“Were we uncomfortable epigoni of Frost, Pound, Eliot, Marianne Moore, etc?” Robert Lowell muses in his memoir of John Berry-man. Reading Lowell’s Collected Prose, I marveled at the way each generation feels overshadowed by the generation that preceded it. A decade after his death, Lowell seems even larger now than he did when he was a living presence on the scene, our greatest poet. His work resonates with undiminished force; it appears out of another world. I was struck by how old-fashioned, how rare and archaic his erudition must sound to a contemporary reader. Page after page of effortless discourse on such matters as the merits of various English translations of Ovid from the Renaissance to our own day; the problems of translating Phèdre; the character of the “woman-shy man” in French literature, in Racine, Constant, Stendhal: there’s no impulse to show off in these references, none of the amateur scholar’s need to establish credentials. A classical education acquired at St. Mark’s School, in his year at Harvard, and at Kenyon, where John Crowe Ransom encouraged him to study Latin and Greek, was Lowell’s training for poetry. “It is hard for me [now] to imagine a poet not interested in the classics,” he wrote in his memoir of Ransom. For Lowell, the study of languages was a primary aspect of the poet’s vocation; it served to place him, to put his own work in a literary context, a tradition.

Do I idealize the recent literary past?