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His latest book of verse, Near the Ocean, published this year, seals a productive decade that brings his output to 130 poems and 69 "imitations" from the classics collected in Life Studies, For the Union Dead, Lord Weary's Castle, The Mills of the Kavanaughs and Land of Unlikeness. He has also written three short plays collectively titled The Old Glory, and a translation of Racine's Phaedra (recently staged in Philadelphia). His new prose play Prometheus Bound, produced this month at the Yale School of Drama, is not so much drama as an oratorio streaked with images of visceral intensity, as exemplified in the paintings of his friend, Artist Sidney Nolan (see color pages). The play is a loose adaptation of the Greek tragedy by Aeschylus, but Lowell has typically given it a punishing contemporaneity. A parable of human pride and torment, it becomes all the more poignant with the realization that Lowell himself is a man riven by deep conflicts.
Indeed, the bulk of his best poetry is seared with a fiery desperation, fed by rage and self-laceration. The world's ills become his own, and his own the world's: / hear
My ill-spirit
Sob in each blood cell.
As if my hand were at its throat . . .
I myself am hell.
Lowell's friend, Poet Elizabeth Bishop, says that confessional poetry "is really something new in the world. There have been diaries that were frank—and generally intended to be read after the poet's death. Now the idea is that we live in a horrible and terrifying world, and the worst moments of horrible and terrifying lives are an allegory of the world." Speaking of some of Lowell's confessional imitators, she adds: "The tendency is to overdo the morbidity. You just wish they'd keep some of these things to themselves."
Man Who Has Everything. There is very little that Lowell keeps to himself. He writes freely about how, over-pressed with anxieties, he periodically checks himself into a mental institution for a few weeks. In Waking in the Blue, he evokes a morning in the hospital, reminding himself that he is a "screwball" among patients whose "bravado ossified young":
My heart grows tense
As though a harpoon were sparring for the kill. . .
We are all oldtimers,
Each of us holds a locked razor.
Marbling this blood-tinged fragility is an incomparable richness and density of classic imagery. Lowell draws habitually from the inexhaustible theater of the Bible and loots many mythologies for his art—as well as modern life. He recalls seeing the condemned murderer Louis Lepke:
Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair-He shudders at the new Boston, the motorized city:
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.
In Near the Ocean, the first few pages bring together Goliath, God, Joan Baez, Cotton Mather, Jesus Christ, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Monteverdi, Trollope, civil rights