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When a structure tends to be paratactic, the sequence of thematic units hardly plays any role in it, while a “frame” arranged ensures the conclusiveness of a poem; the principle of sequential structure (temporal or logical) does not have its own terminal point, so that closure must be secured by other structural principle or through other special terminal features, like nonliterary discourse.
In this paper, I firstly attempt to use the techniques introduced in Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End to analyze how Lowell leads readers to the closures of his poems, then to clarify the ambiguity of the relationship between his poems and the respective endings.
3. Robert Lowell and His Closures
Besides recognized as an autobiographical, Lowell’s works, even the poems which are not about his personal life, connect closely with Robert Lowell’s life experience. The epic poet’s art and life were inseparably intertwined. Therefore, the key to understand Lowell’s works is to know his life, in order to access to the real intentions lying inside of his art.
3.1 The Poet
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 1, 1917, Robert Lowell was in a prestigious family. The Lowells were a Boston Brahmin family that included poets Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell; Civil War General and war hero Charles Russell Lowell, and many more prominent figures craved in the American history. Although having a prestigious family which naturally gave him the opportunities to go to the prominent prep-school – St. Mark’s school, later in Harvard College and Kenyon College, to get suggestions from Robert Frost and to study under John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, by developing and using his own talent of imagination which is included in the gift of being a poet, Robert Lowell established his own prominent position in the history of American literature: he was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948, and then he won the Pulitzer Prize in both 1947 and 1974, the National Book Award in 1960, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977.
The themes in Lowell’s poetry are profoundly considered obvious but obscure, which makes any form of setting his position in literature history seems unfair, imprecise and flawed. One may call his early poetry religious. In his early years, as in the devotion to Catholics, his poems are mainly seemed religiously themed. Due to family history, Robert Lowell had a natural connection with religion. There are some prominent religious figures on his mother’s side: Jonathan Edwards, the famed Calvinist theologian; Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan preacher and healer. Lowell wrote a lot of poems concerning them, especially Jonathan Edwards, who had strong influence on Lowell. Although born as an Episcopalian, later, partly out of being rebellious against his parents, Lowell once converted to Catholicism with his first wife. The first peak of Lowell’s poetry reached by Lord Weary’s Castle, exploring the dark side of puritanism. Yet his most celebrated poems of those are hardly with a single theme. Religious elements mixed with the concern for the modern world, catholic frame constructed with contemporary thoughts – Lowell’s readers never grow bored.
Later, Lowell started to write quite amount of poems about his own experience, especially after Lord Weary’s Castle, thus since then he was seen as an “autobiographical poet”. Lowell believes in “the artist’s existence becomes his art,” although the style of his art altered radically over the years, its essentially experiential character remained. “What made the earlier poems valuable seems to be some recording of experience and that seems to be what makes the later ones.” Lowell once remarked. Instead of what happened to him, “experience” here truly means the combination of relations and interactions between psyche and environment around Lowell. In his autobiographical dense-with –novelistic-detail free verse of Life Studies, and more other poems, the experience of Lowell is being spreading, not just as the life stories, but the emotions and the contemporary existed world appearance.