{"id":104,"date":"2003-10-12T16:44:18","date_gmt":"2003-10-12T20:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/2003\/10\/12\/the-robert-lowell-revival-peter-davi"},"modified":"2012-05-04T00:06:23","modified_gmt":"2012-05-04T04:06:23","slug":"the-robert-lowell-revival-peter-davison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/2003\/10\/12\/the-robert-lowell-revival-peter-davison\/","title":{"rendered":"The Robert Lowell Revival: Peter Davison"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

     Robert Lowell (1917-1977) is back, in spirit and in a massive new edition of Collected Poems<\/A>.  I feel him hovering again over a surreal presidential campaign.  In Eugene McCarthy’s anti-Vietnam insurrection of 1967 and 1968, Lowell was the spooky presence often in the car with the candidate, or at his side, bearing witness as only a certifiably mad poet could (a “throughbred mental case,” in his phrase) that the times were out of joint.  The autobiographical, oft narcissistic Lowell can be classified as a father of “confessional” poetry, though he rejected the label.  Just as clearly he was a poet of public life in a line going back to the Romans.  Lowell rose to the occasion of the 1960s as something of a Boston Brahmin version of Norman Mailer, a celebrity rebel, historian and aphorist for all time.<\/FONT><\/P>
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Only man thinning out his kind<\/EM><\/FONT><\/P>
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sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind<\/EM><\/FONT><\/P>
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swipe of the pruner and his knife<\/EM><\/FONT><\/P>
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busy about the tree of life…<\/EM><\/FONT><\/P>
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 <\/P>
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Pity the planet, all joy gone<\/EM><\/FONT><\/P>
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from this sweet volcanic cone;<\/EM><\/FONT><\/P>
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peace to our children when they fall <\/EM><\/FONT><\/P>
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in small war on the heels of small<\/EM><\/FONT><\/P>
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war–until the end of time<\/EM><\/FONT><\/P>
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to police the earth, a ghost<\/EM><\/FONT><\/P>
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orbiting forever lost<\/EM><\/FONT><\/P>
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in our monotonous sublime.<\/EM><\/FONT><\/P><\/BLOCKQUOTE>
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                    from “Waking Early Sunday Morning”<\/FONT><\/P>
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     Politics may be the least of the reasons to rediscover Robert Lowell.  His Collected Poems<\/A>, edited and annotated by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, is being read<\/A> and reargued<\/A> all over the place–in blogs<\/A>, too, of course.  In poetry publishing, some say, this is the biggest event since Wallace Stevens’ Collected Poems<\/A> of 1954.  Our assignment is to share a little of the sound and fury of Lowell’s poetry.  The conversations here with the poet and editor Peter Davison<\/A> are only a beginning.  Part One<\/A> is a quick walk around the Lowell monument and, in particular, his best-known poem, “For the Union Dead.”  Part Two<\/A> invokes the poet of his own madness in poems like “Man and Wife” and “Skunk Hour.”<\/FONT><\/P>
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     To be continued.<\/FONT><\/P>
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<\/FONT> <\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

     Robert Lowell (1917-1977) is back, in spirit and in a massive new edition of Collected Poems.  I feel him hovering again over a surreal presidential campaign.  In Eugene McCarthy’s anti-Vietnam insurrection of 1967 and 1968, Lowell was the spooky presence often in the car with the candidate, or at his side, bearing witness as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1340,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1340"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":216,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions\/216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/lydondev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}