry. New Critics believed that great poems could be analyzed and understood without knowledge of the author’s experiences. Some emphasized close reading, an intense scrutinizing of the poem’s most detailed forms. Some argued that form and structure contributed more to a poem than the poet’s emotions. As his career progressed, and with his struggles with mental health, Lowell desired a way to express his turmoil in a creative outlet. Lowell looked up to Williams extensively, and believed Williams to be the “model and liberator” of free verse and depiction of lived experience, yet despised poets who directly mimicked Williams. 35

After listening to William’s recitation of his confessional love poem “Asphodel, that

Greeny Flower” during a reading at Wellesley College in 1956, Lowell described Williams’

34 Robert Lowell to Robert Flint, 325 35 Mariani, Lost Puritan, 245

25 “simple confession” as something “impossible, something that was both poetry and beyond poetry.” 36 Lowell strived to achieve something similar – poems that were still well constructed and maintained an impressive form in classic New Critical credentials. The seeds of what became Life Studies began forming, accompanied by increased manic episodes, hospitalizations, and marital strife with his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick.

Lowell published Life Studies in the early months of 1959. In a letter to Robert Frost, he wrote: “The poems… for me they breathe, seem engagingly put together. And yet, and yet! The direction rather appalls me …compared with your work mine is self-locked, more that of a man cut in two. I guess my last poems have the mirror aliveness of a harrowing moment.”37 In this letter to Frost, Lowell shows the taught relationship between structure and expression of emotion. To Lowell, they seem “engagingly put together,” signifying that Lowell has put thought into the craft of the structure and placement of the poems within the book. At the same time,

Lowell believes that Life Studies demonstrates Lowell’s mental and perhaps literary displacement – “a man cut in two” between his former style and new approach to poetry.

Life Studies is divided into four different sections, each incorporating different structures and themes that convey Lowell’s poetic journey and transition into what was later labeled as confessionalism. Lowell despised the term, believing that the careless title reduced the efforts of his artistry and craft. By looking at not only the subject matter, but also the structure and form of

Life Studies, readers can see how Lowell used a variety of different techniques to showcase his gradual transition into a more personal realm of poetry. Each poem within Life Studies has a specific placement that depicts Lowell’s transition. As the book progresses, the poems lose their form and become more directly emotional. Nonetheless, Lowell’s poems are more than an erratic

36 Mariani, Lost Puritan, 256 37 Robert Lowell to Robert Frost, 325

26 outpour of emotions. Lowell heavily scrutinizes and structures his turmoil and observations, creating a tense and often confusing relationship between his inner feelings and the way he presents them. Later in his life, when addressing his poetic process, Lowell wrote

When I was working on Life Studies, I found I had no language or meter that would allow me to approximate what I saw or remembered. Yet in prose I had already found what I wanted, the conventional style of autobiography and reminiscence. So I wrote my autobiographical poetry in a style I thought I had discovered through Flaubert, one that used images and ironic or amusing particulars. I did all kinds of tricks with meter and the avoidance of meter.38

Here, Lowell clarifies his intentions when writing and creating Life Studies. Form, and lack of form, play an important role in Life Studies, and display an appreciation of the autobiographical and a rejection of New Criticism.

Part One of Life Studies is composed of four poems, written in typical Lowellian fashion: full of both obscure and classic historical allusions and rigid forms. Lowell converted to

Catholicism in the 30s, and remained a strict Catholic during the 40s, during the publication of

Lord Weary’s Castle and The Mills of the Kavanaughs. Religion shaped his early poetry, and infiltrates “Beyond the Alps,” the first poem of Life Studies opens with: “On train from Rome to

Paris. 1950, the year Pius defined the dogma of Mary’s bodily assumption.” In the poem, Lowell juxtaposes his European summer vacation with Pope Pius XXI and the Catholic Church declared the holiness of The Virgin Mary: “By the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed

Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” 39

38 Lowell, “After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays On Me,” 114, 39 On November 1st, 1950, Pope Pois XII invoked his dogmatic and papal authority and declared the dogma of Mary’s assumption: “By the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of

27 Lowell compares this defining moment of Catholicism with his desire to move away from religion and towards the more natural world:

Reading again how even the Swiss had thrown the sponge in once again and Everest was still unscaled, I watched our Paris pullman lunge mooning across the fallow Alpine snow. O bella Roma! I saw our stewards go forward on tiptoe banging on their gongs. Life changed to Landscape. Much against my will I left the City of God where it belongs.

Catholicism is an emotionally repressive religion, and Lowell feels the forceful pull of his own turmoil and the world around him move him away, which is expressed throughout the rest of the book. He emphasizes the impenetrable nature of religion in the poem as well, and its effects on

“Mussolini,” “the eagle of Caesar,” and “the crowds at San Pietro scream[ing] Papa.” In a poetry reading at the Guggenheim museum, Lowell stated that the poem was “a declaration of my faith or lack of faith” and about “about people who go beyond nature.”40

The remainder of the first section of Life Studies is composed of three other poems: “The

Banker’s Daughter,” “Inauguration Day: January 1953,” and “A Mad Negro Soldier Confined at

Munich.” In “The Banker’s Daughter,” Lowell inserts himself into the voice of Marie de Medici, the wife of the French Henri IV who was exiled after his assassination. The poem explores de

Medici’s relationship with her newborn child, and the trauma she experiences after her husband’s death. Lowell is neither a mother, a wife, or a woman, yet writes the poem from de Medici’s point of view, foreshadowing a dangerous precedent of appropriating the voices of others in the

God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.”

40 Lowell, Reading at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, October 31, 1963

28 name of “art,” that becomes heavily apparent in later works of Lowell. Similarly, in “A Mad

Negro Soldier Confined at Munich,” Lowell writes from the perspective of a Black soldier during WWII. Lowell himself is an affluent white male, who has never been to war. Today, writing a poem from the perspective of a Black man would most likely not be respected or published. However, this type of obtrusion was common within the world of poetry. Lowell’s imposition of his own voice on to the consciousness of others is not a unique or stand-alone practice. Both “The Banker’s Daughter” and “A Mad Negro soldier Confined at Munich” are dramatic monologues, a common poetic tradition in which a poet assumes the persona of a character. Dramatic monologues were popularized during the Victorian era by the poets Lord

Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. As a student of the classics,

Lowell’s exploration of dramatic monologues were not protested or viewed as inappropriate.

In Life Studies, Lowell turns to himself and his circle. The shield of the dramatic monologue was somewhat removed, yet Lowell continued to warp the stories of those close to him to fit, both emotionally and structurally, into his narrative. Lowell’s dramatic presentation of the self is consistent throughout Life Studies, only without the costume. The costume that remains, however, is his use of structure and form.

Part Two of Life Studies is made up of a singular prose essay titled “91 Revere Street.”

