Poets: The Second Chance

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violence of his revulsion against the war, especially the bombing of cities, crucial to his conscientious objection: Raise us, Mother, we fell down Here hugger mugger in the jellied fire: Our sacred earth in our day was a curse. Many of his antiwar poems were written at Damariscotta Mills, Me., where he and his wife had gone as soon as he was released from jail. Collected in Lord Weary's Castle, his second volume, they won him, at 29, the Pulitzer Prize.

But they won him no peace of mind. In a rage with the world, Lowell found no balm in his religion, and he renounced Catholicism. Nor was marriage a solace; it was another theater for his inner dissension. He and his wife wrote in separate rooms of a big old farmhouse. Years later, he remembered: How quivering and fierce we were. There snowbound together/ Simmering like wasps/ In our tent of books!/ Poor ghost, old love, speak/ With your old voice/ Of flaming insight/ That kept us awake all night. In one bed and apart . . . They were divorced in 1948.

Back to Roots. In the summer of 1949, Lowell married again. The bride, another writer, was Kentuckian Elizabeth Hardwick, who is now an editor of the New York Review of Books. That year he taught at Iowa State University. They spent most of the next three years in Europe, where Lowell plunged into a temporary gambling fling at Monte Carlo. After his mother's death in 1954, he took his wife to Boston and, with his inheritance, bought a big, comfortable town house in Back Bay. "The idea," says a friend, "was to recapture some roots. It was their first attempt to be the Boston Lowells."

For a while it worked. Their daughter Harriet was born. They held expansive dinner parties at which intellectual nourishment was served with the same elegance that accompanied the finger bowls. Critics Edmund Wilson and Philip Rahv dined there, and so did Poets William Carlos Williams, Richard Eberhart and William Snodgrass, Lowell's most gifted student. "Lowell liked the successful poets with more than just a literary interest," recalls a friend. "They were reproductive, they had lasted the course—they were heroes of letters."

For five years, Lowell taught at Boston University. In 1959, he published Life Studies, which included 91 Revere Street and some of his best poetry. In Skunk Hour, which evokes a summer's decay, he watches the animals search in the moonlight for food:

They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top

of our back steps and breathe the rich air-a mother skunk with her kitten swills the garbage pail.

She jabs her wedge-head in a cup

of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,

and will not scare.

Even in those productive days Lowell suffered a terrible physical strain. "He was struggling with two dynamos," says a friend, "one leading him to some kind of creative work, the other tearing him apart." The origin of what Lowell himself called his "break downs" is attributed by some friends to the "incredible tensions" that existed between Lowell's parents. Says one: "I don't see how he survived that family. He has written about it, but the reality is worse than he has written."