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When I met Robert Lowell in 1976, a little over a year before hissudden death, he was living with Caroline Blackwood, his thirdwife, in Maidstone, Kent. Their residence, Milgate, dated to thesixteenth century and had been the home of the young RobertFludd. Out back and looming behind us as we sat on the grass andtalked was the tremendous cypress tree that Frank Parker haddrawn for reproduction on the jacket of For Lizzie and Harriet. Asculpture of a dolphin stood just inside the front entrance to thehouse.

If the house in its early years had been comparatively small, asLowell seemed to say, its kitchen and dining area, which hadsurvived, must have been its largest part. It dwarfed an enormousold range, and the slightest imagination let one believe that hewas in the very space in which Fludd sni√ed his first alchemicalexperiments. The central part of the house, which had a warren ofservants’ quarters upstairs, was built in the seventeenth century,

C o l l e c t e d P o e m s , by Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, with an

Introduction by Frank Bidart (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1186 pp., $45)

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and a wing and the facade were added in the eighteenth. Asthough it were a model for one of Lowell’s books, which oftenfeatured architectural structures, it had been a long time in themaking. More than ever, the poet – lean, then, with a short lion’smane of gray hair, a steady blue-eyed gaze, cool but not unfriendly,narrow hips, shoulders slightly rounded, as though walking into abreeze, rising on the toes and tilting forward with a young man’scat-lithe stride – seemed to me a gallant Lord Weary himself.

He was kind enough to inscribe a couple of those books for me,including Imitations, his collection of translations (of more thanseventy poems by eighteen poets who wrote in five languages),which he had described in its Introduction as not only ‘‘a smallanthology of European poetry’’ but also, remarkably, if not out-rageously, ‘‘a sequence, one voice running through many person-alities, contrasts and repetitions.’’ In the course of my visit wetalked about another structure nearby, the cathedral at Canter-bury, which I was to see for the first time the next day. Lowell wasan enthusiastic foreshadower, specifically fond of various parts, itsrevisions, extensions, and hidden chambers. His admiring verdict:‘‘No one can imitate it!’’

Now, twenty-five years after his death, here is another sui ge-neris construction, his own Collected Poems, edited by FrankBidart and David Gewanter with the assistance of DeSales Har-rison. It is quite simply a great pleasure to have this singular book.Well, I should say it is a great pleasure to have this quite complexbook. Or, better, it is a complex pleasure to have this great volume.‘‘Simply’’ is a word that one wants to avoid in connection withLowell, and this publication, more than a book, is not after allsingular, however unique, but is rather most insistently a works, aswe sometimes say with properly dubious grammar, and the better(which is also to say the worse) part of a life.

To put it one way, perhaps too pedagogical: one could setLowell’s Collected Poems at the center of a college course – thoughit would probably have to be a four-year course – about the litera-ture of the Western world. Granted, that claim might be true ofother distinguished collections – it might even be one criterion for‘‘greatness’’ in a collection – but it is truer of this one than of anyother recent example I can think of. (Ezra Pound’s collected poeticworks, if it existed, would be a rival – and would indeed involve

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more than ‘‘the Western world.’’) I’ll put it another way: thisCollected Poems gives us a world, a planet named Lowell, with itsown complicated and sometimes mysterious ecology, which under-lies and connects its local economies or states, some of them gaud-ily absolutist (Lord Weary’s Castle, The Mills of the Kavanaughs),some so ra≈sh and unpredictable as to verge on anarchy (thoughthe least organized, Notebook 1967 –68 and its successor Notebook,

have been left out in favor of the more evolved History and itssatellite states, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin), andsome intricately heterogeneous with delicate checks and balances(Life Studies is the prime example).

