SOURCE: "Aspects of Robert Lowell," in Commonweal, December 9, 1977, pp. 783-8.

In the following essay, Druska provides an overview of Lowell's literary career, artistic development, and major themes in his poetry.

I. His Career

The speaker of Robert Lowell's "In the American Grain" (History) announces at the close of the poem

     (') I am not William Carlos Williams. He
     knew the germ on every flower, and saw
     the snake is a petty, rather pathetic creature.'

Whether or not the speaker is Lowell—the poem is a direct quote, perhaps a letter to him—the sentiment is rarely his. Snakes, dragons, other biblical and/or allusive figures haunt Lowell's pages. In the early poems of Land of Unlikeness and Lord Weary's Castle he writes this most emblematic. "No ideas but in things," Williams proclaimed. Lowell's first works, for which he has lionized by much of the critical establishment, might...