In these days of voyeurism and the pursuit of vicarious kicks Ian Hamilton’s Robert Lowell: a Biography[1] is bound to be a much-thumbed book. Because the poet himself made a public record of his private life—mess after mess after mess detailed in the later poems—scholars will be at work for a long time, not only with the incidental felicities of phrase but with the questions of the poems’ “truths”: to what extent does this or that passage reflect or falsify the poet’s life, especially his amorous relationships. Here are possibilities for endless gossip, endless soap opera. It is easy to predict that the Lowell biography machine will keep going well into the next century, with Mr. Hamilton’s thick, well-documented biography as a primary text.
Lowell himself practically ordained this by living the sort of life that he did and by writing it into his poems. It was as though, sensing our fondness for gossip, our penchant for meanness, he deliberately left us, in those late “confessional” books, poems in which biographical matters—the agonies of the heart and the mind—greatly outweigh any literary merit. Indeed, during the last twenty years of his life he stepped up his amorous activities and complicated his marital difficulties, recording them in poem after poem, almost with the design of titillating and confounding us. He has left us his literary legacy, and it is a can of worms. How we deal with it will be a fair reflection on us.
Not that
