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The Masculine and the Feminine as Seen in the Poetry of Robert Lowell

1980; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 6; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1980.0006

1913-4835

Gary Willis,

American and British Literature Analysis

T H E M A S C U L I N E A N D T H E F E M I N I N E A S S E E N I N T H E P O E T R Y O F R O B E R T L O W E L L GARY W ILLIS University of Calgary I n her poem “The Phenomenology of Anger,” Adrienne Rich shows a dis­ enchanted woman articulating the rage which consumes her: I suddenly see the world as no longer viable: you are out there burning the crops with some new sublimate This morning you left the bed we still share and went out to spread impotence upon the world I hate you.1 The “you,” of course, is a man, seen as a representative male in our maledominated civilization. Rich is writing here of what she elsewhere, in prose, calls “ the naked and unabashed failure of patriarchal politics and patriarchal civilization.”2 Generally considered America’s best feminist poet, Rich began her career during the 1950s by writing quiet, understated poems; W. H. Au­ den approvingly called them “neatly and modestly dressed.” 3 During the 1960s, however, she grew progressively “radicalized” as a feminist, coming to believe that patriarchal rule has not only deprived women of fulfilment in divers ways but is to blame for the institutionalized aggression, manifesting itself in foreign wars and in domestic repression, which has characterized civilization since ancient times. Feminist views have won widespread and well-deserved publicity during the past decade; recently it has occurred to me to ask whether the person generally acknowledged to be the best poet in English to have emerged since 1945, Robert Lowell, might in his poems say something germane to the important issues raised by Rich and her sisters. Lowell was a contemporary of Rich’s; but his poetic career took, in cer­ tain respects, the opposite direction from hers. While she became progres­ sively “radicalized,” he grew “ deradicalized,” changing from an angry young E n g l is h St u d ie s in C anada, vi, 4, Winter 1980 Catholic who prophesied imminent doom for a corrupt humanity to a gentle middle-aged agnostic who expressed pity for a suffering humanity. Like the mature Rich, the young Lowell savagely indicts civilization; and like her, he associates its tendency toward tyranny and warfare with patriarchy. The vil­ lain in Lowell’s early poems is the father or the father figure (that is, the man in authority); as one poem puts it: I am cold: I ask for bread, my father gives me mould; His stocking is full of stones. {LAM , p. 1 7 ) 4 Another poem, “Rebellion,” makes the poet’s own father representative of the Lowell and of the American tradition of mercantile aggression, epito­ mized in the poem by the “chimney flintlock” which is one of the father’s heirlooms. Patriarchal civilization is, to the early Lowell, fundamentally re­ pressive; in “New Year’s Day,” he characterizes it as follows: Here is the understanding not to love Our neighbor, or tomorrow that will sieve Our resolutions. While we live, we live To snuff the smoke of victims. {LAM , p. 7) Later in the same poem, the infant Jesus is shown as a victim, the agent of repression his own father, who insists on inflicting upon his “howling” son the “wrack” of circumcision. In Lord Weary’s Castle, Jesus is usually shown as a baby, passive and helpless against the tyranny of a world which, as one poem puts it, “out-Herods Herod” (LAM , p. 4). But there are uncorrupt figures in Lowell’s early poems who are not mere helpless victims but who oppose society’s oppressiveness actively. The poet himself, in “Rebellion,” strikes his father and knocks him to the floor in what the young Lowell manically regards as heroic opposition to “ our mighty merchants” (LAM , p. 29). But the poet’s central symbol of militant rectitude is not himself but a woman, the Virgin Mary, whom he associates not with her traditional virtues of tenderness, gentleness, and compassion but with fierce and sometimes vio­ lent battle against sin. In...