Volume 26, Number 1 · February 8, 1979
Pudding Stone
By Helen Vendler
Robert Lowell: Life and Art
by Steven Gould Axelrod
Princeton University Press, 286 pp., $14.50
Because it is the first work on Robert Lowell to appear since his death sixteen months ago, Steven Axelrod's new book will be looked to for some first glimpse of a comprehensive view, consciously phrased in the light of the end of the poetic canon (only a few poems remain unpublished). The myth of Lowell's life and work proposed by Axelrod—my noun is not in itself a criticism, because all accounts of a career reveal an implicit myth—does not differ very much at first from the received ideas which by now encrust the Lowell canon: after apprentice work imitative of Tate in Land of Unlikeness (1944) Lowell becomes famous with his first notable book, Lord Weary's Castle (1946), which encompasses 'three related themes…history, current events, and God.' The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951) is a mistake, Life Studies (1959) is the great watershed, Imitations (1961) is really a book of personal poems, not translations. Axelrod's recapitulations take on a personal shape when he turns to the later books. He praises For the Union Dead (1964) while admitting its 'drought'; he is uncertain about Near the Ocean (1967), especially about the title poem; and he is positively impatient with Notebook 1967-68 and its two recastings, first as Notebook (1970), then as History and For Lizzie and Harriet (1973).
Review, 3617 words
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