My mind was elsewhere – over and over, I kept hearing in my head the disincarnated phrase "Everything ends in the body." I was wondering if I would ever get a chance to stand moodily, theatrically in front of a group of students and to say "We see through a class darkly." I was thinking about the essay I want to write about Mick and I was remembering our gloomy salad days together. I was.... Well, the usual kind of stuff, then.

Medical Foundation

As I waited alone for the doctor in the white and beige cube, I glanced up at a rack full of handouts on the consulting room wall. I saw "BEG" in bold caps. No, not "BEG", it was actually "EEG". Below that, on the wall there was a picture of the Duchess of Cornwall wincing and holding her wrist up to illustrate the pain of CTS. No, it was… someone else, less well-known. My eyes kept travelling. I saw "Nick Exercises". No, it was "Neck exercises."

Gym

As I watched Owen doing straddle-rolls and cartwheels, my attention wandered and I thought I caught sight of a young teacher, idling against a wall, writing "God" and drawing a star in the sunlit dust on a mattress. No, it was "Gold" she was tracing out, and a crude star.

Freeway

In the middle lane I came floating round a long right turn on 101 near San Carlos, and there, at the start of the marshland that runs from the side of the road, was the hoarding for the Giants. It showed a vast man in an "SF" cap and a white polo-shirt, with headphones on and a mic at his mouth. Next to him was the logo, "I want whiners!" I did a double-take, frowned, and returned my gaze to the river of road ahead. Then I looked back again. No, it was "I want winners!"

Church

The violin school semi-annual concert. Hugo had already played his solo piece and was slouched in the pew beside us. I was trying dutifully to focus on an overweight teenager as she sawed flatly away at something by Vivaldi. I looked up at the lofty windows of All Saints, gleaming with the afternoon sunlight of the photographer's "golden hour". Imagine my silent alarm when I glimpsed a jay high above nervously butting its head against the glass, trying to get out of the building, fleeing the sound of Vivaldi. Oh, no. The bird was outside, trying to get in.

Street

We came out of the Creamery. It was getting a bit cold and dark. We strolled. At the corner of Hamilton and Something, we had the light and we started to walk. Nonetheless, a prissy-looking middle-aged motorist in his sky-blue Prius suddenly appeared, gingerly chopped in front of us, realized what he had done but decided to go for it nonetheless. Mouth-pursed, slowly, determinedly, as if he were abroad and felt that an uncouth local were about to grab for his purse, he rounded the turn, his right tyres not far from our shoes. As the car slowed but kept moving, the passengers in the cabin (seemingly dressed up for a night at a concert and a meal at a good restaurant afterwards), were startled to see a middle-aged white man, hair rather wild, out in the street peering into their cabin, giving them a mildly odd, mildly unhinged smile, barking an incomprehensible phrase and waving at them something that might have been a peace sign. "On" something, no doubt....

[note: In what follows I have provided in parentheses, after the name of just about each of the individuals mentioned, the unique "I" number which the "Family Ghosts" database assigns to each person in its records. For example, George Washington is "(I5457)". Anyone who visits the "Family Ghosts" website can type the relevant "I" number into the search box at the top right of the home page to go directly to the site's record for that individual. Alternatively, readers can click on the links below here, which will diagram Robert Lowell's relationship to the person in question.]

"All that I know…"

The more middle-aged I grow, the more Socratic I get. Well, at least in one way. That is to say, the more I read, the more I realize that "All that I know is that I know nothing" (Ἓν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα; Socrates cited in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, bk. 2 sec. 32). Or, to put it another way, less elegantly but perhaps also more realistically, "all that I know is that I have probably forgotten whatever it was." Middle-age is the opening up of vast new, and previously unsuspected, areas of cognitive darkness, before and behind you. It is like standing at the ship's rail at midnight and staring out at the sea. In this chilling psychic obscurity you quickly come to understand that the dark, cold, unfathomable, glinting ocean of ignorance in your head stretches everywhere further, over remoter, less knowable horizons than your inner eye can even discern.