The memoir provides explicit context behind Lowell’s poems about his family. He writes about his childhood in Boston, and explores the lore of his famous Brahmin family members, his strained relationship with his parents, and his education. “91 Revere Street” was shockingly different from anything Lowell had ever written. In Robert Lowell, a Biography by Ian

Hamilton, Hamilton writes that the memoir was originally written as an assignment from

29 Lowell’s therapist.41 Here, Life Studies becomes a product of life itself. “91 Revere Street” sets up the poems in Part Four of Life Studies

In Part Three, Lowell composes four poems dedicated to four of his literary mentors and idols: “Ford Madox Ford,” “For George Santayana,” “To Delmore Schwartz,” and “Words for

Hart Crane.” Lastly, Part Four, which is given the title “Life Studies,” is the section which propelled the book into fame. In Part Four, Lowell uses the family members he wrote about in

“91 Revere Street” and incorporates them into poems. These poems are directly marked by

Lowell’s emotions and experiences, extremely different from his previous poems. Past Lowell poems are grand in their messages and composition. They incorporate great philosophical messages and frequently have intense religious or fantastical resolutions. However, in Life

Studies, Lowell leaves little resolution, and readers are left with an intense, yet vague sense of loneliness, compassion, and introspection.

“Terminal Days at Beverly Farms” has a distinct lonesome ending. In the poem, Lowell describes his father’s last living days while residing at Beverly, a small coastal town “half an hour by train from the Boston doctors.” Lowell does not glamorize his father’s death or attempt to eulogize him grandly. He writes that his father

smiled his oval Lowell smile, he wore his cream gabardine dinner-jacket and indigo cummerbund. His hand was efficient and hairless, his newly dieted figure was vitally trim.

And finally,

Father’s death was abrupt and unprotesting. His vision was still twenty-twenty. After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling,

41 Hamilton, Hamilton, Robert Lowell: a Biography,

30 his last words to mother were: “I feel awful.”

Lowell ends the poem abruptly with the isolating and individualistic last words of his father: “I feel awful.” Lowell’s hasty ending is unsettling, and leaves his audience desiring more out of the poem and out of his father’s death. However, this ending reflects the plainness of death. Instead of creating a grand simile or explanation of the afterlife, Lowell’s father’s death is depicted accurately. The end of the poem reflects the death, furthering Lowell’s desire to represent his poetry in an autobiographical nature: “abrupt and unprotesting.” Lowell described his father’s death similarly in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop in 1950: “The death seems almost meaningless, as is perhaps always the case when the life has long resigned itself to a terrible, dim, diffused pathos.” 42

“Memories of West Street and Lepke,” an autobiographical poem about Lowell’s stint in jail in the 40s for protesting World War II, carries a similar final tone. Lowell describes “Czar

Lepke,” aka Lepke Buchalter, head of the infamous mafia group Murder, Inc. The two were in the same prison, while Lepke awaited execution. Lepke is described mundanely while death looms over him:

Flabby, bald, lobotomized, he drifted in a sheepish calm, where no agonizing reappraisal jarred on his concentration on the electric chair— hanging like an oasis in his air of lost connections. . . .

Despite being incredibly famous and violent, Lowell does not create a bombastic representation of Lepke’s state. Lowell creates a pitiful portrayal of Lepke towards the end of his life. Like

Lowell’s description of his father’s death, Lepke’s near-death is a rejection of the artificial and

42 Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, 159

31 contrived and theatrical portrayals of life and death. Death rarely reflects the grandiosity of someone’s life, and Lowell wants to reflect the mundane and unfulfilling aspect of death and life.

In “Waking in Blue,” a chronicle of his time spent at McLean’s, a mental hospital outside of Boston, there is no set rhyme scheme or structure. However, he sporadically and subtly includes rhymes throughout the poem, and they easily could go unnoticed. In the first stanza of the poem, Lowell writes plainly:

The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore, rouses from the mare’s nest of his drowsy head propped on The Meaning of Meaning. He catwalks down our corridor. Azure day makes my agonized blue window bleaker. Crows maunder on the petrified fairway. Absence! My heart grows tense as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill. (This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)

Lowell’s situation is fairly clear. He is at McLean’s, which he mentions later in the poem, and a sophomore at Boston University is on the night watch. Lowell himself feels depressed by his surroundings. Lowell’s descriptions of others in the hospital, along with his own intense emotional exploration dominate the poem. However, when looking closer at this first stanza, we notice that the words “sophomore” and “corridor” rhyme, which is no coincidence. Again, “azure day” and “petrified fairway” rhyme, along with “kill” and “ill,” which form a couplet at the end of the stanza.

Once again, the ending of “Waking in the Blue” rejects grandiosity. Lowell is in the mental hospital with seemingly important figures that cling to their past: “Stanley, now sunk in his sixties, once a Harvard all-American fullback,” “’Bobbie,’ Porcellian ’29, a replica of Louis

XVI.” He describes these characters as “victorious figures of bravado ossified young.” Lowell is

32 not exempt from these men holding on to their ambitious past. In the last stanza of the poem,

Lowell writes about himself in a self-deprecating but aware manner:

After a hearty New England breakfast,, I weigh two hundred pounds this morning. Cock of the walk, I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey before the metal shaving mirrors, and see the shaky future grow familiar in the pinched, indigenous faces or these thoroughbred mental cases, twice my age and half my weight. We are all old-timers, each of us holds a locked razor.

Like Lepke, Lowell and all of the others in McLean have experienced grandeur and greatness.

However, their situation is far from glamorous. Instead of eulogizing his life and the lives of others, Lowell depicts their depressing and isolating state by grouping them all together: “We are all old-timers,/each of us holds a locked razor.” They are all unable to do something as simple as shaving, a far cry from their past.

There is one distinct poem in Life Studies where Lowell creeps towards the brutal methods used in The Dolphin: “To Speak of the Woe That Is Marriage.” In this poem, Lowell writes from the point of view of Hardwick. Like poems throughout The Dolphin, “These are versions of words Elizabeth Hardwick almost surely spoke in distress, and they paint her husband in the worst light imaginable.”43

“The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open, Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen. My hopped up husband drops his home disputes, and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,

43 Chiasson, Dan. “The Dolphin Letters.” The Yale Review. Yale University, April 5, 2020. https://yalereview.yale.edu/dolphin-letters.

33 free-lancing out along the razor’s edge. This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge. Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust… It’s the injustice…he is so unjust — whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five. My only thought is how to keep alive. What makes him tick? Each night now I tie ten dollars and his car key to my thigh…. he stalls above me like an elephant.”

Like all the poems in The Dolphin, “To Speak of the Woe That Is Marriage,” is also a sonnet.

However, unlike The Dolphin, it is composed of rhyming couplets that act as a sort of a barrier between the personal and poetic, slightly shielding the raw intensity of the poem. Lowell also uses a cryptic epigraph from the German Philosopher Schopenhauer to introduce the poem: “It is the future generation that presses into being by means of these exuberant feelings and super sensible soup bubbles of ours.” Like the rhyme scheme, this epigraph blurs the blunt voice of

“the wife” character.

The last poem of Life Studies, titled “Skunk Hour” is another example of Lowell’s raw emotions within Life Studies. In “Skunk Hour,” Lowell is spying on young couples in their cars.