The result of the author’s huge energy and ambition, which hiseditors have quite rightly sought to represent, is a tome, sometwelve hundred pages long, that comprises at least twenty-eightsections, ranging from an introduction and a note on the textthrough ten of the poet’s volumes to seven appendixes (where wefind his other volume and one piece of his prose) and even moreback matter, including an afterword (‘‘On ‘Confessional’ Poetry’’by Bidart), notes, note to appendixes, and so on. I have never beenso grateful for the invention of multicolored Post-Its. Indeed, inthe galleys I have before me, titles of two later sections – ‘‘Notes toAppendices’’ and ‘‘Chronology’’ – are omitted from the table ofcontents, as though they had been lost track of in the massiveshu∆e. Lowell’s first book publication, Land of Unlikeness, hasbeen relegated to an appendix on the grounds that he never re-printed it (though he did characteristically publish ten of itspoems with revisions in Lord Weary’s Castle and later books), and‘‘Magazine Versions’’ of five poems, ‘‘Uncollected Poems,’’ ‘‘Poemsin Manuscript,’’ and ‘‘Last Poems’’ all get individual headings.The bewildering organization might well have been streamlined,might have been less baroque or medieval, but it would not thenhave reflected the career as well.

The history of the vicissitudes of History all by itself is ascholar’s nightmare – or wet dream. This collection includes re-worked portions of Lord Weary’s Castle, Life Studies, Imitations,

For the Union Dead, and Near the Ocean. Consider the develop-ment of just one of those poems, here called ‘‘Ovid and Caesar’sDaughter.’’ Its earliest appearance is in an unpublished draft, en-titled ‘‘For George Santayana,’’ preserved in the Lowell archives at

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the Houghton Library. It was revised and published in a magazine(for some reason, this edition’s appendix 3, which prints the maga-zine versions, does not identify the magazines) under the title‘‘Beyond the Alps,’’ at which second stage it contained sevenstanzas or sonnets. When it was reprinted in the first Americanedition of Life Studies, it had been reduced to three stanzas (whileone stanza from the unpublished draft was revised and incorpo-rated in another poem in Life Studies, ‘‘For George Santayana’’). InFor the Union Dead, at the suggestion of John Berryman, accord-ing to the prefatory note to the later volume, Lowell restored aversion of one of the magazine publication’s stanzas – so that thepoem had four stanzas. When the second Faber edition of Life

Studies was published (1972), Lowell retouched that stanza. Whenhe composed History, he revised it yet again and published it as anindividual poem with a new name:

Ovid and Caesar’s Daughter

‘‘I was a modern, and in Caesar’s eye,a tomcat with the number of the Beast – now buried where Turkey faces the red east,or wherever Tomi my place of exile was.Rome asked for art in earnest; at her callcame Lucan, Tacitus and Juvenal,the black republicans who tore the titsand bowels of the Mother Wolf to bits. . . .Thieves pick goldfrom the fine print and volume of the Colossus.Because I loved and wrote too profligately,Imperial Tiber, O my yellow Wolf,black earth by the Black Roman Sea, I lielibelled with the boy-crazy daughter of

Caesar Augustus who will never die.’’

Several characteristic revisions merit notice. First, this poem’slast words attribute immortality – however ironically – to CaesarAugustus, whereas in the preceding version Lowell’s Ovid boasted,‘‘ ‘I will never die.’ ’’ (The assertion echoes Lowell’s language at theend of both monologues in the early diptych ‘‘David and Bath-

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sheba in the Public Gardens.’’) Second, while earlier renditionsgave anywhere from the last four to the last ten lines to Ovid, thepoem is now entirely from Ovid’s point of view. Third, in spite ofthe conversion in the current instance of the poem to a dramaticmonologue, framed by quotation marks, the speaker refers to him-self, for the first time, anachronistically, as ‘‘ ‘a modern.’ ’’ If Lowellthus appears to conflate himself with his predecessor, Ovid (andone recalls his description of Imitations as ‘‘a sequence, one voicerunning through many personalities’’), the e√ect can only be en-hanced by the resemblance of Lowell’s Ovid’s speech to the lan-guage of others of Lowell’s personae of the Life Studies period,especially those in ‘‘Words for Hart Crane’’ (which in an earlierversion interestingly bears the generic title ‘‘Epitaph of a FallenPoet’’) and ‘‘A Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich.’’