I am therefore an averagely compulsive, averagely panicky user of Wikipedia to check up in a pinch on facts, people, dates. But how much good does it really do? I've come to feel that "All that I know is that after consulting Wikipedia I still know virtually nothing." Take an instance. I've been reading a lot of Robert Lowell's poetry recently. Here is my good friend Wikipedia on Lowell.

"Lowell was born in Boston, Massachusetts to a Boston Brahmin family that included the poets Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell. His mother, Charlotte Winslow, was a descendant of William Samuel Johnson, a signer of the United States Constitution, Jonathan Edwards, the famed Calvinist theologian, Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan preacher and healer, Robert Livingston the Elder, Thomas Dudley, the second governor of Massachusetts, and Mayflower passengers James Chilton and his daughter Mary Chilton."

Robert Lowell's own immediate, "nuclear" family circumstances were slightly constrained, parched and limited. He was the only child of a father, who was himself an only child and who never knew his own father. But perhaps more than any other poet Lowell pushed the "family experience" into the centre of modern poetry's usable subject matter. Following M. L. Rosenthal, critics often casually label Lowell one of the first "confessional poets." It is just as true, and more meaningful, to say that he is one of the first strong "familial poets."

This is paradoxical because in many ways, not least in its extraordinary historical lustre, Lowell's family was not like most others. Just because he was a poet, his own sense of family lineage was intense and conflicted. He sometimes claimed a lack of interest. "Sorry for all this family business," he wrote to Giovanna Madonia in a letter of March 1954, "I too find it tiresome and alien." But at moments of (literary and/or psychological) crisis and breakthrough, his fascination with his own genealogical past was radiant. At the time in the mid-1950s when he was writing the family poems included in Life Studies, he revelled in the experience of uncovering his roots. "I had a little ancestor-worshipping spree the other day," he told his cousin once removed Harriet Patterson Winslow (I6828) in February 1956,

"and read up all we had in the house written by ancestors, and even worked out on four type-written pages my family tree. How quickly it all runs into the sands of the unknown. What sort of man was my Grandfather Lowell, who died in his twenties, leaving only a Phi Beta Kappa key, a photograph, his name on a wall at St. Mark's School? He had been married only a few months, and Daddy, his first child was not yet born. There are many of these wistful early deaths; Sarah Stark, poor Julian-James, not an ancestor but my patron, and benefactor, as Dickens would say."

Indeed almost certainly one of those books which Lowell "read up" was Biographical Sketches of the Bailey-Myers-Mason Families, 1776 to 1905: Key to a Cabinet of Heirlooms in the National Museum, Washington (1908), a partial family history written by his first cousin twice removed, Cassie Mason Myers Julian-James (I6760). The volume forms the cumbrous foil against which the whole of the later, familial sections of Life Studies are constructed.

Wikipedia's entry is alert to Lowell's historical version of the "family romance". However, for people such as me the plethora of famous names it spills out in its entry on the poet generates not clarity but a new degree of nebulousness. A bit more information actually makes one feel less learned. The glamorous Lowellian ancestors are invoked but simultaneously surrounded by a haze of uncertainty. Lowell? A descendent of Anne Hutchinson? But how exactly? Lowell? A descendent of Mary Chilton? But how exactly? In the extended Winslow family Mary Chilton's mythic status is, to cite Lowell's words in a draft of his unpublished autobiography, that of "the first woman from the Mayflower to have stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock". American history was family history. Family history was American history. Perhaps because of this very mythic centrality, obscurity still swirls around the Lowell/Winslow past like fog around a rock.

I decided that I could not just leave it to Wikipedia. Or to anyone else. I needed to do some leg- (and arm-) work myself. Here are the notes I brought back from my trek. It has been possible to identify 26 out of his 30 immediate ancestors: see this map of RL's immediate ancestry. The notes constitute a modest attempt to sponsor a higher degree of factual, historical precision in future discussions of Lowell's family romance. Thus, my findings slightly extend knowledge of Lowell's family connections amongst the "Mayflower | screwballs" and many others besides, including American Jews.

