Poets: The Second Chance

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he was lucky to have as one of his teachers Poet Richard Eberhart. "At the beginning of his senior year," Eberhart recalls, "Lowell brought me a book of 30 poems—the first fruits of his labors—shyly placing it on my desk when I was not there. I cherish this unpublished book to this day. It showed the young poet heavily influenced by Latin models, but true strokes of imagination came through."

By the time he left St. Marks for Harvard in 1935, Lowell had written in an essay on the Iliad: "Its magnitude and depth make it almost as hard to understand as life." So soon, Lowell had put art and life on a parity. At Harvard, he lolled in his room, surrounded by prints of Leonardo and Rembrandt, listening to Beethoven on his phonograph. He wrote poems full of violence and foreboding, black roses, a "plague" that "breathed the decay of centuries." No one then at Harvard was interested, so Lowell took his verses to Robert Frost, who was living near by. Frost read the first page of the Crusades opus. "You have no compression," he said, and then read aloud a short poem by William Collins, How Sleep the Brave. "That's not a great poem, but it's not too long." Lowell recalls that Frost was "very kindly about it."

Lowell chafed at Harvard and the stifling pedantry of its literature courses, and he seethed against the tensions of his home. The first of his crises was mounting. It came with his announcement, later rescinded, that he was quitting college to elope with a girl to Europe. Father and son quarreled. The violence that churned in Lowell's poetry burst out, and he knocked his father to the floor. As Commander Lowell saw it, his crazed son would have to be packed off to an asylum, but family friends convinced him that his poet son needed not so much the company of keepers as that of other poets—specifically, those living in Tennessee.

Heady Summer. Tennessee in the '30s was the center of a poetic renaissance. Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, fathers of the "New Criticism," had done much to impose form and coherence on the gaseous and self-indulgent free-verse fashion of the time. Thus Lowell at 20 found himself at a reform school—poetic reform. When he arrived "ardent and eccentric" at the

Tates' house in Monteagle, near Chattanooga, he was told there was no room. "You would have to camp on the lawn," said Mrs. Tate, who was already busy with a novel, her family, three guests and the cooking. Lowell bought a pup tent at Sears, Roebuck, pitched it on the lawn, moved in, and slept there for two months.

It was a heady summer. Lowell recalls: "It seemed to be one of those periods when the lid was being blown . . . when a power came into the arts which we perhaps haven't had since." After that, the poet's eye was in a fine frenzy rolling; he was now to find a focus in the forms of tradition.

He returned to Cambridge to muddle through a bit more and, although it seemed impious to his parents for a Lowell to reject Harvard, he was allowed to transfer to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where Ransom and Randall Jarrell now taught. They were to make the Kenyon Review into a dominant force in American poetry and criticism for the next three decades. "I am the sort of poet I am because of