The wholly new lines in the History poem are lines 9–11, whichtestify to their importance as a unit not only by including theshortest line in the volume but also by necessitating a fifteenthline (only two other sonnets have tails, and only one poem fallsshort of sonnet length). The last of these new lines – ‘‘Because Iloved and wrote too profligately’’ – helps to blur distinctions be-tween the American and the Roman poet, and in this context thetwo preceding lines not only suggest Lowell’s poetic modus ope-randi but also anticipate just such commentaries as this one on hispoetry. The ‘‘volume of the Colossus,’’ that is, looks like history inthe first place (it shades by virtue of that appellation into ‘‘theBeast’’ of line 2, which term rolls together Rome, the state asLeviathan, and Satan as he is figured in the Bible in Revelation)and History itself in the second. In other words, the implica-tions of ‘‘Ovid and Caesar’s Daughter,’’ with all its suitable meta-morphoses, is that, ideally, History and history are coterminous.

Many other circumstances point to the same conclusion: fromLowell’s perspective, History is history is his story – now told inthe Collected Poems. In the course of one of this edition’s longestnotes, Bidart illuminatingly quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: ‘‘Manis explicable by nothing less than all of his history. Without hurry,without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning toembody every faculty, every thought, every emotion which be-longs to it. . . . We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans,Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these

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images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learnnothing rightly. . . . Then at once History becomes fluid and true,and Biography deep and sublime.’’ At bottom the point is ethical.As Paul Valéry puts it in his Mauvaises pensées, ‘‘To be human issomehow to intuit that there is something of all of us in each of us,and of each in all. There is something of the victim in the execu-tioner and of the executioner in the victim.’’

In the 386 poems in History, Lowell took their pronouncementsto an extreme that might have left Emerson and Valéry them-selves breathless. History testifies, part and parcel, to Walter Ben-jamin’s verdict in Illuminations that ‘‘there is no document ofcivilization which is not at the same time a document of barba-rism.’’ And even as he out-Herods Herod, he out-Whitmans WaltWhitman – whose precedent his editors must want us to recallwhen they lingeringly gloss Lowell’s reference to Leaves of Grass

as ‘‘Whitman’s lifework, endlessly revised throughout his life-time.’’ ‘‘ ‘You didn’t write, you rewrote,’ ’’ Randall Jarrell says toLowell in one of these poems, and Bidart quotes the phrase as anepigraph to his introduction and then elaborates on its aptness:‘‘Rethinking work, reimagining it, rewriting it was fundamentalto him from the very beginning, and pervasive until the end.’’

In addition to making available most of the poems of a poetwithout whom late-twentieth-century American literature is un-imaginable, and making them available in a form rambling andrambunctious enough to comport with his career yet more cohe-sive and stable than the sum of the career’s parts, the Collected

Poems has many buttressing virtues. The editors have used ascopy-texts early printings, most often the second American print-ing, with corrections from later printings, editions, and manu-scripts when they deemed them superior. (The copy-text for Im-

itations, for instance, incorporates revisions Lowell made when hereturned to certain poems in three later publications, and thecopy-text for History adopts corrections Lowell prepared in manu-script but never published.) Wise as well as tireless, the editorshave ignored the Procrustean mutilations Lowell committed uponseveral longer poems when he was assembling his Selected Poems,

though they have judiciously imported and duly noted changes inthe Selected Poems that a√ect his three volumes of sonnets, His-

tory, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin.

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The notes, wonderfully welcome, so that generations of stu-dents will be grateful, could not possibly be complete, and so theyoccasionally seem capricious. In regard to ‘‘The Old Flame,’’ theyinclude a full paragraph on John Foster Dulles’s phrase ‘‘agonizingreappraisal’’ but nothing on John F. Kennedy’s slogan ‘‘a new fron-tier’’ or on Lowell’s gleanings from a story by his first wife, JeanSta√ord. They discern an echo of Yvor Winters’s ‘‘Marriage’’ in‘‘Night Sweat’’ and alert us to a paraphrase of Francis Bacon’s ‘‘OfGreat Place’’ in ‘‘Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts’’but omit mention of a wry distortion of Robert Frost’s ‘‘On theFigure That a Poem Makes’’ at the end of ‘‘Tenth Muse’’ and of anallusion to John Keats’s ‘‘Eve of St. Agnes’’ at the end of ‘‘The Neo-Classical Urn.’’ They say nothing about Lowell’s debt to Valéry’s‘‘Cimetière marin’’ in ‘‘The Flaw’’ and ‘‘Soft Wood,’’ though theydelightfully suspect an allusion to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘‘Spirit ofthe Hour’’ at the end of ‘‘Waking Early Sunday Morning.’’ Theyignore certain admittedly ignorable terms yet translate ‘‘O mon

