The Spy, the Sharks Eye, and

the True Unreal of Lowells

Notebook
PHILLIP L. BEARD*
Robert Lowells Notebook marks an incompletely recognized, dramatic shift from many
tendencies of his earlier verse. In a loose translation of Rimbauds Rages de Cesar
(called Rimbaud and Napoleon III in Notebook, 214), Lowell says, the normal flow of
[Rimbauds] aesthetic/ energies was to use the other direction.
1
The Lowell of Notebook
adopts as well an other direction, in terms of character and style. In the Afterthought of
the book, Lowell stresses that what he has done is not literal and involves a style that
resists realism; the book is not a literalist diary: this is not my private lash, or confes-
sion,
2
and in a letter to John Berryman, he called the work a short, difficult novel in
verse.
3
The Lowell of Notebook avoids rhetorical clarity or simple autobiography; clear
statements of desire are rare, and the poems often code personal experiences in dense,
difficult ciphers. Earlier in his career, Lowells fascinations with literary, religious, and
political grandiosity were less ambivalent than they are in Notebook. His early poetry,
though it churned in its labors like the north Atlantic sea, struggled to define an order, to
recover tradition, and it used rhyming forms that suggested continuity with tradition and
a provisional containment of sublime energies.
In Notebook, however, instead of the twisted, Calvin-meets-Melville rhetoric of Lord
Wearys Castle (1946) or the telegraphic, anecdotal literary realism of Life Studies (1959),
Lowell recurs to modernist, anti-rhetorical strategies to reflect and comment on disorder
more than to define a new order. Neither oracle nor figure out of realist fiction, his
speaker becomes a spy: a diffuse, observing, partially observable figure, and befitting this
reporting, the style is dense, and the book is composed of blank verse sonnets rife with
jagged, reason-challenging turns and images. Such images are epitomized by Lowells
* Dr. Phillip Beard, Auburn University (Auburn, Alabama). E-mail: beardpl@auburn.edu.
1
Robert Lowell, Notebook (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970), 214.
2
Ibid., 262.
3
Robert Lowell, The Letters of Robert Lowell, ed. Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 2005), 525.
1
Literary Imagination, pp. 118
doi:10.1093/litimag/imu006
The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics,
and Writers. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
Literary Imagination Advance Access published June 2, 2014

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willful mistranslation of loeil mort (literally the dead eye) of Napoleon III (in his
Notebook version of Rimbauds Rages de Cesar) as the sharks eye. Here and in many
poems, the images are not just difficult, but, as in this poem when the shark reference
occurs, intrusive and provocative, as orders of metaphor collide; one can see such col-
lisions in the first poem of the volume (Harriet 1),
4
in which God is a seaslug;
rationality a chainsaw; a familiar face is clock-white, meanwhile, the whole poem is
framed by loose references to driving a car. In Trunks, at least four sets of images barely
converge and seem lain together in the manner of a Rosenquist or Rauschenberg (visual)
collage: white grub worms in trees; tires on a garage wall, considered as found art; God as
ironically good for seeing all people as straw dogs; an anarchist-as-conformist, plant-
ing a black flag. An anticlimactic judgment tossed off at the sonnets seventh line, too
far is easy, enough is a miracle, serves as a turn in the juxtaposed contexts of postmodern
art (tires-as-paintings) and radical politics; the poem is populated with extreme possi-
bilities, but the poet tries, Rimbaud-like, to remain aloof from absolutes.
5
This style is consistent with historical definitions of symbolism, as when T. E. Hulme
(1908) defined it as the communication of momentary phases of the poets mind . . . po-
etry no longer deals with heroic action.
6
William Pratt says the symbolists rather than
being generically symbolic specialized in jarring juxtapositions, somewhat like the
metaphysicals, but without rational argument.
7
Pratt describes the symbolism of
Baudelaire as demonstrating at once super realism and irony, polar attractions resultant
from mans fallen nature, which makes him dually attracted to the real and the
ironic as if to God and Satan.
8
Lowell has a tradition of similar tensions, showing a
Baudelairian sense of navigating a fallen reality, but his attitude in Notebook is more
transcendent than religious; he operates as an outsider not only to right, left, but to
conventional morality, a spy serving an undisclosed possibility.
Struck by the drama of his early career (and often by the poets biography), though,
critics often avoid contact with these aspects of Notebook and operate with a genetic or
structuralist sense of Lowells poetry: they identify his early concerns and then trace later
variants of archetypes.
9
My analysis of Notebook is more alert to Lowells changes of style
4
Lowell, Notebook, 21.
5
Ibid., 219.
6
T. E. Hulme, A Lecture on Modern Poetry in The Collected Writings, ed. Karen Csengeri (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1994), 53.
7
William Pratt, Singing the Chaos: Madness and Wisdom in Modern Poetry (Missouri University Press,
1996), 11.
8
Ibid., 14.
9
A reading of Lowell that has become almost archetypal is that his political ambivalences, his polarizing
attractions to freedom and authority, were consistent with, if not inspirational of, his oscillations
between mania and depression. Such readings often resort to a chiding, clinical tone. His diary-like
Notebook has invited interpretations that mix dramatic 1960s political history and the poets own
substantial psychiatric and epistolary records as critics of the volume, early and late, define Lowell as
a poet not merely of ambivalent but of pathological activism, often relying on biography to shore up the
account, or by allowing interpretations of Lowells early career to seep into analyses of late-1960s
poems. At times the subject of these analyses is less the poems than the poets personality. Rosemary
2 The Spy, the Sharks Eye, and the True Unreal of Lowells Notebook

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if not of mind, reading his career in the 1960s as an evolution rather than as repetition.
By analyzing Lowells poems about the political crises of 196768, I show that he makes
a significant departure from the New England, genteel tradition of bold rhetoric and
moral instruction. The strategies that become motifs in Lowells Notebook that compli-
cate or dissolve his relation to tradition are: an antiheroic persona (modeled on fellow
spy-poets Marlowe and Rimbaud), and especially difficult imagerywhat Lowell calls
the hermetic and the true unreal in his Afterthought comment to Notebook.
Lowell says I lean heavily to the rational, but am devoted to unrealism and that
the true unreal must be about something, and eats from the excess of reality.
10
This
something is often the political turmoil of 196768, and the excess is not only the
overload of ideological tensions and temperamental conflicts in the poet but an unarti-
culated ideal that governs the poets judgmentsthat, in effect, dispatches the spy.
Notebook often describes a political moment on the left between the era of gradual
legal reform in civil rights and the period of more violent youth protests that arguably
began in Chicago at the Democratic Convention in the summer of 1968. This analysis
illuminates the productive and often strange tensions between the puritan and the post-
modern in poems that remain dynamic and questioning rather than declamatory and
easily judgmental; I pull analysis of Lowell away from the secure foundations of
Sullivan sees a complex disjunction of loyalties in [Lowells] own character as definitive of the
ambiguity of his political position Notebook: Robert Lowell as Political Poet, E

