Our longing for literature has the force of a prejudice, and to account for both the mystery and method of that prejudice we need a distinguishing case. Since Robert Lowell’s death in 1977, his reputation has suffered a slow-motion collapse. Even the most distinguished poets are eclipsed by death (we are as worn out by the mediocrity of the bad as by the brutal magnificence of the good). It is a shallow thing, reputation, and its standing before death bears little relation to its standing afterward. This would amuse a family with the long history of the Lowells: such a family can wait for the justice of history, if history is just.

Lowell was the form and the shadow of postwar poetry. Lord Weary’s Castle shaped the mannerisms of the Fifties, and the Sixties were a long footnote (we are still writing that footnote) to Life Studies. This simplifies the sources and ignores the exceptions, but for forty years after Lord WearyLowell was the poet who troubled the sleep of other poets. The great modernists who preceded him have also been dead twenty years or more, and we live in the diminished landscape after such genius. Those who believe we are in a major phase of American poetry have closed their ears to the past. We must retire the past to prepare a revival, however, and perhaps we should be grateful that for all its suppressed power Lowell’s poetry has been rendered mortal by disfavor, by