The poem states clearly that he is lonely: “I myself am hell;/nobody’s here –.” So lonely that he can feel the emptiness pulsating throughout his life source – his blood: “I hear/my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell.” The poem is divided into eight clean sestets, with each sestet containing a different, erratic internal rhyme scheme, perhaps showcasing Lowell’s instability, which he articulates plainly: “My mind’s not right.” Lowell is left alone with his gruesome, voyeuristic thoughts. He is only surrounded by skunks, disgusting creatures who scavenge for food. Lowell is on the same level as lowly animals. The skunks,

They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire

34 of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air— a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare.

Even the skunks around him seem to have companions, and find a sense of relief once they have achieved their simplistic mission – obtaining food. The poem ends here. Readers are left with a grotesque image of skunks ravaging through sour cream, an unappetizing image. There is no relief at the end, and Lowell finds no resolve to his loneliness. “Skunk Hour” seemingly lacks the heavy allusions and pretentious history lessons that Lowell imposed on his early poems.

However, Lowell does maintain the voice of another in “Skunk Hour” – the voice of

Milton’s Satan. Lowell’s reference to Satan is jarring. In Paradise Lost, Milton writes about

Satan’s despair:

Me miserable! which way shall I fly Infinite wrath and infinite despair? Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell; And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep Still threatening to devour me opens wide, To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.

Lowell essentially copies his line directly from Paradise Lost. By doing this, he obscures the boundary between him and Satan. Lowell casts his own trauma as Satanic and the impulse to use the language and actions of Satan didn’t end in literature, considering the direct violence that

Lowell imposed upon Jean Stafford and male friends. Even Lowell’s own nickname invokes the idea of Satan – or at least some type of similar evil. From a young age, friends and family nicknamed him Cal for his large statue and brutish nature. Cal is short for both Caliban, a

35 grotesque half-monster in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and for Caligula, the tyrannical and violent Roman emperor. Caliban’s mother is a witch-hag figure that he worships. Lowell also had a complex relationship with his controlling mother, Charlotte Winslow, who impacted his relationships with other women, and his own mental-health. The nickname “Cal” persisted throughout Lowell’s life. Like Satan in “Skunk Hour,” it is unclear where Caligula and Caliban begin and where Lowell ends. Like Satan, Lowell is in a Hell of his own creation. Hell is his mind, and he is unable to escape. While “Skunk Hour” is a deeply personal poem that looks into

Lowell’s loneliness, his reference to Paradise Lost shows that Lowell still is working between the poetic and the personal, instead of uniting the two. He attempts to bring in the outside voice of Milton’s Satan in order to heighten his own melodrama.

Looking at previous drafts of “Skunk Hour” also provides us with an example of

Lowell’s mixing of his melodrama and his environment. The subtle differences in Lowell’s first draft of the poem vs. his published draft especially highlights his incorporation of others into his work. The unpublished version of the sixth stanza reads:

A car radio bleats: “Love, O careless Love....” Everyone in town is in bed With everyone else. I myself am hell; Nobody's here

The published version of this stanza differs in the third and fourth lines:

A car radio bleats, “Love, O careless Love....” I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat.... I myself am hell; nobody's here —

36 Lowell is involving other unnamed people in his own narrative in the unpublished draft. The people are acting in a way that suits Lowell. They are all together, while Lowell is alone. Lowell heightens the town's gossip into some kind of spiritual map of his isolation. In the published drive, Lowell alters the lines to disregard the other, focusing on his own melodrama. However, he maintains the lines “I myself am hell;/nobody’s here .” Despite maintaining these similarities, the “nobody’s here” have two distinct meanings within each draft. In the first draft of “Skunk

Hour,” Lowell is stating that everyone else is busy in bed with each other – nobody is literally here. In the published draft, he is implying that he is a shell of himself. His mind is not stable and is not present within his own body. He is an outsider to himself. While “Skunk Hour” is a deeply personal poem that looks into Lowell’s loneliness, his reference to Paradise Lost shows that

Lowell’s use of the dramatic monologue and literary allusions has not entirely disappeared, despite his confessional tendencies.

Life Studies was met with a variety of opposing reactions from both critics and his peers.

Despite being an avid fan of the book, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Lowell in 1957 after reading an early draft, lightly critiquing the name-dropping that occurs in Life Studies:

I am green with envy of your kind of assurance. I feel that I could write in as much detail about my Uncle Artie, say—but what would be the significance? Nothing at all. He became a drunkard, fought with his wife, and spent most of his time fishing . . . and was ignorant as sin. . . . Whereas all you have to do is put down the names! And the fact that it seems significant, illustrative, American, etc., gives you, I think, the confidence you display about tackling any idea or theme, seriously, in both writing and conversation. In some ways you are the luckiest poet I know!44

Unlike his wives and literary companions, Lowell entered the world of poetry and academia with his name already established. To this day, the names of Boston Brahmin families are

44 Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell, 1958, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano & Saskia Hamilton (New York, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020).

37 everywhere. It is impossible to take a walk around the greater Boston area without seeing a building or a statue named after a Lowell, Eliot, Winthrop, Cabot, or Winslow. Lowell’s grandfather was the president of Harvard College. The poet Amy Lowell was his cousin. In Life

Studies especially, Lowell eulogizes his famous family, creating a lore that surrounds the Boston intellectual community. Bishop claims that simply stating the names of famous Brahmin family members gives Lowell the confidence to write clearly and openly about his mental health, marital problems, and trauma. Bishop’s criticism of Life Studies erases Lowell’s dedication to craft and structure in the book.

In an interview for The Paris Review, Lowell clarifies the process in which he wrote and edited Life Studies:

I began to have a certain disrespect for the tight forms. If you could make it easier by adding syllables for the tight forms. If you could make it easier by adding syllables, why not? And then when I was writing Life Studies, a good number of the poems were started in a very strict meter, and I found that, more than the rhymes, the regular beat was what I didn’t want. I have a long poem in there about my father, called “Commander Lowell,” which actually is largely in couplets, but I originally wrote perfectly strict four-foot couplets. Well with that form it’s hard not to have echoes of Marvell. That regularity just seemed to ruin the honesty of sentiment, and became rhetorical. 45

Here Lowell provides direct context to how he uses form to complement the theme of the poem.

In “Commander Lowell,” he chooses to change the structure in order preserve the sentiment of their flawed, human relationship. Perfect couplets would have created an artificial and rigid depiction of his father. In the same interview, Lowell says “I couldn’t get my experience into tight metrical forms… meter plastered difficulties and mannerisms on what I was trying to say to

45 Lowell, Robert, and Jeffrey Meyers. Robert Lowell, Interviews and Memoirs. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1988.

38 such an extent that it terribly hampered.”46 When asked specifically about the craft of his contemporary W.D. Snodgrass, Lowell highlights their ability to integrate emotion and form.

The poems are about his child, his divorce, and Iowa City, and his child is a Dr. Spock child – all handled in expert little stanzas. I believe that’s a new kind of poetry. Other poems that are direct that way are slack and have no vibrance. His experience wouldn’t be so interesting and valid if it weren’t for the whimsy, the music, the balance, everything revised and placed and pondered. All that light to those poems on agonizing subjects comes from the craft.47

Lowell then proceeds to claim that the best poems are ones that are able to artfully and delicately incorporate their minute emotions and experiences, just like Snodgrass.

