Volume 31, Number 3 · March 1, 1984
On Robert Lowell
By Derek Walcott
Biographies of poets are hard to believe. The moment they are published they become fiction, subject to the same symmetry of plot, incident, dialogue as the novel. The inarticulate wisdom of really knowing another person is not in the broad sweep of that other person's life, but in its gestures; and when the biography is about a poet the duty of giving his life a plot makes the poetry a subplot. So we read from the comfort of a mold. The book becomes an extension of the armchair, the life becomes the shadow cast by the reader.
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