tudes Anglaises 27,

no. 3, 292. Marjorie Perloff seems to consider a Lowell who is a calcified type rather than a figure of
development when she judges him as morally inconsistent for taking a stance against the Vietnam War
(which she credits to his self-mythologizing, as though the position were grandiosely phony) while
also writing poems on the magical power of a Hannibal or a Napoleon in Poe`tes Maudits of the
Genteel Tradition, The American Poetry Review 12, no. 3 (1983): 3238. No readings of the actual
Notebook poems about Napoleon or Hanibal, which are far from worshipful, intrude on this abrupt
claim. Henry Hart, reading History (the revised, edited version of Notebook), also seems to have Lowell
poems and letters as old as the 1940s in mind as he reproves the Lowell of 1970 for his all too joyous
identifications with authorial masters and authoritarian tyrants in Robert Lowell and the Sublime
(Syracuse University Press, 1995), 98. This observation overlooks poems in Notebook which reject
gods and generals, ignores Lowells identifications with pragmatic women (e.g., Margaret Fuller,
Lady Asquith), and misrepresents or ignores the droll catalog of imperfect mentors (Tate, Frost, and
Williams among them) that is the Writers section of Notebook (and in History). Collating Lowells
biography with his poems of the late 1960s, critics such as Steven Gould Axelrod (Robert Lowell and
the Cold War, 1999) and Jeffrey Gray (Fear of Flying: Robert Lowell and Travel, 2005), mark bright
lines of affiliation between the poets life and work, but in the bargain, these critics avoid too many
thematic and aesthetic aspects of the poetry. The virtue of my emphasis on Lowells spy-identity and his
symbolist style is that it is far truer to the nuances of personality and tone than criticism that implies
that there are a) straight lines of relationship between the poets life and the art, and that b) biography is
the metaphysical fundament of the poetry in ways that make concern with ambiguities of identity and
complexity of tone seem like mere fancy. Lowells poetry in Notebook, no less than Beethovens music,
could only be partially explained by a fundamentally biographical analysisthough the biographies of
the poet and the composer have bearing on the artists works. Finally, Lowell himself warned critics
about the biographical fallacy in saying My autobiographical poems are not always factually true. Ive
tinkered a lot with fact. Interviews and Memoirs, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1988), 94.
10
Lowell, Notebook, 262.
3 Phillip L. Beard

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biography (given the obvious evidence of fantasy and the unreal in the poems) and
stress that Lowell is less a rhetorician, diarist, or documentarian than a poet of dynamic
thought.
The form of Notebook is more of a collage than a linear narrative of over four hundred
blank verse sonnets.
11
Notebook displays less a sense of (or drive toward) a single myth (of
Christianity, of America, or of his own family) than had often structured his other books.
A vivid way of marking the thoroughness of the turn Lowell makes in Notebook (given his
reputation as a traditionalist) is to note that he moves toward a variant of transcenden-
talism, if we understand that to mean a skeptical mind studying its impressions and its
inherited structures.
12
Notebook is an oddly self-reliant text, but of a radical sort, as its
speakers self is not grounded in nature, cosmos, or any coherent myth; the poets
prototypical expression is Nihilist as Hero. Almost any traditionalist gestures of his-
toricism, philosophy or theology are ironized, reversed, or turned inside out at various
times within Notebook.
Lowell seems imbued by a weariness with fixed, monumental definitions of moral
and political positions; in this way he recurs to attitudes typical of many writers (Pound,
Ford, Hemingway, Woolf, etc.) during and after the First World War.
13
Thus, a germinal
11
Notebook was revised three times, published in May and July 1969, and finally in January 1970, with
Lowell apologizing to readers in an end note for asking that they buy the same poem again; the
second edition added five poems and minor revisions; the third edition, which I treat here as the ulti-
mate and standard edition, included more than ninety new poems and more line-level revisions. The
basic structure of the book remains constant in all three editions, as any new poems were folded into the
whole.
12
I offer a specific definition of this term (from George Santayana), as the word is loaded with idealist
implications of transparent eyeballs and direct conduits to the oversoul. But transcendentalism may be
defined with closer attention to its Kantian origins as antecedent to pragmatist psychology and epis-
temology, as in Santayanas definition in The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1911):
transcendentalism is not a system of the universe regarded as a fact, or as a collection of facts. It
is a method, a point of view, from which any world, no matter what it might contain, could be
approached by a self-conscious observer. Transcendentalism is systematic subjectivism. It studies
the perspectives of knowledge as they radiate from the self; it is a plan of those avenues of
inference by which our ideas of things must be reached, if they are to afford any systematic or
distant vistas. In other words, transcendentalism is the critical logic of science. Knowledge, it
says, has a station, as in a watch-tower; it is always seated here and now, in the self of the
moment. The past and the future, things inferred and things conceived, lie around it, painted as
upon a panorama. The Genteel Tradition, ed. Douglas L. Wilson (University of Nebraska Press,
1967), 45.
This definition of transcendentalism is not unique to Santayana; Richard Rorty quotes, supports, and
expands it in the essay Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendent Culture (1976) in Consequences
of Pragmatism (University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 6667.
Several of Lowells statements within Notebook itself evoke this kind of (critical, rather than meta-
physical) transcendentalist epistemology. What is true is not real, he says in Pastime, implying that
truth is not material reality, but a quality of human thought; he also says nothing is real until it is set
down in words. History (in Mexico), meanwhile, is what you cannot touch, or, apparently, a
narrative that stands elegiacally for the lost tactility of events.
13
Stephen James, writing in Energy and Enervation: The Poetry of Robert Lowell, has aptly criticized
a tendency of Lowell scholarship (often delivered in broad strokes in reviews of The Collected Poems) to
4 The Spy, the Sharks Eye, and the True Unreal of Lowells Notebook

