Acción de Contingencia

1. Introduction

All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.^ The paradigm of the tyrannical poet which Auden presents

(albeit with guarded playfulness) is a peculiarly apt one in the case of Robert Lowell. His imagination is susceptible to the glamour of destructive scenes, and the language of his poetry frequently expresses a relish of brutality. Moreover, Lowell's verse exhibits an engaged and complex preoccupation with the motives of tyrants, and with the

tyrannical tendencies which he and others felt were latent in his own personality.^

Looked at from Auden's angle, Lowell's fascination with the impulses of human aggression sits uneasily alongside the poet's high cultural profile. Though no statesman as such, Lowell gained a public prominence which made him something of a statesman of letters in post-war America. The

publicity surrounding the notorious declarations he made to two Presidents and his involvement with political campaigns in the 1960s contributed to this. Public gestures aside, it is the combination in Lowell's poetry of autobiographical and personal reflection with historical and contemporary

^ W.H. Auden, 'The Poet and the City', p. 84.

^ Ian Hamilton's Robert Lowell: A Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1983) provides much detail on the bouts of mania by which Lowell was afflicted, and the resultant behavioural inflictions to which those around him were subjected. 'Tyranny' and synonymous words recur frequently in statements by Lowell's acquaintances, and in the biographer's own interpretations of the poet's life. See, for instance, p. 355 on 'tyrant delusions' - Hamilton's term for Lowell's tendency at times of manic affliction to identify with violent images and characters.

commentary which lends social force to his writing. He adapted the conventionally personal mode of lyric poetry in an ambitious, at times provocative, attempt to connect the private with the public man, and to speak as a chronicler of

the past and a commentator on the present.

The reaction his endeavours have provoked befits that of a statesman: Lowell has received fanatical election and acrimonious deposition by the critical industry and the mass readership. It is to be hoped that the forthcoming

publication of his collected poems (currently in preparation by Frank Bidart) will redress his recent relative decline in popular awareness and esteem.

Lowell's interest in the exercise and abuse of

authority is complex; it needs to be understood in relation to his preoccupation with impotence and futility. The

tyrant-figures in his poems are frequently solipsists, the impulses they manifest being at once self-aggrandizing and self-defeating. The conception of solipsism underpinning Lowell's poetry guides his interpretation of human behaviour as the product of arbitrary, tyrannical whims. A central preoccupation of Lowell's is that the world, and in

particular the American nation, is comprised of solipsists, unable or unwilling to resist their own or their society's

inevitable gravitation towards destruction and self- destruction .

In my analysis of Lowell's early poetry, I focus on the relation between the tyrannical and the puritanical. Lowell explores the Calvinistic obsession with a God of

retribution, and points up the connection between the violence of the imagination and a correlative violence

manifest in the pursuit of warfare and ruthless materialism. The belligerent ethics he denounces, however, find

expression in the violent rhetoric of Lowell's own verse; his appetite for 'scenes of spectacular carnage' aligns Lowell with the tyrannical forces which are the target of his invective.

Life Studies (1959) depicts struggles for dominion in both the public and the private realm. In this volume,

Lowell connects imperialist urges, and their disintegration, to mental and social imbalances. The poems provide brittle, ruthlessly concise sketches of particular characters in order to emphasize the impotence of power-delusions and to convey a pervasive paralysis of will in the society he observes. Each aggressive solipsist, held captive and solitary in a prison of private preoccupations, is seen to gravitate inexorably towards self-destruction.

In his translations and plays, Lowell considers the connection between mania for power and desultory whim. The licence Lowell exercises in adapting the work of others to reflect his particular standpoint draws attention also to a writer's potential for arbitrary, tyrannical presumption. I contend that Lowell is highly sensitive to the dangers he courts, both in the translation work and in For the Union Dead (USA: 1964; UK: 1965) and Near the Ocean (1967), volumes which display an awareness of how artistry

(particularly Lowell's own poetry) can conspire in the

abuses it warns against. His key theme throughout the 1960s is the mischannelling of aggressive energy into fantasies of sexual and political power, aspirations which are frustrated

by the pervasive reality of personal impotence and political decadence.

