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.