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cause of this recurrence to a more elusive, hermetic style is a mistrust of certainty, a
romance of insecurity, and a respect for something dynamic rather than static. In
Chairs, Lowell says, France died on the motionless lines of Marshall Joffre (129).
Instead of certainty, standard conviction, tidy tradition, truth lies buried in a
random, haggard sentence/ cutting ten ways to nothing clearly carried (My
Death, 1, 129). With Rimbaud who is, in Lowells Rimbaud and Napoleon
III, looking for writing he could trust, Lowell reimagines a germinal moment
in modernism: a turn from rhetoric (epigrammatic, moralizing instructions) to style
(which promotes an awareness of languages possibilities on a much smaller scale than
rhetoric).
14
Even in his more traditionalist moments in the 1940s, Lowell flashed
signs of ambivalence, but by the late 1960s, he seems to have exhausted one tradition
and moved to another set of influences within modernism, especially a symbolist line.
Symbolist-influenced modernists like Stevens, Eliot, and Pound tend to reject senti-
mentality (construed as standard narratives about how to feel about thingsWallace
Stevens called sentimentality a failure of feeling),
15
personality (in Eliots expres-
sion, the poet has, not a personality to express, but a particular medium, which is
only a medium and not a personality),
16
and moral rhetoric and realism in favor of
specific impressions (as in Pounds line, rest me with Chinese colors/ for I think the
glass is evil).
17
This rejected glass is conceivably the mirror of conventional, realist
mimesis. Charles Altieri notes that such a poetry that emphasizes impressions above
construe his poetry at large as monumental, grand, and Jeremiac. James offers the corrective analysis
that the poet, especially post-1966, writes a rhetoric mindful of its own potential inadequacy and that
Lowell is actually suspicious of poetic grandeur (111), rather than obsessed with renovating the
category of personal greatness or interested in clinging to icons of authority. The Cambridge
Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2005): 10929.
14
The political architects of disaster in the First World War articulated grand justifications and cer-
tainties. If such rhetoric is associated with tradition, then an innovative style may become a refuge from
rhetoric. Pounds Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920) dramatizes (and satirizes) such a turn toward style.
There is further a tension in that poem between a precious aesthetism, which Pound associates with the
Rhymers Club of the 1890s, and a new style which would rise to meet the age in its demands for an
image of its accelerated grimace (line 21). Ford Maddox Ford, a model of a successful modern stylist, is
received by nature in a haven from sophistication (lines 17283), that is, from the sophistries of the
age. Mauberly himself (the fictive protagonist), though, remains stuck in a kind of preliminary, precious
modernism:
His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate isles;
Observed the elegance of Circes hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials (lines 1316).
Pound concludes that Mauberlys epitaph might be here drifted an hedonist. Lowell in Notebook
documents a similar tension between rhetoric and style, and between mot juste or perfect styles and
styles that jaggedly reflect the chaos of the moment. [Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (New York: New
Directions, 1957), 6177].
15
Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, ed. Milton J. Bates (New York: Knopf, 1989), 189.
16
T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company 1932), 9.
17
Ezra Pound, A Song of the Degrees, Selected Poems, 31.
5 Phillip L. Beard

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rhetoric produces a residual need for social ideals (Lacans the Imaginary or ware-
house of big ideas).
18
The evasion of rhetoric is problematic for audiences of lyric
poetry who crave social commentary, but the modernists realized that if one simply
preaches tradition in the face of complex experience (like the First World War), ones
responses may be partial, stunted, and unimaginative. Despite the potential cul-de-
sacs of formalist sensationalism or hedonism, a reasonable component of modernisms
evasions of sentimentality and standard rhetorics of power is that a poetry that
acknowledges the changing, evolving complexities of history is also ready to be
moral; the Lowell of Notebook frequently indulges a skeptical candor as if it is
fundamental to any fresh ethical action.
Typical political poems in Notebook move with considerable momentum of judg-
ment; they threaten to blossom in pronouncements, exhortations, or denunciations, but
rarely do. More often they resolve or devolve into a kind of musing anticlimax, or what
Lowell in the Afterthought terms a bent generalization.
19
The combined effect of
these dramatic and poetic strategies (the spy-character of the speaker, the abrupt, sym-
bolist turns, and the bent generalizations or perplexing epigrams) is to push the reader
toward an unstated moral judgment. This is an advance on poetry like that of early Eliot
that rests in ironies and on later Eliot that embraces didactic rhetoric. Lowell suggests the
insufficiencies of rhetoric but maintains the momentum of desire for a barely stated, or as
yet unspeakable, ideal.
His visions of contemporary history often concern martyrs and crises that suggest the
desperation that could result from a linear reading of history and set the stage for a
politics based in compassion. The section October and November features poems
about Che Guevara, Caracas (which Lowell had visited in 1967), and the now-famous
march-on-the-Pentagon poems; the poems in May review the S.D.S. uprising at
Columbia, and the poems in The Races concern 1968s presidential conventions
and elections. Che Guevara may be reviewed briefly as a poem typical of Notebook
in its mix of spying observations and moral challenges that threaten the ego of the
narrator and provoke his conscience to transcend tradition. Its narrator seems to float
over the scene, a gritty visual portrait at its center. We see the primitive bier of Che
Guevara, his body laid out on a sink in a shed, revealed by flashlight/ as the leaves
light up, still green this afternoon,/ and burn to frittered reds; as the oak, branch-lopped/
to go on living swells with goiters like a fruit tree (58). But the visual details blend with
metaphor and then collide abruptly with consciencethe hands of the illicit (presum-
ably Lowell and a woman not his wife) lovers are somehow like the white stone walls of
the iniquitous, imperial citywhose buildings over-/shadow the poor (910). The
speaker is an agent for a moral imperative that nearly cancels his own identity; that is, he
implicitly has a standard of reference which informs the dour tone of his accounts, but
this value is unpossessed by the speaker. Kings who had abdicated once hid in oaks,/
18
Charles Altieri, The Fate of the Imaginary in Twentieth Century American Poetry, American
Literary History 17, no. 1 (2005): 7094.
19
Lowell, Notebook, 262.
6 The Spy, the Sharks Eye, and the True Unreal of Lowells Notebook

