Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-rkxrd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-23T22:26:55.011Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cut Off from Words: Robert Lowell's “Tranquilized Fifties”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

William Doreski
Get access

Extract

In a 1961 letter to his cousin Harriet Winslow, Robert Lowell, reflecting on the Cold War crises of the period, particularly the erection of the Berlin Wall, wrote

The world's really strange isn't it? I mean the world of the news and the nations and the bomb testings. I feel it this fall and wonder, if it's just being forty three. Under a certain calm, there seems to be a question that must be answered. If one could think of the question. (Papers)

Though this passage illustrates Lowell's tendency to read the world in autobiographical terms, it also displays his sensitivity to the role of language in crisis situations. The rhetorical, public, and communal problem of voicing the required question may be the key to “the world of the news,” yet asking that question is not only beyond Lowell but beyond everyone else (the uncharacteristically impersonal “one”). By the end of the 1950s, voicing the need to ask such a question had become an intrinsic part of Lowell's poetics, most clearly formulated in “For the Union Dead,” a poem completed in 1960 in which the public and the personal dimensions powerfully cohere. However, Lowell's work of the previous decade, collected in Life Studies (1959), in a subtle way had already explored the clichés, aporia, rhetorical corruption, and general verbal difficulties of the first decade of the television era.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 21 , October 1996 , pp. 149 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Axelrod, Steven Gould. Robert Lowell: Life and Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.Google Scholar
Bell, Vereen M. Robert Lowell: Nihilist as Hero. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bennett, Joseph. “Two Americans, a Brahmin., and the Bourgeoisie.” Hudson Review 12 (1959): 431–39; reprinted (in part) in Robert Lowell: A Portrait of the Artist in His Time. Ed. Michael London and Robert Boyers. New York: David Lewis, 1970: 58–59.Google Scholar
Bishop, Elizabeth. Papers. Vassar College Library.Google Scholar
Block, Herbert. Herblock's Here and Now. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955.Google Scholar
Cooper, Philip. The Autobiographical Myth of Robert Lowell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Eddins, Dwight. “Poet and State in the Verse of Robert Lowell.” Modern Critical Views: Robert Lowell. Ed. Bloom, Harold. New York: Chelsea House, 1987: 41–58.Google Scholar
Fein, Richard. Robert Lowell. New York: Twayne, 1970.Google Scholar
Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights, 1956.Google Scholar
Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1982.Google Scholar
Kramer, Lawrence. “Freud and the Skunks: Genre and Language in Life Studies.” Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry. Ed. Axelrod, Steven Gould and Deese, Helen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986: 80–98.Google Scholar
Lowell, Robert. Collected Prose. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1987.Google Scholar
Lowell, Robert. Day by Day. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1977.Google Scholar
Lowell, Robert. For the Union Dead. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964.Google Scholar
Lowell, Robert. Life Studies. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1959.Google Scholar
Lowell, Robert. Interview with Frederick Seidel. Paris Review 25 (1961): 56–95.Google Scholar
Lowell, Robert. Papers. Houghton Library Harvard University.Google Scholar
Mariani, Paul. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. New York: Norton, 1994.Google Scholar
Mazzaro, Jerome. The Poetic Themes of Robert Lowell. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965.Google Scholar
Mutual Benefit Life Company advertisement. Fortune 05 1958: 5.Google Scholar
Ogden, C. K., and Richards, I. A.. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language Upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. 8th ed. New York: Harcourt, 1959.Google Scholar
O'Neill, William L. American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945–1960. New York: Free Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Pearson, Gabriel. “The Middle Years.” Modern Critical Views: Robert Lowell. Ed. Bloom, Harold. New York: Chelsea House, 1987: 19–34.Google Scholar
“The Retreat in Washington.” Fortune 03 1957: 105–6.Google Scholar
Stryker, Perrin. “A Slight Case of Overcommunication.” Fortune 03 1954: 116.Google Scholar
Warren, Robert Penn. “Pure and Impure Poetry.” Kenyon Review 5 (1943): 228–54.Google Scholar
Witek, Terri. Robert Lowell and Life Studies: Revising the Self. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993.Google Scholar