Robert Lowell's career as a poet moderated or wavered between his natural inclination towards symbolic formalism and his courtship of confessional free verse…. He would not have smarted at being called the heir of the French Symbolists, or more exactly of the Parnassians…. The Parnassians are neglected in favour of the Symbolists, but their standards of formal beauty and objective, often descriptive, verse found for a while a remarkable inheritor in Lowell. Just as the Parnassians both developed and reacted against the extravagances of the great Romantics … [so] Lowell seemed to stand out for an impersonal rhetoric and conventional forms against the free verse utterances that the age had licensed.

My comparison is validated by the belief that when Lowell came to revise Notebook (1969) for History (1973), he gave it what he regarded as a "noble ordonnance", a chronological arrangement, in the gratifying awareness that [José María de...