Robert Lowell: Poetry and Politics

Robert Lowell: Poetry and Politics

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 simpl...