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with prices on their heads, and watched for game (1314). Now, a reversal of revolu-
tionary fortunes, the revolutionary himself is the game: the captured, killed Guevara is
displayed like a trophy animal in a shed. The visual record melts into the document of a
dubious conscience, heavy as a century of history, as the hands of the lovers do not
overcome but agonizingly reinforce the sense of injustice in the poem.
20
Lowells comments in interviews, letters, and the Afterthought of Notebook set the
stage for and somewhat define the dramatic innovation of the spy narrator of the volume.
A spy personaat least, its closely related voyeur roleis sketched by Lowell in an
interview with V. S. Naipaul nearly contemporary with Notebook, in 1969. Lowell notes
that in a preface to a new translation of [Dostoyevskys] The Idiot, [Harold Rosenberg
says] the hero is a spectator, you might almost say a voyeur . . . Id like to appear as a
voyeur in my poems.
21
Swerving from the declamatory, hero-focused inclinations of his
early poetry, Lowell in Notebook considers smaller male identities, especially writers
presented as heroes of observation and suspicion. In encomnia of writers as spies, Lowell
presents a vision which is less dominating, but rather detached and noncommittal:
Christopher Marlowe (in secret service), and Rimbaud shadowing Napoleon III in
retreat from Sedan (looking for writing [he] could trust). Read together, the Lowell
sonnets about poet-spies Marlowe and Rimbaud suggest some rough, nonconformists
equilibrium between a performers adventurism and a stylists private integrity.
22
From Marlowe (156493) he adopts a rough hewn blank verse, an agnostic attitude
toward anything divine, and a surveilling mission (167). Curiously, given Lowells own
foray into the Catholic church, Marlowe actually worked in the anti-Catholic secret
service of Elizabeth I so he is simultaneously a model of spying, verse forms, and phi-
losophy for the Lowell of Notebook: Marlowe popularized blank verse, the form of
Notebook, and Lowell emphasizes that he lived and died as an ostentatious atheist,
metaphysically disinherited. Lowell was likely influenced by a famous 1925 study by
Leslie Hotson that first reprinted a police inquest account of the murder of Marlowe;
23
he is shown
drinking out May is Deptford with three friends,
one or perhaps all four in Secret Service. (89)
20
To borrow convenient symbols from William Blake, the poem (and Notebook as a whole) is consistent
with an Orc cycle; neither the old masters of the imperial city nor the young revolutionaries are
ascendant, but both figure in a circular, historical frieze that baffles the poet and makes him crave a new
term of pragmatics or dialectical unity. Blakes Orc cycle, in which the fiery, revolutionary youth
transforms into his autocratic opposite, Urizen, is discussed by Northop Frye in Fearful Symmetry
(Princeton University Press, 1947), 20735.
21
Lowell, Et in America Ego, Interviews and Memoirs, 145.
22
Lowells poem For Norman Mailer (Notebook, 183) marks another prototype of the spy; the poem
becomes less a conventional encomium than a hymn to Mailers dynamic skepticism and undercover
cultural criticism (in the poem, Mailer dresses in blue suits that camouflage him amongst the business
class). Reading Armies of the Night, Lowell said that even when Mailer seemed disengaged from what
was going on during the 1967 Pentagon protests: he saw everything (Interviews and Memoirs, 166).
23
Leslie Hotson, The Death of Christopher Marlowe (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1925).
7 Phillip L. Beard

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Lowell embroiders any known facts (some historians now say that Marlowe was not
among friends, but was with counter-agents bound to apprehend Marlowe for libel and/
or atheism, and the fight was not spontaneous, but part of an assassination of
Marlowe).
24
In any case, Lowells Marlowe, with his dying words, rejects conventional
consolations with a black-comic relish:
Christ was a bastard, His Testaments filthily greeked
he died, swearing stabbed among friends who loved him
discussing the barcheck. (1012)
Thus, Lowells sonnet Marlowe treats him as a kind of existentialist antihero with no
teleological anchor in history and with no religious convictions. He is also an agent of
dubious valence relative to the powers that be, a reckless, robust connoisseur of inten-
sities; Lowell renders Marlowe as a kind of proto-romantic, dionysiac character; his life is
uncontrollably sweet and swift (6).
Marlowe, as an ambivalent spy, thus becomes a model for the character Lowell
becomes in many of Notebooks political poems. Marlowe has no consolation or over-
arching metaphysics, but a tragic vision, and the tragedy is to die . . . / for that vacant
parsonage, Posterity,/ tabloid stamped in bronze, our deeds in dust (1214). Likewise,
the narrator of Notebook is usually not writing for the ages, but evoking a quotidian
adventure. So, Marlowe is a model of form and character in his spying, iconoclasm, and
indifference to Horatian fame. But most of all, the poet is a spy upon power rather than a
manifestation of it. This is plain in the poems reflection on Marlowes religious attitudes
and implicitly in his uncertain relationship to political idealism; his final month alive is
still undecoded.
Lowell vividly renders Rimbaud as a spy in a sonnet called Rimbaud and Napoleon
III (214) and effectively, uses him as a model of observation and style in many surveil-
ling poems. Lowell had translated a cycle of Rimbaud poems about the FrancoPrussian
War and the siege of Paris in 187071, which he called Eighteen Seventy in his volume
of translations called Imitations (1961) which includes Les Rages de Cesar (called there
Napoleon After Sedan) a Rimbaud poem that dismantles and demythologizes
Napoleon III;
25
as mentioned earlier, this became the sonnet called Rimbaud and
Napoleon III in Notebook. Rimbaud not only serves as a model for Lowells frequent
role as a spy of contemporary history but becomes a stylistic model for a poetry that
frequently twists out of the grip of conventional expectations, enacting a detached
skepticism.
The historical Rimbaud was arrested as a vagabond and suspected spy on his arrival in
Paris in 1871; he later drilled with an inept and under-outfitted national guard force,
before settling into the role of a documentarian of the Prussian occupation and the
24
Park Honan, Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 336.
25
Robert Lowell, Collected Poetry, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 1983), 26465.
8 The Spy, the Sharks Eye, and the True Unreal of Lowells Notebook

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apparent decay of the French empire.
26
In Lowells version of Rimbauds poem, figuring
Notebooks floating, often disengaged narrator, Rimbaud is less historical agent than an
observer who hovers, balloon-like, over the figure of Napoleon after the battle of Sedan,
while the latter was held prisoner at Wilhelmshoehe in Prussia. Here, Rimbaud watches
[Napoleon IIIs] cigar blue out in smoke, an image of the dissipation of reputation that
parallels a poem about Napoleon I who was said to vanish like the smoke of his
artillery elsewhere in Notebook (77). Rimbaud is not simply making a documentarians
martial adventure, but he is looking for writing I could trust,/ but the man was waxy, he
jogged along the fields/ flowering [. . .]/ hes captured (46).
A signal feature of the Notebook version of the sonnet is the change that Lowell
performs to Rimbauds literal text, seizing an extant quality of Rimbauds (symbolist
difficulty) and making it Lowells own. Lowell takes considerable liberties with
Rimbauds poem; the first four lines are Lowells own narration in which he has
Rimbaud muse on a friend or critic who said the normal flow of my aesthetic/ energies
was to use the other direction. The bulk of the poem is a fairly literal translation of
Rimbaud, but (as noted earlier) Lowell willfully mistranslates Rimbauds lines
LEpempereur a loeil mort/ Il repense peut-etre au Compere en Lunettes as The
sharks eye on the horses at Compere. An amateur with a FrenchEnglish dictionary can
deliver this in English as the emperor has a dead eye/ he thinks perhaps of his accom-
plice in spectacles.
27
Lowell turns Compere into an alleged place rather than a
personthe line becomes menacing, mysterious, and ambiguous: presumably,
Napoleon III is looking at the horses with a sharks (i.e., deadly, reptilian) eye. But
there is also the implication that the eyes of the horses are like those of sharks. Or
that Rimbaud is shark-like, watching the erstwhile emperor and his horses. The image
becomes prototypical of many of the Notebook sonnets abrupt, startling metaphors.
Paralleling such jarring imagerys impact on common sense, another challenging
strategy in Notebook befitting a symbolist or ironist is a twisted epigram that has the
cadence of rational summary, but which evades conventional sense. In the
Afterthought, Lowell refers to such usages as bent generalizations (262). These
sometimes operate as turning points in the sonnet. The Flaw recounts an episode of
anxiety (accompanying something like an ocular migraine, which produces mild visual
disturbances) while flying (apparently to Chicago in the summer of 1968). After a
meditation on his eye and on the aqueous, streaked space within a dual-walled
window of the airplane, the poet abruptly says, God is design, this ugliness confides/
the goodness of his will (228). This is not just ironic mockery of Calvinist theology; the
cosmic scope of the claim is wildly out of proportion to the bemused notes on the
window and on ocular flaws, and this disproportionality (and the unreasonableness that
26
Jean-Luc Steinmetz, Arthur Rimbaud: Presence of an Enigma, trans. Jon Graham (New York: Welcome
Rain Publishers, 2001), 4344.
27
Wallace Fowlie says that this accomplice is Emile Ollivier, president of the council of Ministers
who ordered the plebiscite on May 8 and declared war on Germany on July 19, 1870, in Rimbaud:
Complete Works, Selected Letters, a Bilingual Edition, trans. and ed. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press 2005), 451.
9 Phillip L. Beard

