Near The Ocean

by Robert Lowell

Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone,
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war — until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.

This final stanza of “Waking Early Sunday Morning” exemplifies the dark themes of Robert Lowell's new book. The long opening poem is the first of a sequence of five poems that continues with “Fourth of July in Maine,” “The Opposite House,” “Central Park,” and “Near the Ocean.” This sequence is followed by two short poems, “1958” and “For Theodore Roethke.”

In the style he calls “imitations,” Mr. Lowell includes versions of three odes by Horace; the whole of Juvenal's tenth satire, “The Vanity of Human Wishes”; Dante's “Bruno Latini” (Canto XV of the Inferno); and a sonnet sequence, “The Ruins of Time,” based on poems of Quevado and Góngora.

“The theme that connects my translations is Rome,” the author states in a prefatory note, “the greatness and horror of her Empire ... How one jumps from Rome to the America of my own poems is a mystery to me. Perhaps the bridge is made by the brilliant drawings of Sidney Nolan.” Mr. Nolan, the distinguished Australian painter, has made twenty-one drawings for this book.

—Original flap copy from the 1967 hardcover edition.

Genres: Poetry, 20th Century, American

125 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Robert Lowell, born Robert Traill Spence Lowell, IV, was an American poet whose works, confessional in nature, engaged with the questions of history and probed the dark recesses of the self. He is generally considered to be among the greatest American poets of the twentieth century.

His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, at the age of thirty), were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy.

Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he wrote rigorously formal poetry that drew praise for its exceptionally powerful handling of meter and rhyme. Lowell was politically involved—he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War and was imprisoned as a result, and actively protested against the war in Vietnam—and his personal life was full of marital and psychological turmoil. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized.

Partly in response to his frequent breakdowns, and partly due to the influence of such younger poets as W. D. Snodgrass and Allen Ginsberg, Lowell in the mid-fifties began to write more directly from personal experience, and loosened his adherence to traditional meter and form. The result was a watershed collection, Life Studies (1959), which forever changed the landscape of modern poetry, much as Eliot's The Waste Land had three decades before.

Considered by many to be the most important poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century, Lowell continued to develop his work with sometimes uneven results, all along defining the restless center of American poetry, until his sudden death from a heart attack at age 60. Robert Lowell served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1962 until his death in 1977.

Reviews

[Rod · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not at all Lowell's best work. Waking Early Sunday Morning and Fourth of July in Maine are charming and beautiful, but after that the whole thing slides slowly but surely off a cliff. Still, even average Lowell is interesting.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very 1950s collection of poetry.

[Scott Ballard · Rating 2 out of 5]

“His treadmill heart will never rest-“