avril’’ and define ‘‘pileated,’’ and they o√er long contextualizingnotes on matters musical, such as the career of Marian Anderson,which gets more words than the pertinent poem contains, and thepolitical a≈liations of Elisabeth Schwartzkopf. The volume re-prints the books’ frontispiece illustrations, which meant so muchto Lowell, especially those by Frank Parker and Sidney Nolan, butI can find only one passing commentary on any of those illustra-tions. In any case, the information the notes provide is helpful,often indispensable, and what they leave out can be stimulating.

For all its professionalism, this collection is not untouched by aquirkiness Lowell surely would have understood. A fascinatingagonistic encounter between Lowell and Bidart, his longtime con-fidant and best reader, crops up in the introduction. The story inshort: ‘‘Night Sweat’’ is a pair of sonnets in For the Union Dead,

reprinted twelve years later in Selected Poems, where the stanzabreak – the break between the two sonnets – was lost by theprinter. Bidart was dismayed, but Lowell liked the unintendede√ect, because it seemed to him to obscure the di√erence in qual-ity (which he and Bidart both recognized) between the first andsecond stanzas, and so he let the error – or gift – stand. Bidart,rather hopelessly acknowledging that ‘‘Night Sweat’’ is ‘‘a poem Iparticularly love,’’ reprints it here with the original stanza break.

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He explains that ‘‘it’s physically painful’’ for him to read the poemstraight through because ‘‘the eye needs rest, physical space, afterthe ‘urn/burn’ couplet’’ that closes the first sonnet so dramatically.‘‘That was not Lowell’s judgment,’’ he admits, but nonetheless inthis edition ‘‘the stanza break appears, with a note [at book’s end]making clear that this [presentation of the poem in the main text]was not Lowell’s final decision.’’

To break or not to break? Who is doing the rewriting in thisinstance? The poet, who adopts a happy trouvaille à la Auden? Orhis editor, who insists that the poet had already had the last word?(‘‘There are only a handful of such cases,’’ Bidart assures us,though it is not immediately clear which they are.) The crux is allthe more intriguing for an apparent error in the galleys. Passion-ately justifying his choice, Bidart avers that ‘‘I cannot read thepoem with the break.’’ But for his paragraph to make any sense, hemust mean that he cannot bear to read the poem without thebreak. Lowell himself once remarked that he sometimes revisedby adding or removing a negation from a proposition. A breakwith the master – or a hinge to him? Harold Bloom, where are youwhen we need you?

But perhaps the fundamental questions that a Collected Poems

raises have to do with its bookshelf life. It’s folly to respond toquestions about posterity before five decades have lapsed. But thegame reviewer commits himself to foolish speculation.

Robert Lowell will be in the canon forever, partly because hewrote several perdurable poems and one watershed book, Life

Studies, which cleared the ground for new construction as no bookhad since The Waste Land. It made apparently personal subjectmatter, no matter how fictional in actuality, available to the suc-cessive generations of John Berryman and Sylvia Plath. It alsogave them a model for a combination of prosodic sophisticationand invention. Pound had adumbrated a free verse that’s really notin ‘‘The Return’’ and other work, and Lowell, having learned fromhim and William Carlos Williams, wrote lines and stanzas thathave a√ected poets from James Merrill, the finest prosodist of thelate twentieth century, to Frederick Seidel.

Perhaps a more fundamental and certainly a narrower reason ishis sensibility. It might be that he was such a rewriter and recycler(he praised Albert Ryder, who ‘‘let his crackled amber moonscapes

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ripen in daylight’’ and for whom ‘‘painting was repainting’’) be-cause he had, as a surprising complement to his ambition, a hightolerance for the evanescent and the corruptible. He is one of ourgreat poets of the abject, to use the term that Julia Kristeva rejuve-nated. The abject, on her understanding, is ‘‘the jettisoned object,’’the object excluded from an idea of the self for the sake of theimage of the purity of the self. The abject is expelled, left behind,voided, and avoided. It ranges from toenail parings to dung to food(for anorexics and bulimics). Galway Kinnell makes his own cata-logue of instances in the sixth poem in The Book of Nightmares:

carrion,caput mortuum,orts,pelf,fenks,sordes,gurry dumped from hospital trashcans.

