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The heavy burden of learning and the rigorous formal demands of the New Criticism of Ransom and Tate dammed up the first freshet of his verse. His poems were blocked with a deliberate opaque quality, as if he feared that clarity were a sign of mediocrity. Still, he seemed stimulated by restraint. He emerged from Kenyon summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa and class valedictorian. He also emerged a Roman Catholic convert and a husband.
Just before graduation, he married Jean Stafford. Two years his senior, she was intense, beautiful, a gifted writer of fiction (she later wrote Boston Adventure, The Mountain Lion) and an assistant professor at Stevens College in Columbia, Mo. And so, with his marriage, his graduation and his conversion, he at last stood outside the long shadow of Beacon Hill. He would deal with its traditional claims upon him only in his own terms: in poetry. And he would write New England's epitaph rather than a Frostian celebration.
Then began a life pattern that would soon become familiar in U.S. cultural pursuits—in which hundreds of the gifted, the talented or the merely qualified would live from grant to mouth, or move, like modern Lollard friars, from college to college, claiming hospitality by right of authorship. The Lowells drifted to Louisiana State University, and then back to Kenyon. Lowell's poetry was excruciatingly difficult and ambiguous; as he said later, "it really wasn't poetry."
With his wife, he moved to Manhattan's Greenwich Village, where he labored briefly for the Catholic publishing house of Sheed & Ward. This period gave him the metropolitan imagery necessary to a contemporary poet: he needed less an eye for the four seasons of Walden Pond than for the five boroughs of New York City. He was to write: Now the midwinter grind is on me, New York drills through my nerves,/ as I walk/ the chewed-up streets. And, in a cataclysmic line: When Cain beat out his brother Abel's brains/ the Maker laid great cities in his soul.
The C.O. It was a bad time for poets generally. There was a war on. In 1942, Lowell tried to serve first in the Army and then the Navy, only to be turned down by both as physically unfit (eyesight alone would have disqualified him). As the war went on, he changed his mind, or the war changed its character. When the draft called, he refused to report and wrote a letter to the President to explain why. He wrote not as a dissident citizen to the all-powerful President of the U.S. but haughtily as a Boston Lowell to a Hudson Valley Roosevelt: "You will understand how painful such a decision is for an American whose family traditions, like your own, have always found their fulfillment in maintaining, through responsible participation in both civil and military services, our country's freedom and honor."
F.D.R. understood. The judge understood. Lowell was sentenced to a year and a day but served only five months, part of it in Manhattan's West Street jail. He later wrote of his experience with jocular ferocity: I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O., and made my manic statement, telling off the state and president, and then sat waiting sentence in the bull pen beside a Negro boy with curlicues of marijuana in his hair.
Poor Ghost. Lowell's poetry explains better than any presidential letter the