Facts, Dreams, Events, Whatever

Speech to no one in particular, thoughts while flossing my teeth, hollow sounds of the voices of people not present, imagined, impassioned conversations carried on over minutes and hours in self-imposed seclusions, whispered soliloquies, muttered apologies, rhapsodic expostulations to nobody, unraveled and generously footnoted in a spirit of complete contrition, manic crescendos of second-guessing, culminating in strangled self-doubt, or in arch comedy, or in professions of meek good faith, or in episodes of variously directed and fully impotent desire: to make clear, to lay out, to endorse, to proscribe, to communicate with fresh terms the strange triangulations that lead mens' minds in their loneliness to grope for clues to their history and destiny.

"When I was working on Life Studies," Robert Lowell says, "I found I had no language or meter that would allow me to approximate what I saw or remembered. Yet in prose I had already found what I wanted, the conventional style of autobiography and reminiscence. So I wrote my autobiographical poetry in a style I thought I had discovered in Flaubert, one that used images and ironic or amusing particulars." (Hamilton)

This is the introductory phase, in literature, of a long and weary farce: the contamination of literary discourse by the half-conscious whimsy and chat that ordain our lives, as social beings, like the points of a compass.

Jonathan Raban noted the ugly side-effects of this liberty in Lowell's revisions.
"[H]is poem on Flaubert ended with Flaubert dying, and in the first draft it went 'Till the mania for phrases dried his heart' --a quotation from Flaubert's mother. Then Cal saw another possibility and it came out 'Till the mania for phrases enlarged his heart.'"

Another critic, responding in 1974 to The Dolphin, imagined the poet summarizing his working method: "Here are the facts, dreams, events, whatever; I present them; they are unimportant, incomprehensible, and boring."

Here I am compelled to record that I searched on the internet for more writing on "robert lowell flaubert". But having accidentally searched Merriam-Webster instead of Google, the only result I got was the suggestion "reprehensibilities".

So without quite knowing what, I move to share.






Hospital in Bridgeport where Lowell was treated after US entered World War II