Abstract:
"Robert Lowell and the Long Poem" is a study in the literary history and literary theory or the late modern long poem, in the first chapter, an examination of the ways in which two poets, Charles Olson and John Berryman, drew on the example of Ezra Pound when writing their long poems, provides the basis for a model of the long poem as a process poem. The term identifies a compositional feature which many recent long poems have in common: namely, the author begins writing a long poem as an open-ended series; he or she does not know in advance quite what the future direction and contents of that long poem will be, But a poetics of process produces recurrent compositional and "philosophical" problems. Lowell's manner of dealing with these are of particular interest because his Notebooks were written at a time when the process poem model had become a classic method of writing the long poem. In chapter 2, my own research Into Lowell's manuscripts allows me to explore the Ironies of writing a process poem when a poet has the advantage of already knowing how such poems are written. In Notebook 1967-66, Lowell relied on strategies that were not Intrinsic to the process of composition in order to produce a long poem that would nonetheless be readable as a process poem. Repetition of that strategy got him into trouble with Notebook, a revised and expanded edition of the poem. Because so many new sonnets were added according to principles that had long since become peripheral to process of composition, Notebook lost the momentum and unifying drift of the earlier volume. Lowell's difficulties in the Notebooks also stem from problems associated with the process aesthetic itself — problems concerning Immediacy, history, time, and the type of speaking subject formed by the narrative contract of a process poem. The chapter on Notebook mounts a critique of the process poem by reading sonnets that are
representative of these problems and by uncovering others that are allies of
a deconstructlve reading. Chapter four deals with the transition from Notebook to History. The pattern of revision, I argue, is directed against the secure speaking subject of the Notebook volumes. Several sonnets are read in both their Notebook and History versions in order to detail the machinery and import of a movement from an author centered text to one that is writing centered. Chapter five draws on Foucault's historiography to propose a reading of History as a genealogy. The poem is like a family tree in which a genealogy of the poet, ancestral types. At the centre of the poem are a number of "autobiographical" sonnets that are themselves psychoanalytic interpretations of childhood and the investments a subject has in art. I use Lacanian theory to elaborate these and other sonnets that are interested in sublimation, in questions of writing and subjectivity. The last chapter Is an essay on literary change, A critique of formalist literary history and notions of influence as possible explanations for the shift from the Notebooks to History gives way to an argument that draws on the new historicist criticism and Althusserian notions of Ideology to discuss History as belated text. The success of the process poem as a literary form, I argue, is related to the way the deep structures of the genre allowed a return of the old stabilities of traditional narrative forms.