My investigation complements and extends the excellent notations by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter in Lowell's Collected Poems as well as those by Saskia Hamilton in her masterful edition of Lowell's Letters and by Hamilton and Thomas Travisano in their recently-published collection of Lowell's and Elizabeth Bishop's correspondence, Words in Air.

I might as well begin with the Wikipedia entry, since that is what started the whole story.

Lowell's Wikipedia entry -- facts

Robert Lowell was related to all the figures Wikipedia mentions, though it never explains in any case how he was. Here are the filled-in gaps:

Amy Lowell (I6598), 1874-1925, poet, Amy Lowell's great-grandfather and Robert Lowell's great-great-grandfather were stepbrothers: that is, both were sons of Hon. John Lowell II, 1743-1802 (I6584) -- relation to RL

James Russell Lowell (I6616), 1819-1891, poet, Robert Lowell's great-granduncle -- relation to RL

William Samuel Johnson (I6649), 1727-1819, Lowell's four times great-grandfather -- relation to RL

Rev. Jonathan Edwards (I6719), 1703-1758, Lowell's five times great-grandfather -- relation to RL

Anne Hutchinson (I6724), 1591-1643, Lowell's eight times great-grandmother -- relation to RL

Robert Livingston the Elder (I6839), 1654-1728, Lowell's seven times great-grandfather -- relation to RL

Gov. Thomas Dudley (I5553), 1576-1653, Lowell's nine times great-grandfather -- relation to RL

James Chilton (I6574), about 1556-1620, Lowell's eight times great-grandfather -- relation to RL

Mary Chilton (I6573), 1605-1679, Lowell's seven times great-grandmother -- relation to RL

Does it matter?

In two distinct ways the thinking of literary scholars about how biography integrates into contemporary literary scholarship has changed. First, biography is no longer archaic. Second (and because this change of mind abut the genre is not a mere return to the past) biography is not now simply the telling of an individual life-story but instead something more extended in social or geographical space or more broadly diffused through historical time.

Moreover, while a biographical datum never fixes or limits the meaning of a poem, it can be a crucial stimulus to interpretation. Some of the information that I offer here extends not just biographical but poetic understanding (if, that is, these two entities can ever be separated in Lowell's case).

For an example, take "Hudson River Dream", an enigmatic -- and for that reason little-discussed -- poem from History (1973). In the dream that the poem describes Lowell's "mother" and "her mother" are with him in a "very small sailboat" as it drifts down the Hudson which, according to oneiric logic, is "twice as wide as it is, wide as the Mississippi." In the dream Charlotte Lowell is "one-eighth Jewish, and her mother two-eighths" ( Collected Poems, p. 521). All a fantasy of the unconscious? Apparently referring to New York and Schenectady's Captain Mordecai Myers (I6754), 1776-1871, Lowell's great-great-grandfather (relation to RL), the notes in the back of the Collected Poems state that the poet's "Jewish ancestors are on his father's side" (p. 1106). But this declaration needs to be qualified. Lowell's dream about "trees" (perhaps including, one can now see, "family trees") is in fact largely factual at least about his relations.

Charlotte Winslow's great-grandfather was Judge Moses Mordecai (I6709), 1785-1824 (relation to RL), a Jewish lawyer and magistrate from Raleigh, North Carolina. (The southern roots of this ancestor perhaps account for Lowell's metonymic relation in "Hudson River Dream" of his mother and her mother to the archetypal Southern river, the Mississippi.) Lowell was almost right about his grandmother, Mary Livingston Devereux (I6551), 1866-1944 (relation to RL), who was a grandchild of Moses Mordecai. Mordecai married a Gentile, Ann Willis Lane (I6710), 1794-1854.

