It's been a while since I heard as much talk about Robert Lowell as I do now. And that was back in 1997, in a class about Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. Before that, I did my undergraduate thesis concerning the title chapter in Robert Lowell's Life Studies and Snodgrass' Heart's Needle. Don't ask me the thesis. I couldn't tell you at gunpoint, I wrote it under such duress.

Six years ago, I would have been an informed expert. Now I'm grasping wildly at memory bits, dammit!

Anyway, the latter class was much more informative, as I ended up going against the teacher's wishes a little and read (without telling her) some of the Lowell's expose books. Not the classified "okay" one by Ian Hamilton, which I'm just about to break out. Actually, I've read passages before, just not the whole package.

It just might just restart my internal dialogue that questioned whether or not Lowell can be appreciated without an in depth look at his life. Lowell's Life Studies era was understandably the most explored out of any class I took. His older, denser, much MUCH harder to read work was gleamed over by professors and not very many people, if anyone, chose to focus on it for papers with not very many books or teachers to guide them.

It's funny that professors are slow to praise Hamilton's book (especially my professor, who studied under him) but at the same time say that certain chapters reveal the inner workings of particular Life Studies poems quite well. "Ah, I see," you'll say after reading certain pages.

I love Lowell's poems, but my most successful papers/observations focused more on the origins and "behind the scenes" material concerning works like "In The Village" (bonus points to anyone who knows what I'm talking about). It hurts that I never read Lowell before being taught him in the classroom. Also, I've been indoctrinated with so much Lowell related material, I have a hard time reading a poem of his without contemplating who his wife was when he wrote it. It'd be a nice experiment to get a bunch of first time Lowell readers to get their untainted opinions.

It's tough for even his most vocal young fans, I think, to understand his impact in poetry and abroad without gazing at many of the "expose" books, such as Manic Power: Robert Lowell and His Circle by Jeffrey Meyers, book accurately described as "a anecdote-rich study" that some people see as an attack (certainly not an academic study). Whatever your opinion, it's a book that you couldn't really see happening to any other poet today except maybe the late Ted Hughes (seen as many as the Ike to Sylvia Plath's Tina).

David Kalstone's Becoming A Poet is much more rewarding. Much about the genesis of certain poems Robert Lowell wrote using Bishop's prose. And what WAS it with that Blue Chinese Doorstop?