Reviews

NOTEBOOK, 1967-68, by Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 161 pp. $6.00.

ROBERT LOWELL’S NEW VOLUME of poetry continues his passionate meditation on history selectively knotted up out of his personal torments, family and friends, his New England and religious ancestries, and the heroic or ruined underside of the past. What is strikingly new in this present volume is an obsession not so much with history as with immediate politics. This will be no surprise to anyone who has already read some of these poems published on political occasions in The New York Review of Books, or who has followed Lowell’s recent, sometimes sensational career as a public man of the radical Left. Nor will it be surprising, in our current political clamor, if these poems are widely admired or piously approved simply for their partisan side. But it would be too bad, since in more than a few poems Lowell’s radical views are as simplistic as those hatched by Protest placard-poets a tenth his weight. It would be too bad because in another way—less hotly relevant and thus likely to be scanted—Lowell’s poetry cuts into politics at a deep, dark and savage angle we are not really used to in American poetry, or in American politics either.

If many disagree that Lowell is simply the greatest living poet we have, it is hard to see how anyone could deny he is our only poet whose language and temper have greatness in the ...