In the Notebook volumes (1969 and 197 0) and the spin­ off collections, History and For Lizzie and Harriet (both 1973), Lowell develops these concerns while at the same time inviting increased speculation about his own techniques of composition. He rewrites history, drawing upon and splicing together personal reverie and international catastrophe to complex and contentious effect. The publication of altered versions of hundreds of poems contributes to the

contentiousness. Lowell's self-styled 'opportunistic' tactics invite adverse criticism, while the provisionality and self-deflationary tendencies of his strategies

complicate the issue of authorial control.

In his late volumes. The Dolphin (1973) and Dav by Dav (USA: 1977; UK: 1978), Lowell faces up candidly to the ways in which he has plotted with his own and other people's lives and to the damage his deeds and words have inflicted. His interest is in the relinquishing of control both as a human condition and as a poetic imperative.

Throughout my analysis, I maintain an interest in Lowell's revisions - taking my cue from a subsidiary definition of the verb 'redress' as 'to correct, emend'.^

I consider how far Lowell's compositional decisions are guided by a reparative impulse and how far they constitute tyrannical meddling. Specific revisions are shown to

contribute to the worked-up rhetoric of Lowell's early

^ One instance provided in the OED for this meaning reads as follows: '1796 HAMILTON in Washington's Writ. (1892) XIII.190 note, You mentioned to me your wish, that I should redress a certain paper, which you had prepared'.

verse, the atmosphere of suppressed tension characterizing his middle volumes and the offhand, opportunist quality of the later poetry: in the case of each particular

composition, the amendments may be ascribed to either a refractory or a redemptive impulse as it finds its way into words: each shift of decision informs the direction of the verse towards or away from the possibility of making good

the damages done both in life and on the page.^

In the course of an article on the poet Stanley Kunitz in 1962, Lowell defined the two chief qualities he looked for 'in the working out of a poem':

a commanding, deadly effectiveness in the arrangement, and something that breathes and pauses and grunts and is rough and unpredictable

to assure me that the journey is honest. (LCP, p. 85)5 Lowell's conception of poetic composition as an act

combining lethal calculation and capricious whim provides a compelling paradigm of poet-as-tyrant. By the same token, his stress on candid and unpremeditated response argues for a more benign view of his intentions. The task of Lowell's critic, at times a highly challenging one, is to distinguish the ways in which his artistry colludes with the power-

politics it exemplifies from the poet's 'honest' self- awareness about what he is up to in his work.

^ I have provided a detailed commentary on Lowell's compositional habits in a recently published article,

'Revision as Redress? Robert Lowell's Manuscripts', Essays in Criticism, 46 (1996), 28-51.

5 For a key to references within the text of my thesis, refer to the table of abbreviations at the front of the book.

2. 'Tyrannical Delusions'

In his study of literary 'doubles', Karl Miller describes Lowell as a tyrannicide subject to tyrannical delusions. He highlights how Lowell's poems engage with tyranny and its redress to double-edged effect: 'the conscientious objector who entered the tensions and uproars of the late Sixties, and marched on the Pentagon, has his dark double in the connoisseur of greatness and war'. Miller's terms of analysis are particularly apt, given that attention to dualities governs Lowell's own poetic outlook. The split personality of modern man, the dissociation of violent action from violent impulse, the fascination and repulsion which cruelty evinces: these paradoxical conditions are among the abiding themes of his work. Often with wry self- awareness, and sharp self-castigation, Lowell empathizes with the tyrants who people his poems; as Miller puts it, 'a capacity for irony equipped him to suspect, while helping him to sustain, the worship of problematic heroes'.^

Lowell's poetry offers unflinching observations on the most menacing operations of the human mind - and on the social and political constructs which reflect those

operations. He relentlessly pursues connections between his own thought processes and the psychopathology of tyrannical individuals, and he forges links between the historical and biographical data of his life and the events which have

shaped, and continuously reshape, the national temperament of America. Lowell would have been the first to concede the

^ Karl Miller, 'Some Names for Robert Lowell', in Doubles: Studies in Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 299-317 (pp. 311-12, 300).

