Irony and introspection

Robert Lowell: Selected Poems
Edited by Frank Bidart
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 420 pp., paperback, $18

Frank Bidart's services to Robert Lowell have been many: Three years ago he, along with David Gewanter, edited Lowell's 1 ,200-page " Collected Poems "; now he has made a selection roughly a third as long. The year before his death, in 1977, Lowell published his own version of "Selected Poems "; the major additions in the new book are poems from his final volume, " Day by Day, " larger selections from " For the Union Dead " and " History, " as well as 60 pages of Bidart's and Gewanter's notes taken from the "Collected Poems."

For that edition Bidart wrote a useful introduction, speaking in part as a friend of the poet's, one whose critical opinions were especially important to Lowell during the years 1967-1973, when he was shaping and reshaping the scores of unrhymed sonnets that would make up three books. This time Bidart's brief foreword is broken into eight sections, separated by asterisks and delivered in a more oracular tone. He proposes that Lowell is a great "transgressive" poet, and this fashionable word, used twice in four pages ("its transgressive, almost barbaric immediacy") , brought a shiver of mistrust as I wondered who the great non-transgressive poets are. T. S. Eliot? Robert Frost? Does Lowell need to be touted in quite such an overwrought manner? When we are told that his "immense work attempts to make us see the cracks in what we or the culture have thought of as whole," one has to ask what connection such a claim has with the challenge and satisfaction of reading a Lowell poem.

Nevertheless it is good to have this ably chosen and annotated book, in which the shape of a career comes through perhaps even more clearly than it did from the entirety of the "Collected Poems." What emerged for me is the absolute superiority of "Life Studies" to any other of Lowell's books. Its never-to-be-duplicated blend of serious humor is present throughout, as in the opening lines of "Memories of West Street and Lepke": "Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming / in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning, / I hog a whole house on Boston's / ' hardly passionate Marlborough Street, ' / where even the man / scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans, / has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate, / and is a 'young Republican.' " Here are the 1950 s presented with a wickedly accurate eye and an ear that turns bookworm into book-worming and delights in over-the-top alliterative play ("hog a whole house . . . hardly"). "Life Studies" is astonishing in its freedom from the rapt if sometimes muscle - bound sonorities of "Lord Weary's Castle." It is also Lowell's most consistently intelligible collection; each of its poems can be understood.

Lowell never attained, perhaps even tried for, such a manner again. The immediate successor to "Life Studies," "For the Union Dead," has a number of affecting portraits of the poet as reflective, usually pained host of his own past and present, but mostly without the balanced irony that made "Life Studies" unique. If humor, however desirable, also has its limitations as a response to life, Lowell registered this in "Waking in the Blue," a poem from "Life Studies" about his stay in a "house for the ' mentally ill' " (McLean Hospital). In it he asks, "What use is my sense of humor?" Few of his later poems would be able to ask that question in such a bemused tone.

In his foreword Bidart speaks of the "progress of Lowell's formal inventions" as having the " quality of allegory." Without disputing the claim, it could be added that not all the formal inventions are equally convincing. Too often in the sonnets one encounters a brilliant line, then is plunged into opacity by a sequence that doesn't feel sequential. Jonathan Raban, who edited a selection of Lowell's poems in 1974, just after the three books of sonnets had been published, thought one of them, "The Dolphin," "the summit of Lowell's achievement." This seems to me not true either of "The Dolphin" or the other books of sonnets. And "Day by Day" may be the only place for Lowell's art, allegorically speaking, to end, but at the level of individual poems there is often enervation, even slackness, in the too-free verse.

Certain favorites of mine are missing from this selection, such as "Christmas Eve Under Hooker's Statue" and "Rebellion" from "Lord Weary's Castle." But Lowell himself excluded them from "Selected Poems."

"Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoint": Henry James's words from "The Art of Fiction" surely apply to Lowell's art of poetry, the extent to which it is currently alive and will continue to live. Such exchange of views and comparison of standpoints are ideally what this selection will provoke in readers rediscovering Lowell or reading him for the first time.

William H. Pritchard is a professor of English at Amherst College. His most recent book is "Shelf Life: Literary Essays and Reviews."