Life Studies presented readers and critics with the new opportunity to analyze Lowell’s poetry from both an emotional and structural lens. Lowell’s genius in Life Studies shines through because of his ability to link the two. The structure, or lack of one, of his poems in Life Studies vary. Lowell was an extremely cautious writer, and would rewrite his drafts obsessively. In a letter to Bishop in 1959, the year Life Studies was published, he wrote:

In the hospital I spent a mad month or more rewriting everything in my three books. I arranged the poems chronologically, starting with Greek and Roman times and finally rose to air and the present with Life Studies. I felt that I had hit the skies, that all cohered. It was mostly waste.48

Perhaps a byproduct of his manic depression and his poetic talent, Lowell was a serial reviser throughout the entirety of his career, regardless of the genre he wrote. The poet Frank Bidart,

Lowell’s friend, wrote that when turning his book Notebook into History, Lowell “carried around a copy of Notebook with dozens of penciled corrections on every page; he seemed incapable of

46 Lowell & Meyers, Robert Lowell, Interviews and Memoirs. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 47 Lowell & Meyers, Robert Lowell, Interviews and Memoirs. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 48 Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, 351

39 resting with anything as provisional in feeling and texture as Notebook.” 49His dedication to expressing his emotions through both his words and structure show his immense ability as a poet.

Lowell’s ability to use form as a method of expression was disregarded by critics, peers, and mentors. Joseph Bennett of The Hudson Review, wrote [brutely] that: “This book does little to add to Lowell’s standing as a poet. Lazy and anecdotal, it is more suited as an appendix to some snobbish society magazine, to Town and Country or Harper’s Bazaar, rather than as purposeful work.”50 Bennett’s review of Life Studies disregards the discreet and impactful ways

Lowell uses form to display emotion. Lowell’s name dropping of famous family members might be slightly pretentious; however, many poems write about their family. Lowell cannot help that he is a Lowell, and like many others, his family has greatly impacted his life and work. Lowell’s

New Critic mentor Allen Tate was one of the many who rejected Lowell’s new poetic direction:

Tate, sensing the break with his own poetic practice, was deeply disturbed by what he read and told him so in no uncertain terms. The new lines were arbitrary and rhymeless, Tate insisted, and merely “composed of unassimilated details, terribly intimate and cold noted. “Skunk Hour” and “Inauguration Day’ might do, but all the family poems were “definitely bad” and should not be published. In his best poems in Lord Weary’s Castle, Cal had managed “a formal underlying symbolic order. But these poems, because the lacked just such an order, at once dissolved into a chaos of “details presented in causerie and at random,” without any interest to any, perhaps, but the poet and a few friends. In fact Tate told others he was afraid the new poems showed symptoms of mania in Lowell. His deepest fear, of course (though he did not say so,) was that he had finally lost control over his former disciple.51

Tate failed to accept Lowell’s reasoning behind incorporating “details presented in causerie and at random.” Lowell incorporated “unassimilated and intimate details” to reflect his own mania,

49 Bidart, Robert Lowell: Collected Poems, xvii 50 Hamilton, Robert Lowell: a Biography, 272 51 Mariani, Lost Puritan

40 feelings of isolation, and depression. The poems did show symptoms of mania in Lowell, but he had full control of his work, and intentionally edited and revised his poems to depict his mania.

Despite Lowell’s intentions, Life Studies paved the way for a new genre of poetry — confessionalism. The Critic M.L Rosenthal first coined the term “confessional” in his 1959 essay

“Poetry as Confessional,” a review of Robert Lowell’s poetry collection Life Studies. In this essay, Rosenthal compares Lowell’s literary journey to his predecessors’, and the poetic trend towards confessionalism. Rosenthal writes that “Emily Dickinson once called publication ‘the auction of the mind.’ Robert Lowell seems to regard it more as soul’s therapy. The use of poetry for the most naked kind of confession grows apace in our day.” 52 According to the Merriam-

Webster Dictionary, The word “confession,” never before used to describe poetry, has many different definitions, one being “a written or oral acknowledgment of guilt by a party accused of an offense.” In the context of religion, especially Catholicism, which Lowell incorporates frequently into his poetry, a confession is a ritualistic form of penance in which people admit their sins and guilts to a priest, thus involving an audience. By using the word “confession,”

Rosenthal invokes the idea that some form of guilt or crime is at stake in “Life Studies,” and

Lowell’s poetry is a confession. It is up to the readers to absolve Lowell.

Rosenthal proceeds to dissect other poets’ relationship with poetry, stating that the personal qualms of the Romantics were morphed into a greater cosmic symbolism. T.S. Eliot,

Ezra Pound, and other modernists nearly reached the confessional, yet a “certain indirection masks the poet’s actual face and psyche.” Eliot, for example, was heavily fixated on form, references to past literary works, and the inclusion of foreign languages and historical events in

52 The Nation, September 19, 1959. Rosenthal reprinted this review "Robert Lowell and the Poetry of Confession" into his 1960 book The Modern Poets.

41 his poem “The Waste Land” (1922). The poem becomes too omnipresent to become a confession. Rosenthal claims that Whitman brings American poetry to the brink of the confessional. However, like the Romantics, Whitman’s poems transcend the body and mind, creating somewhat of a sublime and otherworldly confessional. Lowell is the first to remove “the mask. His speaker is unequivocally himself, and it is hard not to think of Life Studies as a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal.” John Thompson also reviewed Life Studies in The Kenyon Review, writing that “For these poems, the question of propriety no longer exists. They have made a conquest: what they have won is a major expansion of the territory of poetry.” However, nearly eight years later, when addressing his creation of the term “confessional” in his book of criticism The New Poets (1967), Rosenthal wrote that “It was a term both helpful and too limited, and very possibly the conception of a confessional school has by now done a certain amount of damage.” 53

Lowell, along with many other “confessionals” rejected the label. According to Bidart,

Lowell “winced at the term. It implies helpless outpouring, secrets whispered with an artless that is their badge of authenticity, the uncontrolled admission of guilt that attempts to wash away guilt. Or worse: confession of others’ guilt; litanies of victimization.”54 In his Collected Poems, edited by Bidart and David Gewanter, Bidart also highlights Lowell’s relationship with the confessional: “He became famous as a “confessional” writer, but he scorned the term. His audacity, his resourcefulness and boldness lie not in his candor but his art.” 55 Bidart’s view of

Lowell’s ability to blend personal history into poetry contrasts with Bishop’s originally criticism of Life Studies, and he attempts to make Lowell’s emphasis on craft apparent in the most recent

53 Rosenthal, Macha Louis. The New Poets: American and British Poetry since World War II. (London: Oxford University Press, 1973). 54 Bidart, Robert Lowell: Collected Poems, 997 55 Bidart, Robert Lowell: Collected Poems, vii

42 edition of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems: “Therefore the present edition: by laying before the reader materials often buried since first publication, the present edition hopes to bring into focus

Lowell’s practice as an artist, his nature as a maker.”56

Lowell’s dedication to the craft of his poems is what makes his art so powerful. in Life

Studies, Lowell manipulated forms and structure in order to make his poems seem more autobiographical and life-like. However, despite Lowell’s poetic intentions, Lowell became the precedent setter and rule definer for the confessional genre of poetry. His unchecked candor caused him to extrovert his narcissism and personality onto the people in his life. Before, during, and after the publication of Life Studies Lowell’s habit of borrowing from other poets and aspects of his own life blurs the lines between art, storytelling, and theft. Lowell’s drive to write about his own life, along with his careful construction of the narratives of others present are reflected heavily not only in Life Studies, but in his relationships with others, and in his future books as well. Life Studies was a steppingstone in Lowell’s drive to unify life and art through poetry. However, Lowell continued to crave a form of permanence in poetry that Life Studies did not invoke. Life Studies paved the way for Lowell’s future book The Dolphin, where through the use of raw materials, he attempted to conjoin the personal and the poetic.