Even as Kinnell’s list recovers words that have themselves beenabandoned or shunned, it forces us think about the advantages ofrecognizing our connections with our rejections, our shu∆ings o√of the mortal coil. Cadaver itself, deriving from cadere, Kristevapoints out, signifies something that has fallen away. It is a part ofher project in The Powers of Horror to reconsider the presumedbenefits of repression, hard boundaries, and various forms of ca-tharsis, as it might seem, or segregation.

Lowell rubs our noses in the abject. Here, with its little link tothe reference to Ryder, is the end of his ‘‘1930s 5’’ in History:

I hear the moonsimmer the mildew on a pile of shells,the fruits of my banquet . . . a boiled lobster,red shell and hollow foreclaw, cracked, sucked dry,flung on the ash-heap of a soggy carton – it eyes me, two pinhead, burnt-out popping eyes.

The simmering garbage looks something like what one mighthave found bubbling in an alembic in Fludd’s kitchen. In hisattempts to find the prima materia, which would by virtue of itsprimacy be discoverable in all things, and perhaps because of his

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failure to find it in more appealing substances, the alchemistdevised recipes that called for excrement, raw eggs, hair, sourwine, and anything else, including night sweat.

From one point of view, History is indeed rubbish, a dump,mounds of debris and all manner of residua and ephemera, as itsobsessive particularizing – with its plethora of names, dates, topi-cal references, its ‘‘poor passing facts,’’ as Lowell has it in Day by

Day’s ‘‘Epilogue,’’ it is the antithesis of myth – insists. At the endof ‘‘1930s 7’’ he surveys a littoral:

Whatever we cast outtakes root – weeds shoot up to litter overnight,sticks of dead rotten wood in drifts, the fishwith a missing eye, or heel-print in the belly,or a gash in the back from a stray hook – roads, lawns and harbors stitched with motors,yawl-engine, outboard, power mower, plowingthe mangle and mash of the monotonous frontier – when the mower stopped clanking, sunset calmed the ocean.

The brilliance of the passage is in the appropriately ungainlysyntax, hybridized as the catalogue (the final poem in History

reflects on its ‘‘bad, straightforward, unscanning sentences – /stamped, trampled, branded on backs of carbons,/lines, words,letters nailed to letters’’), the items in which are nonetheless‘‘stitched’’ and ‘‘mash[ed]’’ together by the most unexpected means.Look at the passage again. It’s as though the poet’s mind were atonce the implicit sewing machine, the outboard motor, and theclanking mower.

The end word in the first line of Lord Weary’s Castle, which theeditors present as Lowell’s first real book, ‘‘mire’’ – ‘‘There mountsin squalls a sort of rusty mire’’ – has associations with mud, dung,and degradation, and one of that book’s most memorable poems,‘‘Colloquy in Black Rock,’’ depends upon variations on the ‘‘BlackMud, a name to conjure with : O mud/For watermelons gutted tothe crust,’’ while many other poems in it invoke images that com-port with the colloquy’s ‘‘mud-flat detritus of death.’’ Indeed, oneof several parodic versions of Lord Weary is the poet as ‘‘TheDrunken Fisherman,’’ ‘‘wallowing in his bloody sty.’’ The book islittered with skulls, bones, other body parts, and so many corpses,

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especially crucified, that the grounds seem less those of anyone’scastle than of the Chapel Perilous.

