At eighteen years old, stupid both intellectually and emotionally but curious about making improvements, I began my undergraduate education and enrolled in an introductory course on writing poetry.

The Book of Genesis tell us that on the first day of Creation, God separated the light from the darkness. And indeed on day one of class, our professor Paul Breslin drew his own boundary and told us we’d be restricted to writing in meter. Some sighs could be heard in the seminar room and not a few faces darkened with either fear or disappointment, but you can’t learn tennis without a net. So it went. Along with Professor Breslin, a Norton poetry anthology served as our guide to this new underworld: we studied the canon, learned our iambs from our trochees, and I ended up drafting several poems that were highly derivative of the greats and (it goes without saying—but for completeness I must add) not very good.

My most significant influence turned out to be Robert Lowell (1917–1977). I don’t remember how exactly I found a gateway into his vast and (at times impenetrable) corpus, but soon enough I was taking lessons from the The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket (which still hits like a sledgehammer); the flickering succession of images and memories in Waking Early Sunday Morning; and the elegaic mirror For the Union Dead. The influence came through strongly enough that Professor Breslin, a Lowell expert, told me, “I see you’ve been reading Robert Lowell. In fact I even know what book you’ve been reading.” (He was right.) I for one was glad the influence was visible through the dark, obscuring glass of a freshman student’s “experiments.” Professor Breslin was complimentary, noting that young artists often begin as imitators before they find their own voice. And Lowell’s was a difficult style to replicate: muscular diction, heavy enjambment, and a unification of the personal and historical, the private and public.

I would share the poems but between apparently incomplete computer file migrations and the unknown whereabouts of any extant paper copies, the poems seem to have been lost—(yes, it is funny to use that word lost, as if we are talking about the missing fragments of Sappho and not the juvenalia of a teenager). All I remember are stray pieces, chips, and flecks, such as a line referring metaphorically to “a chessman shifted to a safer square,” which I know I only remember because Professor Breslin (gently) suggested that the metaphor was insufficiently foreshadowed and unrelated to the rest of the poem. Yes, Professor, the axe forgets, but the tree remembers. Just kidding. You will notice, however, that the line is in correct iambic pentameter.

During the class, I raided the library stacks and hoarded Lowell’s books, among them his debut Lord Weary’s Castle (1947), Life Studies (1959), and the crazily ambitious but uneven History (1973), which takes as its subject . . . all of history, unrhymed sonnet by unrhymed sonnet. These were my preceptors. Soon enough though, other classes had other demands; and the books were remanded to their dusty stacks.

Fourteen years later, I am now, as I endeavored, smarter—a better friend, son, partner, and citizen—but, alas, the piston-like metabolism of the undergraduate has since become gummed up. Until recently I had barely revisited Lowell—excepting when I moved to Boston after graduation and finally saw with my own eyes “St. Gauden’s shaking Civil War relief,” the monument to the Massachusetts 54th Regiment that Lowell describes in For the Union Dead. He writes:

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city’s throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound’s gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

The poem, and the monument, remain refreshingly alive—civic, public, still speaking, and by their subject worthy of awe.

A single volume of Lowell’s work, Collected Poems, was released in 2003 and runs to 1,200 pages. Earlier this year I began an assault on the castle. Inside, I found some poems that were dear old friends; others were acquaintances, slipped from memory, that I glad to meet again; but most of them, buried in the hadal trenches of Lowell’s volumes, were new faces.

Indeed, the book was reviewed on its release by none other than A.O. Scott in an article for Slate whose URL slug is “why-read-1200-pages-of-robert-lowell.html” but otherwise proposes that query only implicitly. Scott argues that the whole of Lowell’s poetry is worth reading—and how? “Straight through from beginning to end” despite its many longeuers. I agree. To either read only the best-known poems or to browse haphazardly would mean missing out on the hundreds of felicities in otherwise minor or little-known works, like the astonishing concluding couplet in “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage”:

Gored by the climacteric of his want,
He stalls above me like an elephant.

This is heady, emotional stuff, only possible by Lowell’s mastery of the formal elements—the juxtaposition of the violent monosyllable of the verb “gored,” followed by the line’s load-bearing noun “climacteric” and its heavy Latinate construction. Yes, “climacteric” may make the reader want to consult a dictionary to make sure we’re getting the full valence of Lowell’s meaning. And you, too, should.

I have less personal interest in debating the meaning of the more esoteric imagery, like another final couplet, this one from Beyond the Alps (1964):

Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up
Like killer kings on an Etruscan cup.

After the release of the Collected Poems, these lines somehow kicked off a furious exchange of letters in the New York Review of Books. Why is Paris a black classic and why is it like the killer Etruscan kings? The debate seems a bit trifling: I tend to think that Lowell’s power comes from his supreme architecture of sounds and images, and that too much interrogation can be both bathetic and demystifying. (It is striking to look back on 2003 and see how much ink was spilled on the two lines in a magazine for the general reading public, and ruefully conclude that this wouldn’t happen in the present era, twenty-two years later . . . that everything now is too besmirched by the political—both by the consuming whirlpool of the Trump Era when it comes to the demands of public intellectualism and also by the sense that close reading and aesthetic considerations have taken an increasing backseat.)

To understand Lowell, Scott wrote, “his poems rely so formidably on acquaintance with the staggering range of his worldly and personal references.” True, perhaps, but the acquaintance is unnecessary to understand the bulk of Lowell’s thrust. Knowing more about the details of, e.g., Lowell’s failed marriages, alcoholism, or nervous breakdowns will certainly make one know more about Robert Lowell the poet but may not return the investment when it comes to the pleasure of reading the poet’s poems. Educated liberally enough, I will have some familiarity with King David and Bathsheba, the Charles River, and Troy’s Hector, tamer of horses, but don’t care to learn more about Lowell’s Uncle Winslow. Largely, I feel the same way here about Lowell’s references that I do about reading Pynchon’s: when I understand the allusion, I’ll extract some morsel of delight from completing the puzzle and opening myself to all its branching extra-textual connotations; when I don’t understand the reference, I may be intrigued enough to consult an (online) encyclopedia or ask Google, or I might simply move on, unenlightened but no worse for wear. Consulting footnotes during the very act of reading or, God forbid, reading alongside some separate exegetic “guide” full of annotations has never seemed to me like reading at all—more akin to detective work, and, like that, best left to professionals.

After touring through 1,000 pages, what came to mind was the music critic Robert Christgau’s gnomic pronouncement about Bruce Springsteen from 1978: “An important minor artist or a rather flawed and inconsistent major one.” (Springsteen turned out to be a major one.) Not all of Lowell’s poems equally reward close reading or re-reading. The hundreds of pages of blank-verse sonnets that took up his later career can be accused of prattling, and some poems, like his assessment of Joseph Stalin(!) have a half-finished quality:

The large stomach could chew only success. What raised him
was an unusual lust to break the icon,
joke cruelly, seriously, and be himself.

He tries to tie the bow too tight, and I think there is too much Lowell in here and not enough Stalin.

But it would be wrong to end on a negative note. Lowell’s best work matches up with anyone’s best. Which is why I find it fitting to have the Collected Poems in quasi-permanent installation on a corner of my desk: there when the moment calls for it to be consulted, and always waiting with a new discovery or surprise. What has happened since then is an act of transfer, from page to memory, because his images have also taken up their own quasi-permanent residence in a sector of my mind.