56 Bidart, Robert Lowell: Collected Poems, vii

43 Chapter Three:

Unification through The Dolphin

The Dolphin, published in 1973, provided Lowell with a direct outlet to combine the personal and the poetic. Similar to past books, Lowell sets up the book and its poems against a backdrop of poetic tradition. The Dolphin is composed only of 14 line sonnets that follow no specific rhyme scheme. Again, in typical Lowellian fashion, he weaves in classical symbols throughout the poems. Lowell’s third wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood, is represented by a dolphin. The dolphin “is a symbol of Apollo, one of the gods of poetry and of healing and divination; and the word, some scholarship suggests is etymologically linked to δελφύς or delfys, for “womb.” As a classicalist in college, Lowell would also have known the tale, from Herodotus and Ovid, of the poet Arion, who was rescued from captivity by dolphins.”57 Lowell considered

Blackwood to be one of his poetic muses. Like the Arion in classical mythology, Blackwood saves Lowell from the constraints he felt. She was also pregnant with their child Robert Sheridan

Lowell at the time.

Lowell reconciles the distinction between art and life by enacting and recognizing the tension between the two. Unlike past books, Lowell uses the shaping of the manuscript of The

Dolphin as a physical guide to process and work through his indecision of choosing between

Hardwick and Blackwood, and to resolve his guilt of leaving Hardwick and Harriet for

Blackwood. In this practice, the poems become a living, breathing document because Lowell the art is used in conjunction within his emotions. By blurring the divide between the two, Lowell is

57 Lowell, Robert, and Saskia Hamilton. The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972-1973. (New York, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), xii.

44 able to fulfill his mission as a literary ventriloquist. Lowell also bridges the personal and poetic by directly using raw materials, such as Hardwick’s letters and evolving personal matters. The

Dolphin, “by refiguring the geniuses of memory and imagination as women, allows Lowell to test the patterns of experience and art together and to seek a unified self among them.”58 Lowell maintains the some of the sense of “the poetic” by incorporating the traditional structure of the sonnet, and using the sonnet facilitate the bridge between poetry and life. Unlike past Lowell books such as The Mills of the Kavanaughs, the characters in The Dolphin (Hardwick and

Blackwood) are not acting in “the manner of Robert Lowell.” Despite structural edits, Lowell avoids this by incorporating the letters into the text instead of directly obscuring them: “several of the early letters, from my wife are now cut up into Voices (often using such title) \changing mostly pronouns/ as if I were speaking and paraphrasing or repeating Lizzie.” 59 Lowell still edits and alters the voice of Hardwick, yet her voice and intent pierce through Lowell’s changes.

Hardwick and Lowell married in July of 1949, quickly after his divorce with Stafford.

Hardwick, like Stafford, was an immensely talented writer, and also served as Lowell’s mental, physical, and literary assistant while he struggled with breakdowns and hospitalizations. Her writing was described as “articulate, witty, very clever, freewheeling, she became a master of the slashing critical style of the politicized.”60 She “had a taste for the quick, barbed exchange, a gift for devastating gossip, a commitment to serious political discourse, and a beguiling gracious modesty that concealed a nestles, often brilliantly original mind.” 61 She remained a committed

58 Gewanter, “Child of Collaboration: Robert Lowell's “Dolphin.” 59 Hardwick, Elizabeth, Robert Lowell, and Saskia Hamilton. The Dolphin Letters 1970-1979. (London: Faber & Faber, 2020), 272. 60 Meyers, Robert Lowell in Love, 90-91 61 Meyers, Robert Lowell in Love, 91

45 pillar of stability throughout the entirety of their relationship. Hardwick herself benefited professionally from their relationship. She was

personally ambitious and impressed by the New England aura surround him, and treasured the prestige and power that came with being Mrs. Robert Lowell. By marrying him she climbed higher than she had ever dreamed, from provincial obscurity to a glorious lineage, with all its privileges and accoutrements. He arranged her entry into the New York Review of Books, which greatly supplanted the Partisan Review as the leading intellectual journal, and greatly enhanced her literary reputation. 62

In this way, their relationship was symbiotic and collaborative. Hardwick was Lowell’s intellectual match. Unlike Stafford, jealousy did not plague their relationship. While Lowell helped her advance her career, Hardwick’s stability allowed her to “manage the practical affairs of her impractical husband. When he was ill, she corrected his student papers at Boston

University and Harvard, attended the premieres of his plays, and told him about the performances of the actors and responses of the audience.” 63 Their marriage was still ravaged by

Lowell’s affairs, his mania, and their volatile arguments about Lowell’s drinking and his behavior. When frustrated with Hardwick’s criticism, would attack her intelligence in an attempt to put her down: “Everybody has noticed that you’ve been getting mighty dumb lately.”

Hardwick always took Lowell back, and remained consistently tolerant of his wrongdoings and illness. Her letters to Lowell remained loving and kind. Hardwick also believed

Lowell to be intellectually and artistically superior to him, which is perhaps why she remained tolerant of his behavior and consistently supportive of his work, regardless of how he treated her.

Hardwick explores the dynamic between talented writer couples in her book of essays titled

Seduction and Betrayal, a series of analyses of female writers. In a chapter on Zelda and F. Scott

62 Meyers, Robert Lowell in Love, 94 63 Meyers, Robert Lowell in Love, 95

46 Fitzgerald, Hardwick argues that the less talented of the two writers in the couple should sacrifice their talents to aid the other:

In the case of artists these intense relations are curiously ambivalent, undefined collaborations – the two share in perceptions, temperament, the struggle for creation, for the powers descending downward from art, for the reputation, achievement, stability, for their own uniqueness – that especially. Still, only one of the twins is real as an artist, as a person with a special claim upon the world, upon the indulgence of society…The presence of an intelligent, sympathetic, clever sensibility, always at hand, always bright and somehow creative, is a source even a source of material.64

Seduction and Betrayal was published a year after The Dolphin, after Lowell directly used

Hardwick as a source of material throughout the poems. Hardwick’s position here is jarring and unsettling. Hardwick was used to serving as a muse for Lowell. He wrote frequently about their marriage, however from his perspective Lowell’s publication of The Dolphin deeply upset her, and by directly using her work, he crossed a line.

