The London Review of Books (October 9 issue) prints a head-turning letter from one of its own frequent contributors. He writes:
What is disappointing, even embarrassing about the poetry of Robert Lowell in retrospect is not so much the tin ear or heavy-handedness, not the posturing and self-dramatisation, not even the straining after the important subject, the insistence on being taken as major, when, in fact, with very few exceptions, the poetry isn’t really much good at all; what is, finally, so dreary about the oeuvre at this remove, the reason his enormous Collected Poems sinks like a breached tanker, are Lowell’s cultural assumptions, his notion of a cultural hierarchy and his pre-eminent position in that hierarchy so tirelessly cultivated throughout his career.
Even in the midst of the widespread reassessment that has followed the publication of Lowell’s Collected Poems last summer, I haven’t seen anything close to this emphatic a dissent from the consensus view of Lowell as a great twentieth-century poet. Is Kleinzahler’s view so exceptional, or are there like-minded poetry readers out there who have been biting their tongues?