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nonetheless rings like reason) calls into question the commonplace shape of the rhetoric
involved. In this turn, the poets character is less at issue than his rhetorical tools.
Implicitly, the poet asks: how often are we fooled by convention and cadence in lan-
guage? (Linguistic atavisms are a concern of the volume; in another poem of flying,
Flight in the Rain, Lowell notes prayer lives longer than God [94]).
Especially in accounts of now notorious political crises in the 1960s, Lowell indulges
these strategies of making himself a spy-like voyeur, and he also uses dissonant orders of
images and disruptive, rhetorically flawed epigrams in poems about the march on the
Pentagon, the uprising at Columbia University, the Democratic National Convention in
Chicago, and the Republican National Convention in Miami. At these events, Lowell is
spy within, and to some extent for, the left, but from a kind of detached, transcendental
perspective. As with his renderings of Marlowe and Rimbaud as spies, Lowells own spy
alter-ego, featured in many observational poems about contemporary history, commits
neither to tradition nor to revolution, but he is perpetually other, suggesting his
ultimate goal is somehow synthetic of right and left, of reason and impulse, and, aes-
thetically, blending structure (the sonnet) and wildness (the collage of the whole, the
shifting voices and perspectives within each poem).
The political crises on the left inspired Lowell to change his attitudes toward heroic
personalities and conventional rhetorics of progress. A significant portion of Notebook
documents the tension between a liberalism content to legislate its ideals in the civil
rights era (through the potential election of candidates like Robert Kennedy or Eugene
McCarthy, whom Lowell supported) and a leftist politics so weary and frustrated with
mainstream liberalisms collaborations with the military industrial complex that this
portion of the left became militant in its own ambitions. A major cause of the
Columbia University student uprising in the spring of 1968 was concern about how
the ostensibly liberal university was invested in and supported by grants related to the
defense industry. Furthermore, the failure of the Democratic National Convention in
1968 to address the Vietnam War in its platform alienated many on the leftLowell, for
example, in response, did not vote, and a significant minority of young leftists became
(or intended to become) violent, even deadly in their protests of the war; the
Weatherman group and others tried to frame their struggles as being part of a worldwide
leftist struggle; the hero for some was the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara.
28
Rimbaud describes himself (in words interpolated by Lowells translation) as servant
of France I saved, evoking a salvation that is more aesthetic than political: in that poem,
aesthetic commitments stand above, or even inform the integrity of, political attitudes.
Lowell often tests similar impulses to a point of breaking; his own contemporary political
28
Mark Rudd documents his conflicted views of revolutionary violence in the 1960s in Underground:
My Life with SDS and the Weathermen: In my family, violence was for the goyim or the trombeniks
(hoodlums). I knew no one who hit another person. I did not play football. I had never lost my fear of
violence. But as a member of the cult of Che Guevara, I had evolved a belief in the necessity for violence
in order to end the war and also to make revolution. I must have repeated a hundred times in meetings
and speeches, The ruling class will never give over power peacefully. (New York: HarperCollins,
2009), Kindle edition location 2094.
10 The Spy, the Sharks Eye, and the True Unreal of Lowells Notebook

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poems enact a frustration he ascribed to Mozart whose Figaros insolent slash at folk
could never/ cut the golden thread of the suffocating curtain, this curtain symbolic of
the imperial status quo and the audiences appetite for spectacle (Robespierre and
Mozart as Stage, 168). Such frustration is implicit in Lowells sweat-stained, weary
views of the marmoreal centers of American power in the Pentagon March poems,
concerning the anti-Vietnam War events that brought one hundred thousand protesters
to Washington, DC in October 1967. Amid these occasionally ritualized, oddly confin-
ing circumstances, Lowell seeks a standard of justice not found in the scene or in con-
temporary action. In those poems, even progressive liberalism moves as a kind of herd (in
Trunks, the anarchists also move in drum step . . . like geese in converging lines
(219)); the aesthetic qualities of the poems thus become, as in the example of
Rimbaud, elegiac surrogates for ethical needs. This likely means an artistic salvation,
or even that political action proceeds out of the barrel of a loaded poem, but as we will
see in Nihilist as Hero, Lowell remains skeptical of that level of aestheticism, associat-
ing it with a devil of perfectionism (as well as in Les Mots, in which the mania for
phrases dried [the] heart of Flaubert (38)).
Thus, a legitimately sublime feature of Notebook is its frequent engagement of the
momentum of judgment while it suspends conclusions; the difficult pleasure of the
poems is closer to a sublime, aesthetically, than to beauty, because they bring one to a
moral precipice or uncertainty and then leave one alone, unresolved but imaginatively
charged. The political poems in Notebook are definitively suspicious of authority, but this
hermeneutical suspicion seems a bit scary to Lowell, as he describes what is essentially a
transcendentalist perspective as nihilist: a project meaning living in the world as is,
or living in the world without a super intercessor (like a deity) or superman (like an
Alexander) that might transform the ordinary order of reality, but with language and
ideals that can reduce an impossible summit to rubble.
Nihilist as Hero (211) allows Lowell to present himself as a spy-writer in ways
analogous to his treatment of other writers. The narrator turns the desire for change
(which is implied in political poems) upon himself, and upon events of the year: here
the narrator becomes both a portrait of, and an object of, self-scrutiny. The locus of
the poem is an image of the poet, in a meditative pose reminiscent of many shadowy
detectives or agents in films, staring beyond a match flame, poised to light a ciga-
rette. In the poem itself, the match flames living green as he rejects even artistic
perfectionism as a surrogate for ideal truth and thus tries to make peace with mere
seeing in the world as is (13). The nihilist is another miniature of the poetic
identity of the whole book, as the narrator often seems negated by opposing tensions.
In Nihilist as Hero, the poet quotes Valery, who begged his contemporaries for six
passable lines of verse in a sequence; Lowell adds, in a seeming non sequitur, That
was a happy day for Satan (3). That is, a devil of perfectionism and perpetual strife
would delight in Valerys contempt for his contemporaries. In alternative to a chilly
aestheticism, Nihilist as Hero tries to harmonize with change and flux; the speaker
wants words meat hooked from the living steer, and the enemy is excessive artifice,
which produces the cold flame of tinfoil [that] licks the metal log in a faux
11 Phillip L. Beard