Lowell’s work proceeds from the Waste Land. His first name forit, after St. Bernard’s, was the Land of Unlikeness. If its mostexpansive form is History, it often appears, epitomized, in a smallNew England coastal town. In ‘‘Near the Ocean’’ the town is fig-ured in terms of remnants (a ‘‘wake of refuse’’ behind the boats inthe bay, ‘‘old white china doorknobs, sad,/slight useless things tocalm the mad’’), ‘‘dregs and dreck’’ (the poet’s ‘‘woodshed’’ or mindyields ‘‘tools with no handle, ten candle-ends not worth a can-dle,/old lumber banished from the Temple’’), dilapidations, dis-mantlings, and o√al (‘‘birch’’ is chopped and stacked, the Bible is‘‘chopped and crucified/in hymns we hear but do not read,’’ andone image retained from the good book is that of ‘‘a millionforeskins stacked like trash’’), disease and devastation (‘‘earth licksits open sores,/fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance/assas-sination’’ as ‘‘man’’ continues ‘‘thinning out his kind . . . theblind/swipe of the pruner and his knife/busy about the tree oflife’’). Out of such ‘‘A heap of broken images’’ comes this mar-velous title poem, a beautifully bitter indictment of human care-lessness in general and the poet’s own lapses in particular. Whenhe laments that ‘‘none of the milder subtleties/of grace or art willsweeten these/sti√ quatrains shoveled out four-square,’’ he has inmind not only our hymns but also his poem, written in tetram-eters – which indeed might not have the grace of Andrew Mar-vell’s or the art of W. B. Yeats’s but which are as hard and energeticas any.

Reviewing Lord Weary’s Castle, Randall Jarrell ventured thatLowell had already written one or two poems that would last aslong as the language does. ‘‘Near the Ocean’’ also qualifies, as do‘‘For the Union Dead’’ and ‘‘Skunk Hour.’’ In the latter T. S. Eliot’sabsconded God appears – or rather precisely does not appear – asthe ‘‘summer millionaire,’’ gone o√ forever (suicide is subtly inti-mated) and left the town to shift for itself. Love has long gone, too,and in its absence the lovers become metonymically their ‘‘love-cars,’’ which lie ‘‘hull to hull,’’ emptied of spirit and passion, conve-niently next to ‘‘the graveyard.’’ To Eliot’s gallery of sterile charac-ters Lowell’s miniature adds an anile ‘‘hermit/heiress’’; a bishopwho is a politician; a ‘‘fairy/decorator’’ who’d ‘‘rather marry’’ for

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money than go on tending his storefront’s ‘‘fishnet . . . filled withorange cork’’ and meanwhile makes a double mockery of Jesus’promise to Paul that he would make him a fisher of men; and thesatanic speaker himself (‘‘I myself am hell’’). The latter envies theanimals in the rebarbative and voluptuous last lines:

I stand on topof 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 cupof sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,and will not scare.

‘‘Will not scare’’: yet Lowell stands his own ground on that finalrhyme. Even as he distinguishes between her and himself, hecannot keep us from seeing that like the mother skunk he hasplunged into and fed o√ the garbage we have produced. In his ownway, he has made the air richer.

If one senses that in spite of what he must swallow the poet ishimself a ‘‘rich heir,’’ who thus balances the ‘‘heiress’’ at the begin-ning, the inference is thanks to the ingenuity and delicacy ofthe rhymes and other gossamer connections throughout ‘‘SkunkHour.’’ The poem famously responds to Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘‘Arma-dillo,’’ dedicated to Lowell, in which – if I read that earlier poemrightly – the ‘‘weak mailed fist’’ that is the animal escaping from ahillside set ablaze by a fallen fire balloon is also a punning allusionto her friend, who had published and mailed to the president aletter protesting the fire-bombing of Germany. The resulting hintof the skunk’s correspondence to Bishop (both have shown Lowellthe way) has been anticipated by the whimsical observation in hisfirst stanza, hard on the heels of his dedication ‘‘For ElizabethBishop,’’ that the heiress’s ‘‘son’s a bishop’’ (Bishop of course hadno children).

True, Lowell is predominantly a Prosperian poet, rather thanan Arielian poet, to invoke W. H. Auden’s terms in his essay onFrost, who was the first major poet (Auden deemed him Pros-perian) Lowell asked for criticism. Indeed, Lowell is often Pros-perian with a vengeance – interested in truth rather than beauty,in the sad condition of the world and the possibility of its rectifica-

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tion rather than in wit and wordplay. But as I have just tried tosuggest, he is often playful as well as plangent, fine and fierceboth. The strange lightness of touch embarrasses paraphrase, so Iwill just note from afar its e√ect on such other lasting poems as‘‘My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow’’ (a less likelyanthology piece only because comparatively sprawling), ‘‘To Del-more Schwartz’’ (also less likely because ostensibly more personaland peculiar), and the widely read ‘‘Beyond the Alps.’’ It is harderto discern at first, perhaps, in the earlier ‘‘Mother Marie Therese’’and ‘‘Falling Asleep over the Aeneid,’’ where the surfaces are daz-zlingly arcane by comparison, but it helps to make those poemsamong the few dramatic monologues in the twentieth centurythat call up Robert Browning’s best.