In the fall of 1969, Lowell was offered a visiting professorship position at All Souls

College in Oxford. He accepted, and began teaching at the University of Essex a few months before the fellowship at Oxford began. He immediately began an affair with Lady Caroline

Blackwood. After defensive and vague letters from Lowell, Hardwick learned of their affair in

June of 1970, and “burst out laughing,” believing the affair with Blackwood was just another one of Lowell’s manic episodes.65 However, when the extent and seriousness of their affair became obvious, Hardwick became furious at Lowell for disregarding her career and income: “I want to add my absolute horror that you two people have taken away something I loved and needed. My job at Barnard, which I tried to get back, but is filled for this year and the budget is filled. My utter contempt for both of you for the misery you have brought to tow who had never hurt knows

64 Hardwick, Elizabeth. Seduction and Betrayal. (London: Faber and Faber, 2019.)

65 Hamilton, Robert Lowell: a Biography, 399

47 no bounds.”66 Lowell officially left Hardwick for Blackwood while teaching at Oxford. Despite

Lowell’s adultery and abandonment of Hardwick and their daughter Harriet, Lowell and

Hardwick maintained a steady, frequent, sometimes pleasant, but heart-wrenching correspondence. Their detailed and impassioned letters lead to the creation of The Dolphin.

In an interview with his future biographer Ian Hamilton, Lowell stated that he hoped his poems “might seem as open and single-surfaced as a photograph…It’s severe to be confined to rendering appearances.” 67 Lowell toyed with different forms, themes, and structures throughout his career, searching for way to reflect the “things [he] felt or saw, or read” instead of the things he recalled While still poignant and groundbreaking, Lowell’s previous work narrowly fails to escape the limitations of “rendering appearances.” Lowell’s use of permanent and concrete materials (Hardwick’s letters) in The Dolphin allows him to break through the blurry and separation conjunctions of art and life. Through The Dolphin, art and life become one. Lowell also used the manuscripts and edits to battle through his indecision between Hardwick and

Blackwood. The Dolphin also successfully incorporates life and art by tracking the constant changes and choices throughout Lowell’s life. Using Hardwick’s personal letters was cruel and morally questionable. However, artistically, Lowell succeeded in his journey to conjoin life and art. His actions directly reflect his treatment of Hardwick, another way in which Lowell unites the personal and poetic.

Lowell formed three new sets of sonnets after Notebook (1969). He revised poems from notebook and turned them into History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin, all published in

1973. He wrote to Bidart in 1971, describing the project to him and his desire to use his poetry to

66 Hamilton, Robert Lowell: a Biography, 399 67 Lowell & Meyers, Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs, 158

48 create the image of a personal narrative: “Here’s where I need you most: I’ve tried to reduce

Notebook to personal narrative. Mostly the Historic, the metaphysical go, tho it keeps bits of each, then go the personal poems that fit well enough but are inflated, uninspired, or redundant.68

Lowell did not want to incorporate personal poems that did not contribute to the realistic nature of life. Through Lowell’s mission to represent life through art, he created The Dolphin.

Lowell was not the first writer to incorporate personal voices and materials from other sources. TS Eliot used the narratives and phrases of his mentally ill wife Vivienne in his poem

The Waste Land, the most prominent work of Modernist poetry, and a book that heavily influenced Lowell’s own confessional writing. 69 William Carlos Williams, the author of the poetry collection Paterson, which Lowell believed at the time to be “the best poetry by an

American,” incorporated his friend Marcia Nardi’s love letters into his poetry without her consent.70 Williams also included newspaper clips and other materials into Paterson as well.

Lowell’s response to Paterson, published 27 years before Lowell’s The Dolphin, eerily forecasts

Lowell’s usage of Hardwick’s letters in The Dolphin. In Lowell’s review of Paterson, he defends

Williams’s use of Nardi’s personal and intimate letters, and reiterates their poetic necessity in his correspondence with Elizabeth Bishop:

I think of their effectiveness in two ways: 1) so terrifyingly real, and yet I don’t think I’d want to read many of them straight — too monotonous, pathological, the agony is absorbed. 2) Aren’t they really hardest on Williams himself (Paterson), a damning of his insensitivity. She’s mad, but he, like Aeneas can’t handle her and shows up badly. I think that’s their purpose in the poem. Paterson has been like water to me, and my judgement may be subjective. 71

68 Lowell to Bidart, 579 69 Meyers, Robert Lowell in Love, 113 70 Lowell to Bishop, 16 (Word in Air) 71 Lowell to Bishop, 40 (Words in Air).

49 Long before the publication of The Dolphin, Lowell emphasizes the importance of realness in poetry. He defends Williams’ controversial decision to incorporate raw, unfiltered materials into his poems. Lowell also argues that Williams’ use of intimate materials in Paterson mostly affected Williams himself, not Nardi or the sources of the materials used in the poem. Lowell felt similarly about The Dolphin, stating that after its publication that “The moral criticism, I pass by, — that is for me to take up with myself — something can be learned — the mind can change, though not the acts.”72 Bishop’s response and disagreement with Lowell’s defense of William’s plagiarism parallel her future resentment towards The Dolphin. “I feel like he shouldn’t have used the letters from that woman – to me it seems mean, & they’re much too overpowering emotionally for the rest of it so that the whole poem suffers…I think Williams has always had a streak of insensitivity.”73 Lowell, however, believed that Williams “overpowering emotions” were a valuable reflection on life itself, thus making Paterson valuable and necessary art.

Lowell greatly admired works that invoked vitality. However, similar to Jarell’s criticism of The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Lowell was critical of The Waste Land and Paterson for limiting their external materials and characters: “No characters take on sufficient form to arrive at a crisis. The people melt into voices,” Lowell wrote.74 In The Dolphin, Lowell attempts to resolve this issue by giving his voices and characters enough depth and complexity. The voices he incorporates into his own are not reflections of his own. They are created to be harsh, brutal, and abrupt, therefore representing life, instead of just the recalled.

Lowell struggles with this blurring between the recalled and the present in the poem:

“Double Vision.” While home with Caroline, Lowell attempts to understand his surroundings:

72 Lowell to Bishop, 618. 73 Bishop to Lowell, 38 (Words in Air), 74 Gewanter, “Child of Collaboration,” 179

50 “The room has filled with double-shadows,/sedation doubles everything I see…./You can’t be here, and yet we try to talk;/somebody else is farcing in your face.” Lowell’s medication and mania cause his confusion and his double vision. His physical state represents his poetic state, and struggle to conjoin the two. Confused, Lowell attempts to grasp at his imagined perception of Caroline: “While we are talking, I am asking you,/ “Where is Caroline” And you are

Caroline.” Suddenly the recalled and the present are both in front of Lowell. Hardwick’s voice suddenly interrupts Lowell’s confusion in the next long poem “Hospital II.” In “Voices,” marked by quotations to indicate a voice other than Lowell’s is being used, Hardwick’s figure harshly criticizes Lowell for leaving her and Harriet: “What a record year, even for us –” Hardwick scoffs sarcastically at Lowell.

last March, I knew you’d manage by yourself, you were the true you; now finally your clowning makes visitors want to call a taxi, you tease the patients as if they were your friends, your real friends who want to save your image from this genteel, disgraceful hospital. Your trousers are worn to a mirror…. That new creature when I hear her name, I have to laugh. You left two houses and two thousand books, a workbarn by the ocean, and two slaves to kneel and wait upon you hand and foot – tell us why in the name of Jesus.”

