Search

This article discusses the literary career of poet Robert Lowell and his works. Near the middle of Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead, a new trope appears, one that will continue in several successive books, particularly those whose poems are often presented as daily notes--Notebook 1967-68, Notebook, History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin. Following the poems of optical, epidermal, and neural sensitivity--Night Sweat, The Lesson, The Neo-Classical Urn, and Eye and Tooth--come poems of travel in which journeys appear as new contexts for that sensitization: Going To and Fro, Returning, Buenos Aires, and Dropping South: Brazil, present the strained, introspective speaker of Lowell's breakthrough phase, introduced in Life Studies, as increasingly vulnerable to and destabilized by the duress of travel. The rhetoric becomes murkier, the speaker more disoriented, as he moves from his center of gravity in New England. In Lowell, the disorientation of travel became a metaphor for, if not often a cause of, the disorientation of psychological illness. From this phase until the end of Lowell's life, travel was a texture used to generate fractured narratives of the troubled traveler's ego.