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"If you don't know a good deal about what you're saying, you're an idiot. But if you know too well what you're doing, you are a pedant."
He is fond of reading the works of other poets, sometimes in class, often to friends at home. Occasionally, he makes the circuit scene to read his own work. His voice carries a faintly Southern-accented sound, his 6-ft. frame hulks over the microphone, and his sad blue eyes needle onto the printed page through thick black-rimmed glasses as he intones his poems. He receives as his fee anywhere from $250 to $1,000 or more. At Manhattan's Town Hall recently, he introduced Soviet Poet Andrei Voznesensky to the audience and let loose with a curious political remark—his first such public utterance since his telegram to L.B.J. "This is indiscreet," he said, "but both our countries, I think, have really terrible governments. But we do the best we can with them, and they better do the best they can with each other or the world will cease to be here." Some people in the hall applauded; others gasped. Voznesensky, asked later for comment, merely turned away without a word.
For relaxation, Lowell and his wife still maintain a busy schedule of dinner and cocktail parties, usually with other poets. When summer comes, they pile their Falcon station wagon with books and head for the tiny summer resort at Castine in Maine. There Lowell keeps a small house, left to him by Cousin Harriet Winslow, who, recalls a local citizen, was "a very prim old lady who wore white gloves to the Post Office."
In Castine or in New York City, whether he is stoking his fireplace or his thoughts, Lowell dwells on poetry and, through it, the world. In Waking Early Sunday Morning, he concludes
Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war—until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.
His views on the future of American poetry are somewhat brighter, but are not too optimistic. "It's a very dark crystal," he says. "I don't know what poetry needs now. Something's happening now, but it's hard to tell what it is. Half of it is very difficult, and half of it is very quiet." He guesses that perhaps "there has been too much confessional poetry."
Lowell is surrounded and occasionally followed by a number of excellent poets, some of them brilliant. John Berryman, 52, often ranked with him, is an original, jazzy, elliptical lyricist. Richard Wilbur, 46, an elegant disciple of Eliot's, writes cerebral, well-constructed verse. Charles Olson, 56, founder of the Black Mountain School, has fostered the grand vision of "projective verse"—free, direct, written to be spoken. James Dickey, 44, is Lowell's polar opposite—facile, exuberant, bearing joy and affirmation. Louis Simpson, 44, and Robert Creeley, 41, are promising lyric poets. Elizabeth Bishop, 56, one of America's leading woman poets, is the epitome of the cool, detached, low-key observer. And W. D. Snodgrass, 41, who has written some confessional poetry but is not by any means an imitator, strikes critics as one of the