You may be familiar with this New England ditty:
And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells speak only to Cabots,
And the Cabots speak only to God.
Not quite so. The Lowells through their poetry have also spoken to the nation and the world.
* * *
Occasionally it happens that more than one important poet comes from the same family. Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were husband and wife. Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were sister and brother. All three of the Brontë sisters wrote poetry. And in the United States, the Lowell Family of Massachusetts produced famous poets in three different generations: James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), Amy Lowell (1874-1925) and Robert Lowell (1917-1977).
Now I’m not certain what constitutes an adequate family history in Boston Brahmin circles, but the Lowells can trace their ancestry back at least to King Henry II of England (reigned 1154-1189) . . . he whose wife, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, surrounded herself with those medieval poets known as Troubadours. Poetry runs in the family.
James Russell Lowell deserves to be better remembered than simply as the author of the lyric verse, “What Is So Rare as a Day in June.” In addition to writing poems and essays, he held a law degree, was a professor of modern languages and literature at Harvard for twenty years, a humorist, a diplomat . . . Ambassador to Spain and later the Court of St. James in England . . . and an early and vocal anti-slavery writer.
Among his most popular poems was a piece called “A Fable for Critics” in which he both praised and satirized his fellow writers. For example, here are some stanza openings:
There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one,
Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on.
There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rare
That you hardly at first see the strength that is there.
Here’s Cooper, who’s written six volumes to show
He’s as good as a lord; well, let’s grant that he’s so.
There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge.
And then there’s this self-characterization.
There is Lowell, who’s striving Parnassus to climb
With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme,
He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders,
But he can’t with that bundle he has on his shoulders,
The top of the hill he will ne’er come nigh reaching
Till he learns the distinction ‘twixt singing and preaching;
His lyre has some chords that would ring pretty well,
But he’d rather by half make a drum of the shell,
And rattle away till he’s old as Methusalem,
At the head of a march to the last new Jerusalem.
Lowell was an ardent abolitionist in the period before the Civil War and wrote a poem called “The Present Crisis” as early as 1844. These stanzas have a remarkable fervor.
When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth’s aching breast
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west,
And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb
To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime
Of the century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time.
For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along,
Round the earth’s electric circle, the swift flash of right or wrong;
Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity’s vast frame
Though its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame; —
In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide;
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.
Note: In 1910, when the NAACP needed a name for their new official publication (W.E.B. Du Bois, editor) they decided to call it “The Crisis” in recognition of Lowell’s poem.
To those of you who received schooling in the 20th century, the name Amy Lowell may sound familiar. She had a cousin relationship with James Russell Lowell but had her own distinct voice. Her exceptional poem, “Patterns,” was taught in virtually all college and high school literature programs, and her espousal of Free Verse, poetry that doesn’t use any strict meter or rhyme, inspired generations of poets that followed. Here are excerpts from “Lilacs.”
Lilacs,
False blue,
White,
Purple,
Color of lilac,
Your great puffs of flowers
Are everywhere in this my New England.
Among your heart-shaped leaves
Orange orioles hop like music-box birds and sing
Their little weak soft songs;In the crooks of your branches
The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs
Peer restlessly through the light and shadow
Of all Springs.
Lilacs in dooryards
Holding quiet conversations with an early moon;
Lilacs watching a deserted house
Settling sideways into the grass of an old road;
Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom
Above a cellar dug into a hill.
You are everywhere.
Lilacs,
False blue,
White,
Purple,
Color of lilac.
Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England,
Roots of lilac under all the soil of New England,
Lilac in me because I am New England,
Because my roots are in it,
Because my leaves are of it,
Because my flowers are for it
Because it is my country
And I speak to it of itself
And sing of it with my own voice
Since certainly it is mine.
A volume containing “Lilacs” won Amy the Pulitzer Prize, but “Patterns” was her masterwork. (See performance video below.) Its condemnation of war is wrapped in the formality of patterned brocades and carefully laid-out garden paths. Imagination vies with reality and reflects what Amy Lowell once said, that she uses “the movement of poetry in somewhat the same way that the musician uses the movement of music.”
Robert Lowell, a great grand-nephew of James Russell Lowell and a cousin of Amy Lowell, was one of the most significant and influential poets in the period following World War II. Writing often from personal experience, he helped create the movement that came to be known as Confessional Poetry.
Robert led an eventful life. Some of it was celebratory: he twice won the Pulitzer Prize among many other awards. Some of it was academically important: as an instructor at Boston University, he instilled his poetic practices into such impressionable students as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Some of it was politically strident: he was a conscientious objector during the war and spent time in prison. And some of it was personally tragic: as a victim of bipolar disorder, he was in and out of hospitals much of his life.
But he was a prolific writer and exhibited great variety in the way he structured his poetry. While Cousin Amy championed free verse, Robert found that he could mix this technique with traditional meter and rhyme as in this piece called “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts.”
Edwards’ great millstone and rock
of hope has crumbled, but the square
white houses of his flock
stand in the open air,
Out in the cold,
like sheep outside the fold.
Hope lives in doubt.
Faith is trying to do without
faith. In Western Massachusetts,
I could almost feel the frontier
crack and disappear.
Edwards thought the world would end there.
We know how the world will end.
but where is paradise, each day farther
from the Pilgrim’s blues for England
and the Promised Land.
Was it some country house
that seemed as if it were
Whitehall, if the Lord were there?
so nobly did he live.
Gardens designed
that the breath of flowers in the wind
or crushed underfoot,
came and went like warbling music?
As the poem suggests, Robert had a deep interest in history, both public and personal and often the two together. As one critic wrote, “He juxtaposed self and history in ways that illuminated both.” And as Robert put it:
History has to live with what was here,
Clutching and close to fumbling all we had —
it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never finishes.
* * *
Robert Lowell had two children, neither of whom became a poet. But I’m certain that somewhere down the line another fine Lowell poet will emerge. It runs in the family.
* * *
For our video, the members of the First Poetry Quartet will perform a poem from each of our three Lowells. First, Cynthia Herman offers “What is So Rare as a Day in June” by James Russell Lowell. Then Jill Tanner performs “Patterns” by Amy Lowell. Finally, George Backman offers Robert Lowell’s “You Never Had the Constitution to Quarrel.”
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: THE LOWELLS OF MASSACHUSETTS
