Past Present

Fanny Howe’s essay “Past Present” on Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems was first published in Harvard Review 25. Fanny Howe passed away on July 8, 2025.

I first saw Robert Lowell when I was dining with my father at the Harvard Faculty Club. It was Daddy who pointed him out to me where he was seated alone at a table for two beside a cold dark window. Thoughtful and solitary, he looked the way I imagined a poet should. It was two years before I saw him again and only weeks after my father had died at the same age—sixty and suddenly—that Lowell in his own time would die.

On a winter night Lowell appeared before me in the company of the glamorous English Gowries, Grey and Xandra, who were working at Harvard. He was carrying a glass of vodka and milk, beginning a course of Lithium, and wearing hospital clothes, after having been driven by Grey out of McLean’s Hospital for a brief night whirl. Our friendship developed from there, lasting until Bobby Kennedy’s assassination and my marriage.

Thanks to that supernatural action (some would call it psychological) that allows you to find the person whom you recently lost in someone new, I adored him as a father who was warmer than my own. This friendship (like an angel) carried me through my grief. I found I had the capacity to love life without a father in it.

It was most likely because Lowell was very similar to my father (only ten years younger) in his manner, his jokes, his Bostonian background. And like my father he was never my teacher or my idol. Already I had allied myself with another kind of New York poet, with the San Francisco Beats, the anti-establishment, hand-to-mouth poets who stapled together their own books. Lowell’s work and life seemed steeped in the Wasp privilege that I was born to reject. He was not condescending, though, but savage about it all. Self-loathing Bostonians are a breed unto themselves. Once you know one, you are always glad to meet another. I was at ease with him.

Our private conversations mostly revolved around “the problem with Boston,” mutual friends, books, poets he admired (Ginsberg, Williams, Stevens, Rich) and ones I admired and his luminous narratives about history and current events, always punctuated with laughter. He had no interest in my opinions about his work, I was so young and so obviously committed to traditions that included the Black Mountain and Black American poets. I never showed him my poems. Perhaps because of this mutual disinterest, there was no unhappiness associated with any moment of our friendship.

Now—suddenly—Lowell’s Collected Poems has appeared twenty five years after his life. It is one of those mysterious affirmations of the mercy of time. If the book had emerged twenty years ago, he would not have had the chance to be seen apart from the environment in which the poems were made. The fact is his poems (like Shelley’s) have been submerged in a tide of imitations and our recent hysterical history that tossed them out of sight along with a lot of other literature. The last quarter of the twentieth century wanted no more of the world preceding Lowell’s birth in 1917.

Poetry (as always) offers an intense trace of the culture that it cannot see because it is so deep inside it. It bears the dark stamp of time on language and thought like a green growing woodland. Neither useless nor useful, a poem is a way to read the interior of time. It is a science that the poet practices alone.

Lowell’s poems, cut free from their own sources in New England, New York, and England, and from the circles of powerful people who surrounded and protected them, from students who learned from them, from family who have lost him, are now lonely and alone. That is, they are true organic matter. The poets Frank Bidart and David Gewanter took years in arranging and annotating them; this is good because otherwise they might have been eaten away instead of simply absorbed and forgotten. They are finally inimitable, they are so dated.

The collection provides brief, precise notes on references and revisions, and avoids the gossip that might have tainted the poems in retrospect. The poet is unnviolated because the collection is devoted solely to the texts. The question of whether any of it is “good” or “bad” seems ridiculous in the face of this massive energy, this eminently readable stuff. That it was compulsively written and rewritten only affirms the un-vain thrust of the project.

As meticulously as any nineteenth-century novel, the poems provide the detail, the narrative, the ambience, the thought of a critical time in American history. Many of the poems face the other way, towards the days and years before Lowell’s own presence was in them. His early poems often seem old-fashioned, and his middle poems continue a tradition that George Meredith began in “Modern Love” and Thomas Hardy continued. It is late-Victorian, pessimistic, ironic, personal. The brief, and probably manic time he spent as a Roman Catholic leaves no mark on the essential secular gravity of the work. In Life Studies, he descries his early manic-heroic throb. His father, a Boston failure, stirred up this passion. Despite the shifts in focus, the momentum is plotted as if to prove that life imitates art.