Knowing about Lowell's Jewish ancestors is informative but also suggestive, if only because it offers a counterframe to the conventional WASP New England world into which Lowell is normally fitted. You change the context and you change the object in that context. Moreover, one of the most important artists amongst Lowell's ancestors was a Jew. Judge Moses Mordecai, just mentioned, was the grandson of Myer Myers, (I7083) 1723-1795 (relation to RL), one of the most prolific silversmiths in colonial New York, and apparently the first Jew to train in the city at the craft or art. Myer Myers was Lowell's four times great-grandfather, through his mother's side of the family. Lowell had illustrious Jewish ancestors on both sides of his family.

Remoter ancestry -- Lowell the Plantagenet

The elites of the New World were deeply interwoven with the elites of the Old World. Robert Lowell's distant ancestry demonstrates the point. The 20th century poet was (like W. H. Auden) a direct descendant of Henry II (I1280), 1133-1189, the first Plantagenet king of England, and of every subsequent Plantagenet king down to Edward III (I1268), 1312-1377. He was descended from Henry II on both his father's side (relation between Henry II and RL through his father) and on his mother's side (relation between Henry II and RL). Lowell was a direct descendent of Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou (I1282), 1113-1151, the founder of the Plantagenet dynasty, by multiple routes, including through Geoffrey's heir, Henry II, and through Geoffrey's illegitimate son, Hamelin, Earl of Surrey (I7257).

Colonial- and revolutionary-periods American history

Lowell's father's family is known primarily for its extraordinary part in the history of 19th century Massachusetts and especially of Boston. However, as Ian Hamilton wrote, Robert Lowell's father belonged to a "relatively humble station in the Lowell clan… the poor (i.e., merely comfortably off) branch of the Lowells -- priests and poets figured prominently among his immediate forebears…. The Lowell millions, though, were elsewhere, with the bankers and the lawyers and the cotton magnates." But in addition to those figures, such as Mary Chilton and Jonathan Edwards, mentioned above, on both his father's and his mother's sides Lowell was related to a number of very important actors in colonial- and revolutionary-period American history. It was a fact that Lowell was quite apparently quite aware of. For example, he told Bishop in 1947 that he had "won [Ezra Pound's] heart by telling him that I was a collateral descendent of Aaron Burr" (Words in Air, p. 15).

Here (in alphabetical order), starting with Burr, are some of the other significant figures in Lowell's family past:

Aaron Burr (I7026), 1756-1836, vice-president of the United States, Lowell's first cousin five times removed -- relation to RL

William Constable (I7100), 1752-1803, one of the land speculators involved in the gigantic "Macomb Purchase" in New York State in 1791, Lowell's three times great-grandfather -- relation to RL

James Duane (I7090), 1733-1797, the first post-Revolutionary mayor of New York City, Lowell's four times great-grandfather -- relation to RL

John Jay (I6877), 1745-1829, first Chief Justice of the United States, the husband of Sarah Van Brugh Livingston (I6876), 1756-1802, Lowell's first cousin six times removed -- relation to RL

Philip Livingston (I6842), 1716-1778, signatory of the Declaration of Independence, Lowell's six times great uncle -- relation to RL

Robert R. Livingston (I6852), 1746-1813, member of the Committee of Five which drafted the wording of the Declaration of Independence, negotiator with France of the Louisiana Purchase, Lowell's second cousin six times removed -- relation to RL

Gov. William Livingston (I6874), 1723-1790, signatory of the United States Constitution, first post-Revolutionary governor of New Jersey, Lowell's six times great uncle -- relation to RL

President George Washington (I5457), 1732-1799, first President of the United States, Lowell's eighth cousin, seven times removed -- relation to RL

Gov. Edward Winslow (I6799), 1595-1655, third governor of the Plymouth Colony, Lowell's eight times great uncle -- relation to RL

Gov. Josiah Winslow (I6945), 1629-1680, 13th governor of the Plymouth Colony, Lowell's first cousin eight times removed -- relation to RL

Relation to the Roosevelts -- family business

A feedback loop was established between Lowell's awareness of his family history and his behaviour in the present. His conduct and attitudes were predicated on his sense of the tradition to which he had to live up. Though, arguably, the wearily, ruefully seigneurial tone struck in so much of Lowell's poetry is predicated on his sense of himself as a kind of fallen aristocrat, the most striking single instance of the noblesse oblige attitude comes at the time of his refusal to be drafted in 1943. In his [5 or] 7 September 1943 letter to President Roosevelt, Lowell declared to the President that he was conscious of being one those privileged Americans whose "family traditions, like your own, have always found their fulfillment in maintaining, through responsible participation in both the civil and the military services, our country's freedom and honor." (Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 37-40; citation from p. 38). In fact, since the families making up the country's patrician elite was so densely intermarried, Lowell and President and Mrs. Roosevelt were all distant relations of one another.

