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Prose commands their minds, but poetry envelops their senses. They are aware of hard, sharp words that can clobber the emotions, that communicate one-to-one, man-to-man. Says Lowell: "The strength of the novel is that it tells a story and has real people. But so many novels have been written that when you pick one up you feel you've read it before. The problem with poetry is that it doesn't necessarily have the connection with life and can be rather obscure. But poetry has the wonderful short thrust. By the time you get to the end of a poem, there's a whole interpretation of life in 70 lines or less. It's hard to get that in a novel, hard to get the heightening, hard to leave things out. And amid the complex, dull horrors of the 1960s, poetry is a loophole. It's a second chance of some sort: things that the age turns thumbs down on you can get out in poetry."
From Pound to the Beats. In the 20th century so far, the devotees of the "second chance" have constituted a remarkable poetic pantheon. The Zeus of that lofty company is himself still alive, though he has long since had his say. Erza Pound, 81, now living in Italy, fathered modern English poetry, freed it from excessive strictures of meter, rhetoric and prosody. One of his earliest converts was T. S. Eliot, who sensed the dilemma of modern, urban and areligious man, and whose dry, ironic style and endless rhythmic ways of weaving contemporary sounds are echoed in virtually every poet's work today.
Of Eliot's generation, Robert Frost seemed a throwback; yet, while he adhered to established forms, he commanded a deceptively simple vision of man's vanities, his heart and his land. More experimental, and less accessible, were William Carlos Williams, a true avant-garde poet and master of the spare, stripped-down image, and Wallace Stevens, a pointillist of light, color and all intangible things. Marianne Moore, now 79, constructs unique mosaics from conversations, newspaper clippings and even scientific tracts.
W. H. Auden and Allen Tate were both, in Auden's word, "colonizers" of the terrain that Pound and Eliot discovered. Theodore Roethke was already a major poet when he died in 1963 at 55. The late Dylan Thomas, with his crosscountry sweep of public performances, helped carry poetry into the floodlit arena. So did the beats. Of them, only Allen Ginsberg retains any influence, perhaps less for his poems than for his relentlessly acted role as the bewhiskered prophet of four-letter words, homosexuality, pot, and general din. Still, in their better moments, the beats, now fitfully imitated by the hippies, gave poetry a startling air of spontaneity.
Against this background stands Robert Traill Spence Lowell. Echoes of many of his predecessors and colleagues can be found here and there in his work, although he lacks the resigned elegance and orthodox Christianity of Eliot, the homespun philosophy of Frost, the intellectual subtlety of Stevens, the wit of Auden, the wild (and