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fireplace (56). Another danger, aside from such artificiality, is the beautifully un-
changing fire of childhood/ betraying a monotony of vision (67). Competing
aesthetic visions create a field of tensions, with Lowell in the middle: these possible
visions are represented by Valery, by a Satan of perfectionism, by childhoods
monotonous sublimity, or a life that breeds on change. Such a life of getting,
spending, and smoking is consistent with an entire empire built on consumptive
habits, as he, an agent of such enterprise, observes himself and other men each
season scrapping new cars, wars, and women (9).
The oscillation between strong assertion and claims of weakness in the poem
emphasizes the ambiguity of power in the agent, as when a confession of weakness
(sometimes when I am ill or delicate) is followed by the affirmations that infirmity
affords. The nihilist cannily balances pragmatic acceptance of the world as is and
his summit-vaporizing desire. In the moment, with elegance wasted on a match flame
(described not only as a green flame but also as a cornstalk in green tails and seeded
tassel), the power is not in the flame but in the intelligence that reads the flame.
The feeling of decentered-ness in the poets gazing the impossible summit to rub-
ble is profound: is this a hymn to anarchic power or a droll self-elegy? One expects
at several points the poet to commit to a vision or creed, either to aesthetic mon-
umentalism, or to a love of flux. Nearly every source of value negates its alternatives
in contest. The flame in Nihilist as Hero may be read as an image of this mental
agency, lambent, shifting, luminous; a significant source of drama, even a sort of
melodrama in Notebook, is in Lowells rendering his shift from metaphysical myth to
mere, mortal intelligence as the tense, sneaky efforts of a kind of film noir antihero;
in the context of his genteel (literal and literary) ancestry, the 1969 Lowell, philo-
sophically and formally, is an outlawbut an outlaw of good reason, as his sight has
become less a matter of prophetic vision and more a Vietnam-era skepticism of
power.
The March I and The March II (54) poems feature Lowell as an ineffectual agent
of protest to the Vietnam War; he stands in stark relief against the account of his ancestor
Charles Russell Lowell in the poem following the March pair. The qualified respect
Lowell has for his ancestor is framed by history; the C. R. Lowells equestrian escapades
seem already quaint in the context of the Civil War and fatally obsolete during the Cold
War: the older Lowell had twelve horses killed under him and gave . . . / everything at
Cedar Creek/ . . . scorning the earth he rode over (55). Lowell as a spy on his own
circumstances gazes into the too long reflecting pool on the mall, sees the cigarette
match quaking in [his] fingers. In both March poems, the army for peace staggers
forward and then back in retreat from the eerily docile other army of the State,
Martian-like in green new steel helmets. Lowell rates himself as unfit to follow
the dream of those for whom the Pentagon is their Bastille, but there is also evidence
he finds the protest march lacking a spirit of liberty he craves; under the withering
autumn sky, the marchers are absurdly locked arm in arm (56). Alan Williamson
points out that the blank and giantized obelisk and pool (symbols of liberal imagination
ironically static and imperial) have stylistic mates in the outsized and individual-
12 The Spy, the Sharks Eye, and the True Unreal of Lowells Notebook

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drowning protest march with its amplified harangues for peace.
29
Lowells intelligence
is unsatisfied by anything on record here, and seems both sent by and questing for
something else: his fleeing is not blank retreat, but searching.
A searching for a rational, progressive politics and a floating, surveilling narrator
characterize the section of Notebook called May, which begins with and is dominated
by its poems about the student uprising at Columbia in 1968. As the students in the
North American Congress on Latin America described the movement in 1968 in the
pamphlet called Who Rules Columbia, they protested (quoting the Universitys bal-
ance sheets) that the institutions trust was bound up with and largely fed by the U.S.
defense industry. The students also protested (and succeeded in stopping) the construc-
tion of a new gym on grounds that were a park in Harlem.
30
The students staged a strike
that shut down the university, and occupied President Grayson Kirks office. The two
areas of student protest that Lowell describes mark the end of early-1960s sit-in style
protests (Columbia) and the beginning of more violent confrontations, with images of
protesters in football helmets to ward off police clubs. Rational political conversation
exists as unfulfilled promise; instead there is a vacuum between left and right that
threatens to be occupied by violence.
The poem The Pacification of Columbia begins with a Cezanne-like or even cubist
vision of the rooftops mixed with a religious vision of consummation that is a cipher
that may be read either as apocalyptic or rational:
Patches of tan and blood-warm rooftile, azure:
an old jigsawpuzzle Mosque of Omar flung
to vaultless consummation and blue consumption,
exhalation of the desert sand to fire. (14)
The architectural analogy of the dome of the Columbia Library and the Mosque of
Omar (built in Jerusalem in AD 691) expands into a fanciful expression of the fulfill-
ment of a fiery vision.
The junction of the first part of the poem and the more literal description of the
campus in the aftermath of the uprising is abrupt except for the spy-like motto: I got the
message, one the puzzle never sent. The poem manifests an ironic distance between the
visionary images at the outset and the grim dungeon feudal reality of Columbia. That
is, the puzzle of the library dome suggests exalted learning, transformations, unions of
western and eastern thinking in grand visionary harmony, but the rest of the place in
May 1968 consists of thickened buildings in a dungeon feudal style. The plants
order is maintained by blue police and their horses that Lowell derisively identifies as
higher artistic types than their grooms. The message seems to be that Columbia will
remain a bastion of the military industrial complex. The police and horses show
they . . . have learned to meet and reason together as the students and the administration
29
Alan Williamson, Pity the Monsters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 108.
30
Who Rules Columbia? North American Congress on Latin America (New York: NACLA 1968),
http://www.utwatch.org/archives/whorulescolumbia.html.
13 Phillip L. Beard

