undefinedDrawing by Hans Beck, 1961.

 

On one wall of Mr. Lowell’s study was a large portrait of Ezra Pound, the tired, haughty outlines of the face concentrated as in the raised outlines of a ring seal in an enlargement. Also bearded, but on another wall, over the desk, James Russell Lowell looked down from a gray old-fashioned photograph on the apex of the triangle thus formed, where his great-grandnephew sat and answered questions.

Mr. Lowell had been talking about the classes he teaches at Boston University.

Four floors below the study window, cars whined through the early spring rain on Marlborough Street toward the Boston Public Garden.

 

INTERVIEWER

What are you teaching now?

ROBERT LOWELL

I’m teaching one of these poetry-writing classes and a course in the novel. The course in the novel is called Practical Criticism. It’s a course I teach every year, but the material changes. It could be anything from Russian short stories to Baudelaire, a study of the New Critics, or just fiction. I do whatever I happen to be working on myself.

INTERVIEWER

Has your teaching over the last few years meant anything to you as a writer?

LOWELL

It’s meant a lot to me as a human being, I think. But my teaching is part-time and has neither the merits nor the burdens of real teaching. Teaching is entirely different from writing. You’re always up to it, or more or less up to it; there’s no question of its clogging, of its not coming. It’s much less subjective, and it’s a very pleasant pursuit in itself. In the kind of teaching I do, conversational classes, seminars, if the students are good, which they’ve been most of the time, it’s extremely entertaining. Now, I don’t know what it has to do with writing. You review a lot of things that you like, and you read things that you haven’t read or haven’t read closely, and read them aloud, go into them much more carefully than you would otherwise; and that must teach you a good deal. But there’s such a jump from teaching to writing.

INTERVIEWER

Well, do you think the academic life is liable to block up the writer-professor’s sensitivity to his own intuitions?

LOWELL

I think it’s impossible to give a general answer. Almost all the poets of my generation, all the best ones, teach. I only know one, Elizabeth Bishop, who doesn’t. They do it for a livelihood, but they also do it because you can’t write poetry all the time. They do it to extend themselves, and I think it’s undoubtedly been a gain to them. Now the question is whether something else might be more of a gain. Certainly the danger of teaching is that it’s much too close to what you’re doing—close and not close. You can get expert at teaching and be crude in practice. The revision, the consciousness that tinkers with the poem—that has something to do with teaching and criticism. But the impulse that starts a poem and makes it of any importance is distinct from teaching.

INTERVIEWER

And protected, you think, from whatever you bring to bear in the scrutiny of parts of poems and aspects of novels, etc.?

LOWELL

I think you have to tear it apart from that. Teaching may make the poetry even more different, less academic than it would be otherwise. I’m sure that writing isn’t a craft, that is, something for which you learn the skills and go on turning out. It must come from some deep impulse, deep inspiration. That can’t be taught, it can’t be what you use in teaching. And you may go further afield looking for that than you would if you didn’t teach. I don’t know, really; the teaching probably makes you more cautious, more self-conscious, makes you write less. It may make you bolder when you do write.

INTERVIEWER

You think the last may be so?

LOWELL

The boldness is ambiguous. It’s not only teaching, it’s growing up in this age of criticism which we’re all so conscious of, whether we like it or don’t like it, or practice it or don’t practice it. You think three times before you put a word down, and ten times about taking it out. And that’s related to boldness; if you put words down they must do something, you’re not going to put clichés. But then it’s related to caution; you write much less.

INTERVIEWER

You yourself have written very little criticism, haven’t you? You did once contribute to a study of Hopkins.

LOWELL

Yes, and I’ve done a few omnibus reviews. I do a review or two a year.

INTERVIEWER

You did a wonderful one of Richards’s poems.

LOWELL

I felt there was an occasion for that, and I had something to say about it. Sometimes I wish I did more, but I’m very anxious in criticism not to do the standard analytical essay. I’d like my essay to be much sloppier and more intuitive. But my friends are critics, and most of them poet-critics. When I was twenty and learning to write, Allen Tate, Eliot, Blackmur, and Winters, and all those people were very much news. You waited for their essays, and when a good critical essay came out it had the excitement of a new imaginative work.

INTERVIEWER

Which is really not the case with any of the critics writing today, do you think?

LOWELL

The good critics are almost all the old ones. The most brilliant critic of my generation, I think, was Jarrell, and he in a way connects with that older generation. But he’s writing less criticism now than he used to.

INTERVIEWER

In your schooling at St. Mark’s and Harvard—we can talk about Kenyon in a minute—were there teachers or friends who had an influence on your writing, not so much by the example of their own writing as by personal supervision or direction—by suggesting certain reading, for instance?

LOWELL

Well, my school had been given a Carnegie set of art books, and I had a friend, Frank Parker, who had great talent as a painter but who’d never done it systematically. We began reading the books and histories of art, looking at reproductions, tracing the Last Supper on tracing paper, studying dynamic symmetry, learning about Cézanne, and so on. I had no practical interest in painting, but that study seemed rather close to poetry. And from there I began. I think I read Elizabeth Drew or some such book on modern poetry. It had free verse in it, and that seemed very simple to do.

INTERVIEWER

What class were you in then?

LOWELL

It was my last year. I’d wanted to be a football player very much, and got my letter but didn’t make the team. Well, that was satisfying but crushing too. I read a good deal, but had never written. So this was a recoil from that. Then I had some luck in that Richard Eberhart was teaching there.

INTERVIEWER

I’d thought he’d been a student there with you.

LOWELL

No, he was a young man about thirty. I never had him in class, but I used to go to him. He’d read aloud and we’d talk, he was very pleasant that way. He’d smoke honey-scented tobacco, and read Baudelaire and Shakespeare and Hopkins—it made the thing living—and he’d read his own poems. I wrote very badly at first, but he was encouraging and enthusiastic. That probably was decisive, that there was someone there whom I admired who was engaged in writing poetry.

INTERVIEWER

I heard that a very early draft of “The Drunken Fisherman” appeared in the St. Mark’s magazine.

LOWELL

No, it was the Kenyon college magazine that published it. The poem was very different then. I’d been reading Winters, whose model was Robert Bridges, and what I wanted was a rather distant, quiet, classical poem without any symbolism. It was in four-foot couplets as smooth as I could write them. The Kenyon Review had published a poem of mine and then they’d stopped. This was the one time they said, if you’d submitted this we’d have taken it.