Lowell then interrupts Hardwick’s angry and acerbic voice and cuts the quotation marks:

“Why/am I clinging here so foolishly alone?” he asks. In an unpublished draft of the manuscript,

“Voices” is titled “From My Wife.” Lowell’s change here is confusing. The title “Voices” is more obscure, an attempt to remove the directness of Hardwick’s voice. Lowell’s unpublished draft of “Voices” perhaps does a better job of incorporating art and life into one. However, in order to morally soften the manuscript Lowell alleviates Hardwick’s voice, a difference seen

51 across both the published and unpublished manuscripts. Hardwick’s heartache and vulnerability are displayed in the next poem, “Letter”: “I shout into the air, my voice comes back — /nothing reaches your black silhouette.”

Hardwick continues to interrupt Lowell’s despair and his professions of love to

Blackwood. Her voice seems hardly poetic, and the words Lowell gives her (or takes from her) read like letters. In “In the Mail,” Hardwick writes about logistical matters such as Lowell’s students at Harvard, nature sightings, and Harriet’s grades:

“Your student wrote me, if he took a plane past Harvard, at any angle, at any height, he’d seen a person missing, Mr. Robert Lowell You insist on treating Harriet as if she were thirty or a wrestler — she is only thirteen. She is normal and good because she had normal and good parents. She is threatened of necessity…. I love you Darling, there’s a black black void, as black as night without you. I long to see your face and hear your voice, and take your hand — I’m watching a scruffy, seal-colored woodchuck graze on weeds, then lift his greedy and listen; then back to speedy feeding. He weighs a ton, and has your familiar human aspect munching.”

Similar to “Letter,” Hardwick (through Lowell) compares Lowell’s absent presence to a dark void. “In the Mail” is composed of different bits of Hardwick’s letters, with small edits from

Lowell to fit the form and the tone. Nonetheless, her voice rings through.

She appears again in a different poem titled “Letter,” this time within the larger poem titled “Marriage.” In this letter, Hardwick writes about Harriet and the nature of letters themselves: “I despair of letters. You say I wrote H. isn’t/interested in the thing happening to you now./So what/ A fantastic untruth, misprint, something;” From this poem, it seems as if Lowell is claiming that Hardwick wrote to Lowell in a previous that Harriet was uninterested in hearing about Lowell’s new life. The “thing is vague,” but Hardwick seems to be alluding to Lowell’s

52 new family. Hardwick sarcastically disregards Lowell’s claims, blaming them on the miscommunication of letters and distance. Hardwick continues to describe Harriet, claiming that she meant Harriet didn’t care for London in general: I meant the London scene’s no big concern, just you…./She’s absolutely beautiful, gay, etc./I’ve a horror of turmoiling her before she flies/to

Mexico, alone, brave, half Spanish-speaking.” Abruptly, Hardwick cuts back to “the thing”:

Children her age don’t sit about talking the thing about their parents. I do talk about you, and I have never denied I miss you.. I guess we’ll make Washington this weekend; it’s a demonstration, like all demonstrations, repetitious, gratuitous, unfresh…just needed. I hope nothing is mis-said.

Lowell toys with the “mis-said” and the fact and he is using and cutting up Hardwick’s letters into poems.

Lowell also verbally enacts the difficulty in bridging the personal and the poetic.

Hardwick’s voice is not the only one that is incorporated into the manuscript. In “With Caroline at the Air-Terminal,” a poem in the last segment of The Dolphin, Lowell describes Blackwood’s genuine fear of his mania:

If I have had hysterical drunken seizures, it’s from loving you too much. It makes me wild, I fear….We’ve made the dining-room his bedroom — I feel unsafe, uncertain you’ll get back . I know I am happier with you than before. Safer…”

Like Hardwick, Caroline’s voice is clearly her own, despite edits: cautious and uncertain about Lowell’s health. Lowell, in his own voice, vaguely voices his frustration with combining truth and art: “Everything is real until it’s published.” This frustration can be tracked throughout the book, from the first poem to the last. In “Fishnet,” the opening poem, Lowell writes “the old

53 actor cannot read his friends,/and nevertheless he reads himself aloud,/genius hums the auditorium dead./The line must terminate.” Assuming the position of the actor, Lowell wishes to

“read his friends” and to versify “the lives of others” without making their voices his own.

However he “cannot” for reasons that are not explicitly clear. Regardless, Lowell does versify his friends, yet in order to prevent them from being his own voice, he uses letters and concrete materials. Lowell however is proud of his poetic accomplishments: “Yet my heart rises, I know

I’ve gladdened a lifetime/knotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope;/the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten,/ nailed like the illegible bronze on the futureless future.” The fish and the net (art and life) are next to each other, like a trophy. In “Fall Weekend at Milgate,” Lowell states “Nature, like philosophers, has one plot,/only good for repeating what it does well:/life emerges from wood and life from life.” Lowell makes a case for the combination of life and art.

If life emerges from a piece of wood, and if life can also emerge from itself, why can’t life emerge from art, and vice versa?

Lowell also directly confronts his use of both Hardwick and Blackwood’s letters in

“Heavy Breathing,” a segment of the longer poem “Marriage.” He also addresses the issues that arrive with the confessional style of writing poetry.

I stand on my head, the landscape keeps its place, though heaven has changed. Conscience incurable convinces me I am not writing my life; life never assures which part of ourself is life. Ours was never a book, though sparks of it spotted the page with superficial burns: the fiction I colored with first-hand evidence, letters and talk I marketed as fiction — but what is true or false tomorrow when surgeons let out the pus, and crowd the circus to see us disembowelled for our after life?

54 Lowell expresses the struggle within his conscience while writing The Dolphin and other confessional works that “confess” the lives of others. Conscience aside, Lowell went through with it all, for the sake of “art”:

In the “The Dolphin,” the closing poem of book, Lowell again confronts what he has done:

I have sat and listened to too many words of the collaborating muse, and plotted perhaps too freely with my life, not avoiding injury to others, not avoiding injury to myself — to ask compassion…this book, half fiction, an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting

Lowell then breaks the sonnet form, adding a 15th line to the poem after a space in the poem and a long physical pause, imitating the languishing breath one experiences when making a final, difficult decision:

my eyes have seen what my hand did.

The poem, and the book ends here, on the brokens sonnet. Lowell acknowledges that his book is a work of collaboration, and also that it is part fiction, and part art. Like “an eelnet made by a man for the eel fighting,” Lowell has used the progression of this document to track his volatile and changing emotions, and relationships with Hardwick, Blackwood, and his children. His eye recognizes his hand. The self recognizes the art, and they become one.

