Marjorie Perloff: When the Collected Poems was published in 2003, I thought it would make a huge difference. The CP is an enormous volume, lovingly presented by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, and the early reviews suggested that Robert Lowell was in for a big revival. Younger people, so the argument went, would now be exposed to the emotional charge and brilliant technique of this great mid-century poet and would become acolytes. I myself continue to admire Lowell’s poetry enormously, even though I also continue to dislike the sonnets in History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin. I feel that these volumes contain slack, self-indulgent poems that are too much like diary jottings, too local to be interesting.

Acclaim from new readers seems not to have occurred. My students love Frank O’Hara: they can’t get enough of him. And they seem to find Elizabeth Bishop a better poet than Lowell, perhaps because her poems are so “finished,” so perfectly formed and rendered. But since I happen to prefer Lowell to Bishop, finding his range much larger and more apropos our lives, I wonder if the problem isn’t one of presentation. The Selected Poems, which contains only 100 pages of sonnets, vis-à-vis 240 pages made up of the earlier poems along with the last volume, Day by Day, should be more popular. Still, I don’t think we’re about to see a Lowell revival anytime soon. Has your experience with the younger generation of potential Lowell readers been different from mine?

David Wojahn: A couple of years ago I taught a grad course on the middle generation poets, and my experience mirrors yours. The students found Bishop charming; they had no trouble accepting Berryman’s mannerism and tendency toward bathos, and they even warmed to poets I thought they’d resist—Weldon Kees, for example. But Lowell was difficult for them; they didn’t outright dislike him in the way they did George Oppen, but they expressed a fair amount of puzzlement, and a couple of them found it hard to believe that he was once held in such high esteem. This saddens me, but I think the students’ appraisal of Lowell is typical of readers who are newcomers to him, ones who don’t remember or care about his former stature, and who find his desire to act as our social conscience a little bit quaint. (He was Official Verse Culture when it meant something.)

It doesn’t help that the three most crucial Lowell books—Life Studies, For the Union Dead, Near the Ocean—are preceded by the not-very-reader-friendly modernist density of Lord Weary’s Castle and The Mills of the Kavanaughs, a book that seems to me nearly unreadable. And after the three great books comes the letdown of the sonnet trilogy. Even a judiciously made Selected like this new one is not going to diminish this difficulty. Furthermore, even the three essential Lowell books cause problems for my students, and the main problems are these.

They complain that Lowell is an elitist. They balk at his repeated references to his ancestry and social position. Never mind that his feelings about his background are so decidedly ambivalent. And they fail to see how cannily Lowell exploited his social standing in his poetry and in his public life. They see the Mayflower Lowell, not the “Mayflower screwball” of “Waking in the Blue.”

Worse yet, Lowell is seen as a “Confessional” poet during a time when that word is used pejoratively or not at all. Over the past decade or so, it’s grown all too common to encounter students in M.F.A. workshops defending obliqueness and obscurity in their poems by saying they didn’t want them to seem “too confessional.” Sadly, the brighter students see in Lowell the beginnings of a kind of autobiographical self-indulgence that had its heyday in the ‘70s and ‘80s (the sort of writing that you once characterized as “talk show poetry,” Marjorie)—and such poetry has now fallen considerably out of fashion. But I have to say that this reaction mystifies me. Sharon Olds was not Lowell’s fault. And they forget that Lowell himself disliked being labeled a confessional poet. (I remember that brilliant line from his Paris Review interview—“a poem isn’t about an experience, it is an experience.”)

I worry that the problems with Lowell’s reputation right now have less to do with the flaws in his work than with the problematic ways in which he influenced a later generation--and many of those writers didn’t read him well.

MP: I think you put it perfectly when you say “Sharon Olds was not Lowell’s fault.” Absolutely not, and it’s true that the whole packaging of the recent Collected Poems (and now Selected) is problematic. But talk of Lowell’s reputation leads to a larger question. I’m curious how you feel about the following. When it comes to the early twentieth century, most poets/critics/readers seem to agree on the canon: Eliot, Pound, Frost, Stevens, Williams, Crane, Moore, H. D., Stein. . . . Now H. D. and Moore may be getting more attention than they used to, but, on the whole, the canon of American poets from this period is not very different today from what it was when I graduated from Oberlin in—heaven help me—1953. But now look at the mid-century. Is the dominant group the Olson circle (Creeley, Duncan, Levertov, Dorn, etc.) or the Lowell circle or the New York School or the Beats? Why has Roethke’s reputation declined so sharply? In my early teaching days, every other grad student did a dissertation on Roethke—I directed two or three.

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