Free Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton Page A

by his own boldness; for a period, at any rate, he was content simply to “take liberties,” to relish the sheer drasticness of what he’d done. The notion that free verse could be as intricate, dramatic and intense as anything he’d done before in meter seems not to have struck him until about halfway through the sequence of “family poems” in Life Studies. A letter to William Carlos Williams on February 19, 1958, is a bold and defensive statement to the archenemy of metrics that Lowell’s “conversion” would, after all, be incomplete:
    In a month or so I’ll mail you another little group of my own stuff, God willing. I now have four or five things you haven’t seen. I wouldn’t like ever to completely give up meter; it’s wonderful opposition to wrench against and revise with. Yet now that I’ve joined you in unscanned verse, I am struck by how often the old classics get boxed up in their machinery , the sonority of the iambic pentameter line, the apparatus of logic and conceit and even set subjects. Still, the muscle is there in the classics, we re-read them with joy, and in a sense wherever a man has really worked his stuff outbraves time and novel methods. We would always rather read a good old sonneteer, such as Raleigh or Sidney than somemerely competent modern fellow who is on the right track. The excellent speak to the excellent. 28
    That “ we would rather read …” observation is a kind of scolding bluff, since Lowell knew very well that Williams might not rather read a Raleigh sonnet than some new effort “in the American grain.”
    As it turns out, the inconsistency between the “early” and “late” poems of Life Studies does seem to have a point. The looser, more pedestrian “studies” are those in which the family is seen through the eyes of the child Lowell—“My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” “Dunbarton,” “Grandparents” and “ Commander Lowell.” These are elegant and witty pieces, and have some piercing moments—the ending of the Uncle Devereux poem for example—but the tone throughout is benign, detached and utterly unhurried. And one would be hard pressed to insist that they need to be set out as verse, not prose; indeed, their merits are prose merits.
    The change comes when Lowell begins to draw on his adult experience of family life, and death; when the poet cannot avoid moving to the center of his own poems. It may be that by this stage Lowell was more sure—technically—of what he was about; or it may be that the subject was no longer half invented and remote. Certainly, with “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms” and the poems that follow it, there is a noticeable tightening: alliterations and assonances seem more deliberate, more shrewd and menacing; the dramatic shifts more calculated, brutal. Here is Mr. Lowell once again, thirty years older now but still clutching his ivory slide rule:
    Each morning at eight-thirty,
    inattentive and beaming,
    loaded with his “calc” and “trig” books,
    his clipper ship statistics,
    and his ivory slide rule,
    Father stole off with the Chevie
    to loaf in the Maritime Museum at Salem.
    He called the curator
    “the commander of the Swiss Navy.”
    Father’s death was abrupt and unprotesting.
    His vision was still twenty-twenty.
    After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling,
    his last words to Mother were:
    “I feel awful.”
    There follow three more poems on Lowell’s parents’ deaths and then a transitional piece—“During Fever”—in which the poet, a father now himself, strains for a wise, forgiving view of his own background. Then we are immediately thrust forward into the orphaned present tense, with “Waking in the Blue” and “Home After Three Months Away.” We have moved from “those settled years of World War One” to the 1957 agonies of the family’s afflicted heir, from lazily chopped-up prose to a lyricism more delicately measured than anything in Lowell’s early meters. The