The Dolphin acted like a scrapbook to Lowell: a physical collection of permanent materials that retained memories. Before the release of The Dolphin, Lowell wrote to Hardwick, thanking her for the material that he had given her: “It was miraculous to have your letters and pictures. It always seems to have been an unfulfilled craving in my life to have a scrapbook — as the drawers overflowed with unsorted photos. I had just bought one, and now it’s filled, artfully

55 arranged pages, sequences, like my long poems, full of profundity for me if no one else.”75 Here,

Lowell compares the scrapbook and the poems, and indicates that both portrayals of memory and life are necessary and profound for him. He creates both for himself and believes is responsible for carrying the brunt of the pain, just as Williams in Paterson.

Despite writing the book for himself, Lowell published the book for the world to see, solidifying his own emotions, with the words of Hardwick, into a piece of art. Lowell wrote to

Hardwick in 1971 and described his desire to permanently remain within his poetry: “I hope to live in it long after I’m dirt.”76 Naturally, Lowell faced a wide array of criticism and anger from both Hardwick, critics, and friends. In a heated replay of their disagreement over Paterson, except this time more personal, Bishop wrote to Lowell, arguing that

I’m sure my point is only too plain … Lizzie is not dead, etc.—but there is a “mixture of fact & fiction,” and you have changed her letters. That is “infinite mischief,” I think. The first one, page 10, is so shocking—well, I don’t know what to say. And page 47 … and a few after that. One can use one’s life as material—one does, anyway—but these letters— aren’t you violating a trust? IF you were given permission—IF you hadn’t changed them … etc. But art just isn’t worth that much…

In general, I deplore the “confessional”—however, when you wrote LIFE STUDIES perhaps it was a necessary movement, and it helped make poetry more real, fresh and immediate. But now—ye gods—anything goes, and I am so sick of poems about the students’ mothers & fathers and sex-lives and so on.77

Here, Bishop states that Life Studies was necessary in creating a form of poetry that appeared more real and reflected the immediacy of life. Regardless, she draws the line at The Dolphin, writing the famous line: art just isn’t worth that much…

75 Lowell to Hardwick, 608 76 Lowell to Hardwick, 578. 77 Bishop to Lowell,

56 To Lowell, however, art is worth that much. Lowell is willing to sacrifice his relationships, his privacy, and the privacy of others to create a form of art and life combined. He wrote back to Bishop:

Lizzie’s letters? I did not see [the poems] as slander, but as sympathetic, tho necessarily awful for her to read. She is the poignance of the book, tho that hardly makes it kinder to her. I could say the letters are cut, doctored, part fiction…(I attribute things to Lizzie I made up, or that were said by someone else. I combed out [some abuse, hysteria, repetition). The trouble is the letters make my book, I think, at least they make Lizzie real beyond my invention. I took out the worst things written against me, so as to not give myself a case and seem self-pitying….How can the story be told at all without the letters? I’ll put my heart into it.78

Lowell admits here that the “letters” represented in The Dolphin are not completely raw.

However, he battles Bishop’s letter, claiming that his edits don’t erase Bishop’s voice or narrative. Hardwick is still “real beyond [Lowell’s] invention.” Lowell also claims that it would be wrong to tell the story of Hardwick and Blackwood without incorporating his letters with

Hardwick. Letters were used as a way to communicate with Hardwick through their separation, and were an integral and necessary part of his life. The story would be incomplete without the letters.

Through The Dolphin, Lowell achieved a unification of life and art. Despite outrage from

Hardwick and Bishop, several reviewers viewed The Dolphin as a success. Helen Vendler cited the book as a “votive sculpture,” an ancient statue created to embody worshippers. After The

Dolphin won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1973, William Alfred stated that in “comparison with the other works nominated, I had no other choice but to cast my vote for it. It embodies an experience of our time, nonetheless tragic for being common; and it does so in a language worthy of the seriousness of that experience and supple enough to convey its desperately

78 Lowell to Bishop, 592.

57 puzzling contradictions.” These puzzling contradictions: art and life, fact and fiction, all dichotomies Lowell wrote into The Dolphin to showcase his erratic behavior, indecision between the two women, and desire to create a book that permanently embalmed his experience into words.

~ ~ ~

Lowell’s final book Day by Day was published in 1977, the year he died of a heart attack on his way to visit Hardwick in New York. In the last poem of book “Epilogue,” a ghostly finality that foreshadows his death. In “Epilogue,” Lowell addresses his poetic processes and journey to reflect experience in art one final time:

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme— why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled?

Lowell is still unsatisfied and is searching for a way to create something tangible, instead of

“recalled.” He addresses this issue in painting as well: I hear the noise of my own voice:/The painter’s vision is not a lens,/it trembles to caress the light.” Physical artists too fail to fully capture their subject matter. It’s impossible for the paintbrush to mimic the eye. Lowell continues to express his frustration:

But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot, lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, heightened from life, yet paralyzed by fact. All’s misalliance.

58 Suddenly, Lowell’s tone transitions from despair to an unfamiliar optimism, resolve, and acceptance:

Yet why not say what happened? Pray for the grace of accuracy Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning. We are poor passing facts, warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name.

Perhaps the journey to depict experience through art, is enough of a representation of life itself.

Artists across all mediums will continue to mimic life in their own way. Like Vermeer’s sun,

Lowell’s poetry has been a unique, unerasable reflection of his own personal experiences, creating a new burst of tangible energy.

59 Bibliography:

Bidart, Frank, David Gewanter, and DeSales Harrison. Robert Lowell: Collected Poems. (London: Faber and Faber, 2003).

Bishop, Elizabeth, Robert Lowell, Thomas J. Travisano, and Saskia Hamilton. Words in Air the Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).

Bloom, Harold. The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer through Robert Frost. (New York, New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 656-657

Chiasson, Dan. “The Dolphin Letters.” The Yale Review. Yale University, April 5, 2020. https://yalereview.yale.edu/dolphin-letters.

Gewanter, David S. “Child of Collaboration: Robert Lowell's "Dolphin.” Modern Philology 93, no. 2 (1995): 178-203.

Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: a Biography. (London: Faber and Faber, 2011).

Hardwick, Elizabeth, Robert Lowell, and Saskia Hamilton. The Dolphin Letters 1970-1979. (London: Faber & Faber, 2020).

Hardwick, Elizabeth, Seduction and Betrayal. (London: Faber and Faber, 2019).

Lowell, Robert “After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays On Me” in Salmagundi Magazine, (Saratoga Springs, NY: Skidmore College), 114.

Lowell, Robert, and Jeffrey Meyers. Robert Lowell, Interviews and Memoirs. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1988).

Lowell, Robert, and Saskia Hamilton. The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972-1973. (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).

Mariani, Paul L. Lost Puritan: a Life of Robert Lowell. (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996).

Meyers, Jeffrey. Robert Lowell in Love. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016).

Ransom, John Crowe. “Criticism, Inc” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. (New York, NY: W.W. Norton CO., 2001).

Rosenthal, Macha Louis. The New Poets: American and British Poetry since World War II. (London: Oxford University Press, 1973).

60 Wellek, René. "The New Criticism: Pro and Contra." Critical Inquiry 4, no. 4 (1978): 611-24.

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