Since his childhood his sense of history was male-made, catastrophic; it was heroic, mythic, European, American, a post-war vision of ruin and fallen icons. Eliot seems almost Marxist by comparison! England, which never absorbed modernism, understood Lowell’s interest in huge empires falling and embraced him. He who had identified himself since childhood with Caligula, Napolean, et al was carried across the Atlantic as if by some Siren, some charm in his later years. Many of his poems now stand as a last post-Hitler blast: taps for old history. It says goodbye to all that, for us readers.

He himself feared being overloaded, like Browning, saturated in attributes. He admired the cranky specificity of William Carlos Williams but when he tried to find another template that was already embedded (as in buried) in his own cells, it was the sonnet. For many pages it is that familiar form that provides the space, length, shape of his thoughts. The sonnet is like a party where you can leave when you have had enough, with a summary statement at the door of air. You are not afraid of your own absence; indeed you enjoy providing closure. And then you can re-make the whole event as you drive off alone into the night, revising, refocusing.

Duncan, Ginsberg, Stevens, Williams—contemporaries of Lowell—even Hardy didn’t write this way. Each one took an utterly unique approach to the shape and destiny of a poem. So now what is distinctive in Lowell is the method of his manner. More regretful than prophetic, more furnished than natured, he is an indoor poet who uses nature as metaphor. (Hardy, by contrast, puts nature first.) He is not experimental with language, but pleasure-seeking. The gorgeous, unifying sound patterns and reflecting images, the belief in symbol and metaphor suggest that the world is hanging on by its words.

Lowell’s sonnets (daybooks) give him a form that is the equivalent of a calendar page. Already the stunning form of Life Studies—spliced between prose and poetry that sometimes repeated images from the prose—had revealed a mind that was complicatedly focused, first on the past, then on the present, then on fusion between the two, fusion being a form of resolution, the way the problem that the poem sets up, gets solved. The first words of the poem determine the rest of the words in the poem, so then relentless revision is a way of fighting this determinism. (For Shakespeare and Dickinson, it was often paradox that settled matters, a harmonics of contradictory realities.)

Prose memoir generally faces the past in order to dredge up some revelatory facts that will free both writer and reader from repetitive perplexity. The prose notebook is something else. It is anti-memoir. It is a response to a day and a future that is entirely immediate. The notebook does not look back. Therefore it is often churning with ideas for the future, is political in intention, and is written in a state of crisis. It is not a diary, but a chronicle of ideas and observations that could belong to anyone. (Pascal, Camus, Weil, Baudelaire). The prose notebook is not revised but written in a feverish state in response to the immediate or approaching world.

So now with Lowell’s sonnets in particular we have the poetry notebook. They are sort of like the Arab journey poems (ghazals) that respond to immediate weathers, obstacles, desires, and politics. But they are not exactly like them because the metaphors and symbols are personal, not religious. These poems are worked over and over for the eye’s ear and for resonant emotion. They are nostalgic in nature, which diminishes a political edge and instead puts the stress on disappointment in history past. They are like letters that are like notebooks that also assume a sympathetic reader.

Lowell’s fame during his lifetime did nothing to undermine the relentless business of these notebooks and his labor over them. In them he found, I think, a way to live as much as a way to write; they were one action. Yet his fame infiltrated the work to a degree where its surrounding human references became like reloading rumors onto the truck of each verse. One longs not to know whom the people named or addressed are because really they are ghosts, stand-ins for the real and the lost.

How does a mind work? Like a cognitive therapist studying his own symptoms, Lowell experimented with meaning through the English language and his lived experience. This is what is meant by “science.” After he died, the social upheaval that tended towards identity politics moved the outside world to the outside and put the inside where the outside had been. Symbols crashed. No one thought symbolically after Vietnam.

Lowell’s scrupulous method turned into a surge of first-person narrative poems or else was subsumed in reactionary nausea. His fame made people hate him as it always does. Huge political (and necessary) social transformation, multiculturalism, racial awareness, class disgust, buried Lowell alive under the dramatic revelations of Plath and Sexton. Perhaps because his poetry had such a large influence on women, it became tainted and unclean in retrospect. In any case, the confessional urge was exactly what feminism need for a while, in order to chronicle the difficult and forgotten.

Now that we can read the whole text of Lowell’s life (and his own summary of it in an essay) it feels as if we had been reading rain-drenched fragments until now. I personally am glad I lived long enough to see the fresh reawakening of Lowell’s life work and the perspective on the twentieth century that it provides. The past always looks its best when no one is in it.