Lowell was the sixth cousin once removed of Eleanor Roosevelt (I6741), 1884-1962 -- relation to RL

He was the seventh cousin once removed of Franklin D. Roosevelt (I6740), 1882-1945, the 32nd President -- relation to RL

Franklin D. Roosevelt (I6740) and Eleanor Roosevelt (I6741) were sixth cousins once removed (relation between FDR and ER)

To gauge the relative degree of Lowell's family closeness to President Roosevelt, consider that Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd President, was a fifth cousin of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (I6782), 1858-1919, the 26th President (relation between TR and FDR). The two Presidents are often described as being part of a single political dynasty. But they were not much more closely (or distantly) related to one another than Lowell was to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. were fifth cousins. As noted, Lowell was a sixth cousin once removed of Eleanor Roosevelt and a seventh cousin once removed of her husband. The tone in Lowell's "manic statement" is founded on his idealistic and unpractical sense of belonging to the country's elite in the same way that the President himself did.

Incidentally, culture, political power, religious eminence and money being always and everywhere intertwined, it is worth noting that Lowell was the sixth cousin once removed of Henry Sturgis Morgan (I5920), 1900-1982, founder of the investment bank Morgan Stanley (and he was thus the fifth cousin twice removed of John Pierpont Morgan, Jr. (I5919), 1867-1943, and the fourth cousin three times removed of John Pierpont Morgan, Sr. (I5926), 1837-1913) -- relation to RL

Ancestors and relations mentioned in Lowell's poems and letters

The notes in this section of my post diagram Lowell's relation to all of the ancestors and relations whom he mentions in his poems and in the two published editions of his letters that I referred to above. Some of the names cited here have already been cited above, but they are included here for the sake of completeness and focus. The names are listed in alphabetical order of last name, with the person's name being given in the form in which it is conventionally presented by critics and biographers in works on Lowell.

W. H. Auden (I5), 1907-1973, Auden and Lowell were 18th cousins once removed; almost certainly neither was aware of the connection; for poems by Lowell in which Auden features, see "Since 1939", "Truth" (in "Leaving America for England"), "The Spell" -- relation to RL

Charlotte Bailey (I6755), 1796-1848, Lowell's great-great-grandmother; see the poetic memoir "91 Revere Street" -- relation to RL

Caroline Blackwood (I6511), 1931-1996, Lowell's third wife; see the poems "Redcliffe Square", "Caroline", "Fall Weekend at Milgate", "Marriage", "Leaving America for England", "Flight to New York", "Milgate", "Suburban Surf", "Seventh Year", "Caroline in Sickness", "Three Freuds", "Summer Tides", and others; see also Letters of Robert Lowell, passim; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, pp. 682 ff. -- relation to RL

Aaron Burr (I7026), 1756-1836, Lowell's first cousin five times removed, see above; see also the poems "Three Poems 2. River Harbor"; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, p. 15 -- relation to RL

Mary Chilton (I6573) 1605-1679, Lowell's seven times great-grandmother, see above; see also the poem "At the Indian Killer's Grave" -- relation to RL

Evgenia Citkowitz (I6543), (b. 1964), Lowell's stepdaughter; see the poem "Summer Tides"; Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 548 ff. -- relation to RL

Ivana Citkowitz (I6544), b. 1966, known as Ivana Lowell, Lowell's stepdaughter; see the poems "Another Summer", "Summer Tides"; Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 548 ff.; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, pp. 704-05 -- relation to RL

