Collected prose.

Collected Prose

by Robert Lowell (Farrar,377 pp., $25)

ROBERT LOWELL had all the qualitiesof a major critic: intelligence, learning, judgment, style, taste, and wit. His Collected Prose, full of inspired insights, reveals an electric and energetic mind. This book confirms Lowell, along with the frenetically erudite John Berryman and the savagely brilliant Randall Jarrell, as the leading poet-critic of the postwar generation.

Lowell wrote a hundred reviews,tributes, memoirs, essays, statements, introductions, notes, and letters-to-the-editor between his first appearance in his prep-school magazine in 1935 and his death in 1977. His publisher, Robert Giroux, has selected forty of the best essays (six of them previously unpublished) and sensibly organized them into three categories: on fellow poets, on literary topics, and on Lowell himself. (The last section also contains two of Lowell's twenty interviews.)

Apart from two antiwar letters--to President Roosevelt and President Johnson--Lowell's political statements are not included, though his impassioned credos showed--for the first time since the death of Byron--that a poet's courageous conscience could influence public affairs. This book has a full cloth binding (which stains the fingers), but no index. The editor's source notes for the essays are both incomplete and inaccurate.

Lowell combined a Yankee and aSouthern, a classical and a Catholic heritage. His early reviews established the characteristic pattern of his criticism: identification with the subject, placement in its literary tradition, reference to other critics, judgment of faults and achievement, positive--even generous--evaluation. He can epitomize a type, a work, or an author in a single gnomic expression. "Most scholars are not men of letters, but statisticians and warehouses'; poets "are little read, cause no sensations, and live on grants.' Spenser's Shepheardes Calender "is mostly a sort of dried cake frosting'; Milton's Samson Agonistes "is the last great English play in verse, the last great English tragedy in any form, the only great English play that cannot be acted.'

The soft, bookish hands of CottonMather, the Salem witch-burner, "are indelibly stained with blood.' Emerson "found life too long for comfort and too brief for perfecion.' Thoreau, "a naturalist of the eternal, [had] the eternal always at his fingertips.' The nonagenarian George Santayana "enjoyed writing his life much more than having lived it.'

Lowell's essays were often self-reflective,and he saw a "redeeming shadow of darkness in just about every writer who had ever lived' in this hard, cracked world. Hawthorne was a being of "intermingled gloom and brightness'; Melville allowed "glimmers of genius to escape [his personal] darkness.'

Lowell's memoirs of Ford, Frost,Eliot, Ransom, Jarrell, and Berryman --the best part of the book--recalled his teachers and intellectual development. His elegies were eulogies, suffused with affection. The tone was gentle, the emotions deeply engaged. Lowell was able to assume a filial and fraternal role, to praise his friends more freely because they were dead, and to portray character (including his own) in novelistic scenes that brought his friends back to life.

Jarrell (a frequent critical touchstonein these essays) mocked Lowell's impressive pedigree and wrote: "I'm sure the Lowells have all sorts of [ancient] Egyptian connections, were, in the old days, Egyptians.' But Lowell's ancestry was also a curse. His menaced and meancing musings on his family and frenzy, his melancholy expression of annihilating despair in the autobiographical essays--"Antebellum Boston' and "Near the Unbalanced Aquarium' --explore the darkness in the human spirit. "The strain brought about by his [father's] effort to make himself heroically nonexistent was extreme.' His mother "was not one whose hand was stayed from destruction by sentiment.' Their talented and troubled son, recovering in a mental hospital from a violent manic seizure, "suspected that [his] whole soul and its thousands of spiritual fibers, immaterial ganglia, apprehensive antennae, psychic radar, had been bruised by a rubber hose.'