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girdled by his establishment
this Sunday morning, free to chaff
his own thoughts with his bear-cuffed staff,
swimming nude, unbuttoned sick
of his ghost-written rhetoric.
And when he writes in an adaptation of Juvenal, "What do you hope from your white pubic hairs," it is not just another attempt to render Latin into English verse, but to say something sharp and contemporary about how the current U.S. cult of youth and happiness, through sex, bears down heavily on older men.
Love & Grace. How has Lowell made so many disparate things recognizably his own? It is a riddle and a mystery. Something important and complex happens in the poetry of this complicated man, whose art can also be readily understood not because it is merely simple but because it is the single outcome of many conflicting forces. His poetry leaps with disconcerting metamorphoses at every turn of speech. The bullets that "a stringy policeman" counts become rosary beads. The swan-shaped boats on the ornamental ponds of the Boston Public Garden become mythological birds taking his grandfather, Arthur Winslow, beyond Charles River to the Acheron where the wide waters and their voyager are one.
Stones crop out all over, and one feels not only the weight of them but also their sublapidary meaning. In Lowell's vision, Moses' tablets of the law become "the stones we cannot bear or break." The great slab of rock upon which Prometheus is chained by Jupiter for his technological hubris in bringing fire from heaven is the center stage of Lowell's version of Aeschylus. Much of Lowell's poetry is indeed stony. It is hard with the condemnation of his age and his society. Just as his confessionals are far beyond personal confession, his condemnations are far beyond "protest." His most immediate concerns with war or injustice are never merely topical but involved with the greatest and most permanent themes—life, death, love and grace. His anger is hot, but it is never unshaded by compassion. His disgust with the times is great, but it is never unqualified by a sense of the past. He knows that evil as well as good is in specific men, but also that it is in all men; that it is today, but also that it was yesterday.
Dialogue. A great deal of this knowledge is connected with his sense of family history. A gibe heard when he published Life Studies was not entirely unjust: "He writes as if Christ was crucified on the Lowell family tree."
He chose not to wear his ancestry as a social decoration but to accept it as a present doom and to argue with the Pilgrim Fathers as if they were living men. His poems call the Puritan spirit of New England to sharp account and make his ancestral portraits step from their frames and answer to Lowell. Thus his dialogue becomes an argument about his own nature, in terms of the Calvinist obsessions with sin, damnation, God and Satan. Lowell does not possess his ancestors; they possess him.
One of them was Mary Chilton, the first woman to step off the Mayflower. Another branch of the family produced Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell. Great-Great-Uncle James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) was a Harvard professor of belles-lettres