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« Woe is pompous me | Main | On The Economist » Thursday, March 15, 2007Lowell returnsIt's worth paying attention to a latecomer to the latest smattering of essays and reviews about Robert Lowell, whose Letters, edited by Saskia Hamilton, were published in hardcover in 2005 and in paperback this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (to be followed at some point by his correspondence with Elizabeth Bishop, hurray). I read all Lowelliana, greedily, as it comes. He and Yeats are duking it out for my favorite poet, but Lowell has the immediacy that comes from being closer to me (and us, presumably) in age and geography. I've seen a couple of his houses here and there in New England. But I always read this stuff with a melancholy heart, because with Lowell, almost literally, went poetry's rightful place in culture. He was the last rock-star poet, the last who commanded large lecture halls and advances. Will such things ever come back? Not that they should matter, I suppose, to the true aesthete, but they do matter in our self-conception. Christopher Benfey's piece about the Letters in Agni is perceptive and learned, and where else can you find the observation, by Lowell, that William Burroughs's work is "very real, but partially of psycho-pathic interest"? Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:05 PM
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