inbuilt egotistical bias of such a poetic project; indeed, this is a central part of the preoccupation: his poems seek to define the nature of a self-world dualism through

exploring the subjective prison of the ego. By such means, he provides a diagnosis of the power-drives which corrupt

individuals and societies. These are shown to result in tyrannical configurations on both the domestic and the political plane.2

The central problem facing Lowell, and the critic who would gauge Lowell's achievement, is in distinguishing between diagnosis and remedy; one is forced to ask to what extent the poet is merely addressing the circumstances he describes, and how far does he go towards actually

redressing them.^ This evaluative problem, applicable to all poetry, has a particular relevance in the case of Lowell, since his poems are expressive above all of

'solipsism'. The word is defined in the OED as 'the view or theory that self is the only object of real knowledge or the only thing really existent'. The examples provided indicate how this has led to the term being used to express ideas

^ The OED offers a range of examples in which tyrannical behaviour within domestic relationships has been referred to:

'1768 H. WALPOLE Hist. Doubts 63 Henry was a tyrannic

husband'; '1792 in Gentl. Mag. Dec.Il99/I A man of republican levelling principles, who was the greatest of tyrants to his wife and family'; '1908 R. BAGOT A. Cuthbert iv. The marriage had not proved a happy one...He had been a domestic tyrant'. Johnson's dictionary provides an instance from Bacon: 'Suspicions dispose kings to tyranny, and husbands to jealousy'. For Johnson's views on 'Parental Tyranny' (and the 'redress' thereof), see Samuel Johnson: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. by Donald Greene, Oxford Authors series

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 232-35.

^ Definition 10.b of the verb 'redress' in the OED is 'to cure, heal, relieve (a disease, wound, etc.). Also in fig. context'.

about subjective idealism, withdrawn melancholy, absolute egoism, and incapacitation of judgement and effective action. 'Solipsism' implies the obverse of disinterested self-awareness; it defines a paradoxical state of mind in which a sense of identity-loss and total self-immersion are combined.

In a supplement to the OED, an example of the use of the term 'solipsist' is given which links it unambiguously to the tyrannical temperament :

1972 Last Whole Earth Catalog 16/2 Solipsist

tyrants, believing that their will, like their eyeballs, could move mountains, have come to believe that it should trample over these small annoying figures in their visual field.

The quotation brings to mind Emerson's 'tyrannous eye' and suggests a means of linking Lowell's practice to the

aggressive stress on individualism often seen to underlie modern American verse. Such matters have informed, for example, Richard Gray's recent survey of the field. Gray makes pertinent connections between the affirmative stress which American writers have placed on the Emersonian values of solitude and self-reliance and the negative implications of this - in particular, obsession with the lonely, isolated ego.

For Gray, Modernism promoted and problematized the

phenomenon of poetic self-preoccupation. He characterizes a J. Alfred Prufrock-syndrome in modern poetry, whereby 'the narcissistic ego translates the blank stare of reality into, alternatively, a mirror of its own concerns or a threat to its purity, or even its existence'.^ Eliot's poetry.

^ American Poetry of the Twentieth Centurv (London and New York: Longman, 1990), p. 340.

emphasizing how unreliable the self is, how much it is

defined by the vanity of self-immersion, is seen by Gray to have initiated a line of counter-individualism which has had a significant impact on American writing. Adopting

protective layers of stylization provides the poet with the means to escape personality, or to reconstitute an identity in such a way as to highlight the inadequacy of self-world relations.

Making a choice between Emersonian self-promotion and the Prufrockian example of self-doubt is a dilemma which has preoccupied many poets. Of particular relevance to the case of Lowell is the example of one of his most influential

mentors, Allen Tate. In the course of explaining his famous 'Ode to the Confederate Dead'^, Tate makes explicit his

engagement with solipsistic and narcissistic impulses: That poem is 'about' solipsism, a philosophical doctrine which says that we create the world in the act of perceiving it; or about Narcissism, or any other ism that denotes the failure of the human personality to function objectively in nature and society.

