The Chameleon Poet

NOTEBOOK, 1967-68 by Robert Lowell. 161 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.

In one of her celebrated remarks, Gertrude Stein once wrote, "Remarks are not literature." However, a poet is a poet is a poet, and Robert Lowell is just the poet to refute this pedant. In his first major effort since Prometheus Bound, Lowell has packaged many remarkable remarks as sonnets, 274 of them, to be exact. "I lean heavily to the rational," Lowell explains in a prose note, "but am devoted to surrealism."

His rationality is formally stimulated by the rule that sonnets have 14 lines (who among mod poets could resist the 15th?). His surrealism--Lowell's word for it, and not really the right one--is technically encouraged by a decision to abandon rhyme and relax the meter of his sonnets--roughly the equivalent of playing checkers with chessmen on a blank board. This stylistic invitation to artistic indulgence occasionally helps betray Lowell into incoherence. Surrealism, after all, is mainly for those who applaud calculated chaos as critical therapy, a place where turned-on birds may sing but no poetry is written. When Lowell's struggle is against his own chaos, he does not always win. But when reason triumphs, poetry prevails. When Lowell confronts the world outside, he compels, not perhaps always for the justice of his cause but for the quality of his partisanship.

The public sonnets vary in mood and tone. Some are simple, even simpleminded, like one devoted to Senator Eugene McCarthy ("I love you so". . .). Some labor through metaphorical complexities. Stalin, for instance, begins botanically, switches to a feline metaphor ("What shot him clawing up the trunk of power?") and finally reaches a fine physiological line, "his intimates dying like the spider-bridegroom?/ The large stomach could only chew success."

The intelligent reader, that lame dog who often feels the need for help over styles, will find many familiar Lowell mannerisms. Among them: the dazzling fast shuffle of historical cards from different decks, imperial Rome, Emerson's Boston, Wren's London. There are, as always, several Lowells: Lowell the improper Bostonian, the politically engaged, the scholar, traveler and eclectic New England importer of foreign cultures. Lowell the poet has not only the chameleon's ability to change the color of his verse to fit the subject but that wizard lizard's faculty of independently focusing each eye. The left Lowell eye may be modishly on the topical--Che Guevara, police, R.F.K., student riots, Dr. Spock. But the right eye glints backwards to Agamemnon, Sir Thomas More, Napoleon, King David, Adam. "I am learning to live in history," Lowell writes and adds, as his chameleon's tongue flicks out to ingest another aphorism: "What is history? What you cannot touch."

Bloody Cruelty. History lives in his verse because he has understood in his poetic bones that all history is contemporary history; what is dead in the past is just that, but the living past works in our minds. Thus Andrew Jackson "despite appearances, stands for the gunnery that widened suffrage."

Lowell can chill the heart with a vision of the bloody cruelty of history. But sometimes, when he leaves his personal time machine, he is a political moralist who must be disconcerting to the left and to youth. Lowell is not from Boston for nothing. The left may feel at home with his sneer at "Harry Truman's loss/ of a minute's sleep for Hiroshima less than/ a boy catching the paw of his mutt in the door of a car." But surely there is a stern moral sermon against the sex-drug-youth cult in his sonnet on rats: "Someone rigged the enclosure with electric levers/ that could give rats an orgasm. Soon the rats learned/ to press the levers, did nothing else--still on the trip,/ they died of starvation in a litter of food."

He has evidently decided that 1969 is no country for old men and, past fifty, feels his years. Many of his new poems are concerned with lost love, age and death. The image of civic murder, genocide, public cruelty and dishonor crowd his thought. "The hand's knife-edge is pressed against the future," he writes from a monastery in Mexico.

Lowell sketches portraits of brother poets--his great friend Randall Jarrell, who died in 1965, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom and others, some living, some dead. Perhaps most touching to the heart is a Leica snapshot of T. S. Eliot walking in the Harvard Yard and saying: "Don't you loathe to be compared with your relatives?/ I've just found two of mine revised by Poe./ He wiped the floor with them . . . and I was delighted."

No one will compare Lowell's relatives, who include a Harvard president, an astronomer-diplomat, a Continental Congressman, and cigar-smoking Poet Amy Lowell, to Lowell. He is unique, since Robert Frost's death America's greatest poet, an honest madman and an eloquent one.

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