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failed to do. The poet, a barely suggested, observational presence in the poem, suggests
an unspecified political synthesis. He refuses to mandate this or phrase it as conventional
rhetoric, but telegraphs it in the odd, symbolist union of the first five lines of the sonnet
and the next nine, the turn at which he gets the unstated message.
Leader of the Left, the third poem in the sequence, similarly pivots on a fine point of
ambivalence. While the figure is likely a symbolic compound, a fiction, the figure sounds
more like Rudi Dutschke than (as others have suggested) Mark Rudd;
31
Dutschke was a
Christian Socialist who escaped from East Germany to West Germany and spoke of a
fundamental theology of love; the poem begins Love will not bind it to his blind ambi-
tion, meaning potentially that love of the leftist can not bear to link his extremist assas-
sination to the figures own egotistical intensities. In the spring of 1968, a week after
Martin Luther Kings assassination, Dutschke was shot by a West German assassin who
confessed he was inspired by the murder of Dr. King (Dutschke was severely wounded, but
he survived until 1979). Anticipating (and perhaps informing) the Lowell poem, an April
12, 1968 headline on the front page of the New York Times proclaimed West German
Gunman Wounds Leader of Left-wing Students (emphasis added).
32
An intimation of imperial rigidity within revolutionary personalities, a motif
common in Lowell, has this symbol in Leader of the Left (185): the scars of the
revolutionary speaker are like those of a Heidelberg student, thus, like an early twen-
tieth century German member of a dueling fraternity (such dueling, which was consid-
ered a sport like fencing but was also, culturally, a prelude to imperial military service, so
it is obviously an ironic contrary of left wing activity). Furthering the irony, the
romantic firebrand is described as having a face of plastic grafted to his one natural
feature (oddly, his scars, plural and unnatural); his face is also said to be wood, his
voice electric . . . a low current whir (9). This transmogrifying order of similes is a
striking example of Lowells true unreal or a set of discordant, non-intuitive descriptors
that resonate with irony in the service of political perplexity, as the leader of the left,
the potential representative of a new authenticity, is rendered as a spectacular automaton.
The leader mesmerizes his audience who are rapt even in anticipation for the pre-
destined poignancy of his murder, as if this calamity is a rock-and-roll, theatrical per-
formance; the leader ultimately projects not a rational vision of change but a
Machiavellian Utopia of pure nerve (14).
The American political season of summer and autumn of 1968 gave people with
ambitions for a coherent, energetic liberal politics first tragedy (the assassinations of King
and Kennedy) followed then by the narcotizing anticlimax in the nominations of
31
Stephen James in Shades of Authority and Paul Breslin in Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since
the Fifties speculate that Leader of the Left could be about Mark Rudd, one of the more active
students in the Columbia University protest movement and a founding member of Weatherman leftist
group, but I sent the poem to Rudd, and, in consultation with others, he concluded it has nothing to do
with him, though he added Lowell is a obviously a great poet, and a real mensch. Mark Rudd, e-mail
message to author, June 30, 2013.
32
West Berlin Gunman Wounds Leader of Left-Wing Students: STUDENT RADICAL IS SHOT IN
BERLIN, The New York Times, April 12, 1968, 1.
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Democrat Hubert Humphrey, who ran for president under a mandate from Johnson not
to challenge or change administration war policy, and Richard Nixon, who then seemed
to many a politician whose career had ended six years earlier in his failed attempt to
become governor of California. Lowell reports the conventions and election in The
Races, not with journalistic literalism but with counter-intelligence, symbolist strategies
that not only evoke disappointment and disorientation but which suggest the inefficien-
cies of conventional style and thinking. Lowell challenges common sense, as from the
outset of the section, it is difficult to discern what may be a description of an actual
object from what may be a metaphor. August begins with a description of an
Edwardian vase holding mustard bush and goldenrod: the object becomes a trope for
the Republican Convention in Miami, but it is never plain that Lowell is describing a
literal vase in a convention hall or hotel lobby; it is even ambiguous if the flora is in the
vase or a design on it, but to consider the flowers, weedy and bitter, contained in a fancy
vessel, makes metaphorical sense. The convention, he says, is like the vase containing
Americana like dead flowers (6). The images amount to a true unreal that commu-
nicates the stale ceremonialism of the convention. The poem also features the bent
generalization or inverted New Testament maxim, many are chosen, and so few were
called (8). This implies the field of candidates was lousy, but the form of this statement,
like other twisted maxims in Notebook, calls attention to the compulsions of common-
place, epigrammatic phrasing and stresses not only an insufficiency of the candidates but
an insufficiency of rhetoric. Lowells sighing criticism has the cadence of a biblical
judgment, but it says less than what one expects, and compels one to muse on the
phrases possible meanings. The last six lines recall hallucinatory transformations of
female images in other Notebook poems (as in the transformations of a Cretan bulls
head to a girl with a wicker cows head in The Old Order (41), or the dreamt of girl
with burnt yellow legs at the edge of wintertime New York in Ice on the Hudson 2
(127)). In August, at line nine, a female figure (of liberty? of the industrial future?)
emerges from the flowers, maturing like a flower blossoming in time-lapse photography,
with breasts escaping the rib. Abruptly ironizing this image is another motto, loosely
in touch with reason: the future is only standing on our feet, which suggests that this
goddess of the future must be less neoclassical fantasy than an idea that gains stability
from (on) real people. Meanwhile, the Floridian sun at poems end is not an ahistorical
poets sun (that would be timeless, radiant, abstract of most strife and a reminder of a
cleaner, energizing order in nature, etc.), but a symbolist sun, part of a new, unexplained
order of images: The sun warms the mortician, unpolluted (14). This image gains a
fuller dramatic context in poem seven of The Races, The Hospital. That poem
recurs to the image of the decrepit, undesirable presidential candidates (in this case,
Lowell is describing Humphrey) and we learn the mortician (seen in poem one,
August) is needed to make the dead look alive.
The second poem of Races, Five Hour Rally (227), like The March I and II
features a spy speaking in ciphers, uneasily observing a political gathering (apparently a
meeting of Republican candidates early in the proceedings in Miami). But Rally is a far
odder poem than the March poems. The candidates are like twenty first ballerinas in
15 Phillip L. Beard

