… why do so few of his vast number of poems—his Collected Poems runs to nearly 1,000 pages—stay in mind? Perhaps the best explanation came from F.W. Dupee, the critic who for many years taught at Columbia, who regretted Lowell’s abandoning his earlier structured—by meter and rime—poems for more loosely formed verse, influenced by William Carlos Williams, that he seemed to be able to turn out by the bushel. In his earlier poems, Dupee declared, Lowell "wrote as if poetry were still a major art and not merely a venerable pastime which ought to be perpetuated." Dupee found, as do I, something "inconclusive" about Lowell’s poetry, of which he asks: "Where, as Henry James would inquire, is your denouement?" In much of Lowell’s poetry one encounters the interesting image (he called Ford Madox Ford's novel The Good Soldier the best French novel in the English language), the arresting phrase (his poem "For Santayana" ends, "There is no God and Mary is his mother") but never at a poem’s conclusion that marvelous click that signals perfection.
In a review of Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth, Wilfrid Sheed mentions that Lowell often spoke of a poet's best lines--Yeats's or Frost's, or his or his friends'--and that this was perhaps a reason that Sheed didn't find Lowell's poems that satisfactory: the lines were fine, but were like all-star teams that hadn't practiced together.
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