‘‘Executions,’’ the first of the three ‘‘Last Poems’’ in the Col-

lected Poems, brings the poet back on stage for an encore in theguise, only half-heartedly maintained, as in so many of his laterpoems, of an exotic potentate, perhaps Egyptian:

I wear a fine suit of gold – two slaves to fan meand carry me in a huge armchairshaking in their hands,as I count the steps downwardfrom my throne. . . .

Before descending, he sits ‘‘under the royal oak’’ deciding fates: his‘‘executions,’’ which spare him ‘‘the agony of early rising,’’ reg-ularly ‘‘begin at 10 p.m./and end with dawn,’’ and he finds himself‘‘raising most’’ of the accused and ‘‘condemning few/with an in-audible whisper’’ to his guard. The poem can only be a littleallegory of the poet’s routine. It looks back to the first poem inDay by Day, where Ulysses/Lowell himself looks back at hiswanderings, his ‘‘circles,’’ his recurrent ‘‘flight,’’ his ‘‘ten years toand ten years fro.’’ (When Lowell died of a heart attack in a taxi inNew York he had left Caroline Blackwood and was on his way torejoin his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick.) It also reprises suchpoems in For the Union Dead as ‘‘Fall 1961’’ and ‘‘Myopia: a Night,’’with their dark nights of the soul, and especially ‘‘Going to andfro,’’ where the speaker is a latter-day Job (see Job 1.7) ‘‘trying toget through the Central Park by counting’’ and even imagining

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that he might ‘‘get loose/from the earth by counting/his steps tothe noose.’’ In ‘‘Executions’’ as in ‘‘Going to and fro,’’ the countingalludes to numbers, the art of verse, and the judgments renderedmust be on the drafts of poems. Whether those raised up or those‘‘executed’’ are the ones saved, and what ‘‘saved’’ would mean inthis context – is a ‘‘finished’’ poem a completed one? or a deadone? – Lowell faithfully declines to tell us.

But his judgments are also, are therefore on himself, and so it isthat he says, ‘‘I can point out myself, the culprit,/with my palsied,pedagogic scepter.’’ As throughout History, he is both executionerand victim. As in the dark night of ‘‘Skunk Hour’’ (‘‘I myself amhell’’), he sentences himself. This insistent self-knowledge, espe-cially in a poet who has produced such a monumental ‘‘lifework,’’constitutes his bail. The pervasive guilt is perhaps nowhere moremovingly expressed than in ‘‘Fishnet,’’ the opening poem in The

Dolphin:

The line must terminate.Yet my heart rises, knowing I’ve gladdened a lifetimeknotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope;the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten,nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.

The editors tell us that the last line glances at Horace’s famousclaim in his Odes 3.30, ‘‘Exegi monumentum aere perennius,’’ andif any poet of his generation has earned the right to echo theclaim, it is Lowell, who of course modifies it dramatically with theadjectives ‘‘illegible’’ and ‘‘futureless.’’

We might pause, too, over the duty Lowell assigns to himself. In‘‘knotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope,’’ he repeats Penelope’swork, but he perhaps also reminds us of picking oakum, a painful,bloody chore once given convicts and inmates of workhouses, whowith their fingers took apart old rope so that it could be reused tocaulk the wooden decks of ships. If so, he recasts the image thatconcludes his poem for George Santayana, a kindred recusantspirit, part condemned combatant and part irascible, inveteratealchemist, also Robert Fludd’s heir. Lowell must have had inmind, too, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 111, where the poet’s ‘‘nature’’ is‘‘almost . . . subdu’d/To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand’’:

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Old trooper, I see your child’s red crayon pass,bleeding deletions on the galleys you holdunder your throbbing magnifying glass,that worn arena, where the whirling sandand broken-hearted lions lick your handrefined by bile as yellow as a lump of gold.