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a convention room with a monotonous, acre-large carpet marked ominously with many
sunsets. The convention carpet becomes a veritable field of disruptive metaphors, each
effectively as dissociating as the sharks eye in Rimbaud and Napoleon III; Lowells
evocations of the politicians blend dissonantly with descriptions of the carpet figures,
which resemble a broken pretzel, wings . . . like ironwork/ for a Goya balcony and a
belly . . . a big watermelon seed (89). The logic of transitions is nothing less than
surreal, but if one has to wrench some conventional insight from the poems end, one
notes that in the convention room, ideology becomes stultifyingly naturalized in the
image of an infernal ground of insects and statesmen grappling on the carpet. The
politicians, like the monotonous sublime of the carpet sunsets, indicate You will swallow
me. I you. As in Robespierre and Mozart as Stage, a consumptive spectacle absorbs
the possibilities for progressive politics.
The poem We are here to Preserve Disorder (229) gets its title from an infamous
slip of the tongue by Chicago Mayor Daley, who addressed the press, and was quoted by
newspapers and by Time magazine. His motto becomes a prototypical bent generali-
zation of the era: Gentlemen, get the thing straight once and for allthe policeman
isnt there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.
33
This poem
also has ominous, cryptic details delivered as if by a voyeur or surveillance officer, as
Lowell offers a recessive sequence of images as he views of himself viewing a piece of a
spectacle on televisionThe beefy door ajar an inch or two (1) with a TV partially
visible in the opening.
But instead of a literalist description of the screen, the poem mixes challenging images
with an inversion of the expected order of agents: the green screen seeing more than if
Id seen it (2). There is thus potentially an Orwellian agency ascribed to the screen, or a
Marshall McLuhan-esque implication that the medium of TV, making the spectator a
cog in its machinations, does the job of watching itself. Lowell could also be implying
that the TV viewer accomplished a more thorough image of the action, like a modern
sports fan, than a spectator actually in the arena. This poem, like most political poems
within Notebook, is tense with a judgmental momentum that does not crystallize into a
statement of value. Rather, the reader is seduced into a collage of ciphers, like the green
screen and the dark strip of silenced stalk in rippling a streaking, frightened cat who
becomes the wordless voice of Chicago (5), or a figure of the mute idealism of the spys
conscience in the book at large.
New Years Eve 1968 (172) acts as a conclusion of Notebooks fantasies of spying
(the poem, located in the middle of Notebook, later actually became the ultimate sonnet
of History), as the poet presents himself in a current, dated history that demands to be
rendered in the tone of popular fiction; he reviews the genealogy of debunked heroes that
provoked the identifications with spies, and, ultimately, he bequeaths himself to the
reader in a document in need of deciphering. The poem presents the afterimages of
authorities, some debunked or tossed aside by Lowell in the course of Notebook. (Among
the figures he gives the demythifying treatment are Alexander, Attila, Roland, Tamerlane,
33
John Kifner, Daley is Called Dishonest, The New York Times, September 11, 1968, 29.
16 The Spy, the Sharks Eye, and the True Unreal of Lowells Notebook

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King Richard, Napoleons I and III, and Lincoln.) In New Years Eve 1968, he speaks
of these authorities as conquered kings who pass angrily away;/ the gods die flesh and
spirit and last in print,/ each library is some injured tyrants home (13). This poem
that takes place beside a river recalls The Lorelei of Heine and Lowells echo of it in
The Gap, and his desire to engulf the siren (212). By internalizing the feminine call
of the river, Lowell becomes not autocratic, but mindful of contingency and expressive of
compassion. New Years Eve 1968s skeptical take on history is hard to see as con-
taining a desire to co-opt the powers of absolutists, even in negating them and creating,
as Henry Hart creatively suggests, a mirror or negative image of what he rejects (76).
This mind must express insights in something like Mickey Spillane-styled prose in order
to compete with film: since the year runs out in the movies, it must be written/ in bad,
straightforward, unscanning sentences. Theres a touch of the sublime in counterpoint
to the self-deprecating criticism; he describes himself in his black pages of carbon
backings that resemble the rosetta stone with its hero a hero demens or Ahab-like
captain forcing his ship past soundings to the passage (172).
This mixture of references, and the shift in stylistic scale from pulp fiction
(bad . . . sentences) to William Carlos Williams-like urban realism (the slush ice on
the east water of the Hudson is/ rose heather) to Melvillian myth (the hero
demens . . . ill starred of men), suggests the fantasy life of many middle-class males,
city-dwellers who mix history, heroic mythology, and sight with the immediate land-
scape. Here the mixture is not maudlin or grandiose, but tempered by an unironic
confrontation with the poets own historical moment. The slush ice of the Hudson
River reflects his image of his own writing (as the perpetual reviser, Lowell literally
went through lots of carbon paper); the icy river at dusk also refigures his work, carbon
scarred with ciphers(14). As ciphers are the stock in trade of the counterintelligence
officer, the message writ in code, to read history upon the ice of the Hudson requires
active intelligence, a poetry of thought and compassion rather than authority; in New
Years Eve 1968, Lowell doesnt need a field marshal or god to set him straight. Theres
almost nothing teleological or anchored about his position; Lowell seems less Ahab and
more like le Carres rumpled figure of resistance, Alec Leamas, in a paperback spy
novel.
34
While he evokes the historical momentum of systems of belief and social
order, he denies their ability to oppress, and so his intelligence, in its liberating qualities,
serves an open image suggestive of compassion (the open channel, the bright sky, bright
sky), and he strenuously avoids any a static image of power.
The spy figure in Notebook, no less than the roving I of Whitman in Song of
Myself, wants some sort of transcendence. But the poet is not himself a transcendent
figure, as the young Lowell dreamt a poet might be,
35
but he is a skeptical substitute for
34
John le Carre, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963).
35
As an undergraduate, Lowell wrote brazenly of a poetry directly indebted to the metaphysicals that
makes the miraculous explicit . . . it can make explicit the most supernatural reality, God, in Ian
Hamiltons Robert Lowell (New York: Random House, 1982), 59. The Lowell of Notebook has
moved far away from this prospect of establishing a conduit to divinity.
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transcendence conceived as physical power, despite the beaten player in American
politics who perennially hungers for the blood feud . . . loved like whiskey
(November 6, 231). The poems of Notebook move precariously between activism
and aestheticism, between the public security of rhetoric and the hermetic refuge of
style, and between conventionally male and female models of power. Lowell evinces a
skeptical quality of mind rather than an apotheosis of violence or even of charisma.
Notebook, with its frequent evocations of a mental fight
36
is a quasi-romantic poetry
that resists most of the comforts of romantic lyrics: nature as a pantheistic succor, or the
meditative caress of objects. Romantic poetry can treasure and define security, or it can
chart and challenge thinking. In its manipulations of conventions of lyric character, its
unreal imagery, and its sublimely suspended judgments, Notebook should be under-
stood less as a difficult documentary and more as some of the most relentless poetry of
thought in the twentieth century.
36
From William Blakes And Did Those Feet: I will not cease from Mental Fight . . . in The
Complete Poetry and Prose, 95.
18 The Spy, the Sharks Eye, and the True Unreal of Lowells Notebook

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