W.C.  Brownell, the latest critic of Lowell’s poetry, says of this poem:  “The ode is too long, its evolution is defective, it contains verbiage, it preaches.  But passages of it—­the most famous having characteristically been interpolated after its delivery—­are equal to anything of the kind.  The temptation to quote from it is hard to withstand.  It is the cap-sheaf of Lowell’s achievement.”  In this ode “he reaches, if he does not throughout maintain, his own ‘clear-ethered height’ and his verse has the elevation of ecstasy and the splendor of the sublime.”

The versification of this poem should be studied with some particularity.  Of the forms of lyric expression the ode is the most elaborate and dignified.  It is adapted only to lofty themes and stately occasions.  Great liberty is allowed in the choice and arrangement of its meter, rhymes, and stanzaic forms, that its varied form and movement may follow the changing phases of the sentiment and passion called forth by the theme.  Lowell has given us an account of his own consideration of this matter.  “My problem,” he says, “was to contrive a measure which should not be tedious by uniformity, which should vary with varying moods, in which the transitions (including those of the voice) should be managed without jar.  I at first thought of mixed rhymed and blank verses of unequal measures, like those in the choruses of Samson Agonistes, which are in the main masterly.  Of course, Milton deliberately departed from that stricter form of Greek chorus to which it was bound quite as much (I suspect) by the law of its musical accompaniment as by any sense of symmetry.  I wrote some stanzas of the Commemoration Ode on this theory at first, leaving some verses without a rhyme to match.  But my ear was better pleased when the rhyme, coming at a longer interval, as a far-off echo rather than instant reverberation, produced the same effect almost, and yet was gratified by unexpectedly recalling an association and faint reminiscence of consonance.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Horace E. Scudder:  James Russell Lowell:  A Biography. 2 vols.  The standard biography.

Ferris Greenslet:  James Russell Lowell:  His Life and Work.  The latest biography (1905) and very satisfactory.

Francis H. Underwood:  James Russell Lowell:  A Biographical Sketch and Lowell the Poet and the Man.  Interesting recollections of a personal friend and editorial associate.

Edward Everett Hale:  Lowell and His Friends.

Edward Everett Hale, Jr.:  James Russell Lowell. (Beacon
Biographies.)

Charles Eliot Norton:  Letters of James Russell Lowell. 2 vols. 
Invaluable and delightful.

Edmund Clarence Stedman:  Poets of America.

W.C.  Brownell:  James Russell Lowell. (Scribner’s Magazine, February, 1907.) The most recent critical estimate.