According to his own interpretation, Tate's 'Ode' diagnoses 'the remarkable self-consciousness' and 'extreme

introspection' of his time. It does so through a contemplation of how the possibility of heroic action

(symbolized by those who died for the Southern cause in the American Civil War) is an illusion unavailable to the

contemporary 'locked-in ego'. Tate's emphasis is on 'the cut-off-ness of the modern "intellectual man" from the

^ Poems by Allen Tate (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1961), p. 19.

world', trapped as the individual is in 'his subjective prison, his solipsism'/

From Lowell's perspective, the world consists of a plurality of solipsists. His poems, which frequently describe the blank stare of the mirror, are centrally

concerned with vanity, self-aggrandizement and self-disgust. Above all, it is the pathology of power which most

fascinates him. Another OED supplement example, this time from the work of the psychology writer Anthony Storr,

indicates the connections between solipsism, violent

inclination and mental schism which are fundamental to an understanding of Lowell's preoccupations:

1968 A. STORR Human Aggression xi.l04 Psychopaths

share with the schizophrenic the characteristic of living in a world which is predominantly

solipsistic; that is, in which people and events are not valued in and for themselves, but only in so far as they affect the subject.

This recourse to textbook psychology is not as inappropriate in assessing Lowell's art as it might be in the case of

other authors; it is the psychoanalytical and biographical studies of the poet which have yielded some of the most incisive commentaries on his work. Convincing cases have been put forward for casting the megalomaniac in Lowell's verse as the poet's alter ego, and the poem itself as a

^ 'Narcissus as Narcissus' (1938), in Essays of Four Decades (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 593-607 (pp. 595-96, 596, 598, 599). Tate admits that the linking of 'narcissism' with 'solipsism' lacks scholastic rigour. The OED supplement defines 'narcissism' as 'self-love and admiration that find emotional satisfaction in self­ contemplation' , adducing examples which emphasize the implications of an egotistical withdrawal from reality and an indulgence in fantasy. The earliest instance of usage given is 1822 (and for 'solipsism' 1881).

paradigmatic, alternative constitution willed into being by the power-crazed libido.

Paul Breslin has helpfully interpreted Lowell's art along such lines, probing at the root causes for Lowell's fascination with tyranny:

From his own manic episodes he understood the seductiveness of self-aggrandizement; his poems often describe megalomania as a solipsistic exaggeration of the common desire for pleasure, recognition, and respite from the fear of death, more to be pitied than censured. Even at his moments of greatest sympathy for the murderous powerful, however, Lowell usually remains aware

that the consolations of the tyrant are illusory. Since one world is too small for him, and the distractions afforded by that world finally

limited, the tyrant at last hurls himself against his own finitude.^

The emphasis on solipsistic urges which return with a vengeance to haunt the defeated spirit when forced to

confront bodily limitation encapsulates a fundamental aspect of Lowell's outlook. Self-aggrandizement, self-reproach, all the inflations and deflations of the poetic voice, tend towards resignation. The yearning for non-existence exerts its pull, straining against the incessant urge for

self-validation that impels (peculiarly so in Lowell's case) the continuation of poetic practice. This conflict accounts for such descriptions of Lowell as 'a nihilist with heroic presumptions' and for the emphasis laid upon his poetry's

'capacity for self-extinction'.®

^ 'Robert Lowell: The Historical Self and the Limits of "Conflation"', in Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 59-94 (p. 86).

® See Vereen M. Bell, Robert Lowell: Nihilist as Hero (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 5, and John Bayley, 'Robert Lowell: The Poetry of Cancellation', in Robert Lowell: A Portrait of the Artist in His Time, ed. by Michael London and Robert Boyers (New York:

Alan Williamson applies psychoanalytical interpretation to Lowell's work; he has frequent recourse in his study to the radical Freudian premiss that aggression arises out of social and neurotic distortions. What emerges in his

criticism is a persuasive, closely-argued reading of Lowell's poems which shows how they manifest the 'depth- psychological basis of the drive to omnipotence, and its intimate connection to the very notion of order'.

Williamson defines the 'solipsistic mental world' which the tyrant is customarily seen to inhabit: