Aesthetic Vocabulary Test

Art by Elliot Skow

1. Robert Lowell, “Waking in the Blue.”

Lowell’s reputation as a poet has for some time been eclipsed by Elizabeth Bishop’s, who once stood in his shadow. His pyrotechnic command of rhyme and meter, the firehose of metaphor and vocabulary that his poems paint on the page, these can sometimes seem to cover a deep emptiness. How wonderful then to hear his praises sung, by Michael Hofmann, in his book Where Have You Been? Hofmann’s claims:

That he [Lowell] exemplarily converted life into literature. That the range of his effects—from the most oblique, almost hermetic, feint to the plain statement of fact, to the tenderly, brassily magniloquent is unequaled. That in his refusal as a poet to be cowed or deflected or marginalized, he, though no sort of hero, was heroic. That he is unspeakably missed by his literature and his country, and that in his absence, literary and civic life have both deteriorated.

Of course it’s only to those of us standing with our faces pressed against the glass that the relative standing of Lowell and Bishop is visible, for

Poetry has lost so much ground in the years since Lowell started out in it, it’s easy to feel a somewhat preposterous sympathy for him....The last apotheosized poets are the generation of the 1910s and 1920s, Eliot and Frost and Stevens and Pound and Yeats and Bunting. They have had no successors, or the succession has not been allowed....It’s as though the human reef of literature was not considering any more applications, or the escalator had ground to a halt. To say that anyone who cares about poetry should read Lowell is not enough.

The speaker of “Waking in the Blue”—who cannot be far from Lowell, the founder of “confessional poetry,” himself—speaks to us from McLean’s mental hospital in Massachusetts. (Lowell suffered from bipolar disorder.) In the poem “there is a canniness and craftiness and dryness and confinement—a boundedness and mildness.” So far as we can judge from the poem, the speaker’s mind is perfectly lucid and no clouds in sight, and