Natalya Citkowitz (I6542), 1960-1978, Lowell's stepdaughter; see the poem "Summer Tides"; Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 548 ff. -- relation to RL

Charles Edward Cotting (I7031), b. 1889, Lowell's uncle, married to Lowell's aunt, Sarah Winslow Cotting (I6786); Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, p. 48 -- relation to RL

Sarah Winslow Cotting (I6786), about 1893-1992, Lowell's aunt; see the poem "For Aunt Sarah"; Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 12 ff.; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, pp. 48, 237, 777 -- relation to RL

Jonathan Edwards (I6719), 1703-1758, Lowell's five times great-grandfather, see above; see also the poems "Mr. Edwards and the Spider", "After the Surprising Conversions", "Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts" and "The Worst Sinner, Jonathan Edwards' God"; Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 79, 80-1, 279, 519 -- relation to RL

T. S. Eliot (I5821), 1888-1965, Lowell and Eliot were seventh cousins twice removed, as in the case of the relation between Auden and Lowell (see above), almost certainly neither Lowell nor Eliot was aware of this connection; see the poem "For T. S. Eliot" -- relation to RL

Elizabeth Hardwick (I6560), 1916-2007, Lowell's second wife; see the poems "Home After Three Months Away", "Man and Wife", "New York 1962: Fragment", "Near the Ocean", "Summer", "New York", "Circles", "Records", "Communication", "In the Mail", "During a Transatlantic Call", "Exorcism", "The Couple", "Artist's Model", "Marriage", "Foxfur", "On the End of the Phone", "Off Central Park", "Loneliness", and others; Letters of Robert Lowell, passim; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, passim -- relation to RL

Joseph Hawley (I6952), about 1693-1735, Lowell's seven times great uncle; see the poem "After the Surprising Conversions" -- relation to RL

Julian James (I6761), 1844-1870, James was the wife of Lowell's first cousin twice removed, Cassie Mason Myers Julian-James (I6760), 1851-1922; see Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 254 -- relation to RL

Robert R. Livingston (I6852), 1746-1813, Lowell's second cousin six times removed, see above; see also the poetic memoir "91 Revere Street" -- relation to RL

Abbott Lawrence Lowell (I6596), 1856-1943, his great-grandfather and Robert Lowell's great-great-grandfather were stepbrothers (both were sons of Hon. John Lowell II (I6584), 1743-1802); see the poetic memoir "91 Revere Street" and the poem "Ford Madox Ford"; Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 19, 24-5, 265 -- relation to RL

Amy Lowell (I6598), 1874-1925, see above, her great-grandfather and Robert Lowell's great-great-grandfather were stepbrothers (both were sons of Hon. John Lowell II (I6584), 1743-1802); see the poetic memoir "91 Revere Street"; Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 3, 79, 269-70; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, pp. 194, 198 -- relation to RL (Curiously, Robert Lowell was a third cousin, four times removed of another poet or lyricist, some of whose words are far better-known than Amy Lowell's, James Russell Lowell's or Robert Lowell's: James Lord Pierpont (I7414), 1822-1893, was the author of "Jingle Bells" -- relation to RL)

Augustus Lowell (I6592), 1830-1900, Lowell's great-great-great-grandfather, Hon. John Lowell II (I6584), 1743-1802, was the great-grandfather of Augustus Lowell; see the poem "Bright Day in Boston" -- relation to RL

Rev. Charles Russell Lowell, Sr. (I6897), 1782-1861, Lowell's great-great-grandfather, minister of West Church, Boston; see the poetic memoir "91 Revere Street" -- relation to RL

Brig. Gen. Charles Russell Lowell III (I6899), 1835-1864, Lowell's first cousin twice removed; see the poem "Colonel Charles Russell Lowell 1835-64"; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, p. 572 -- relation to RL

Harriet Winslow Lowell (I6561), b. 1957, Lowell and Hardwick's daughter; see the poems "During Fever", "Home After Three Months Away", "Memories of West Street and Lepke", "Summer", "New York", "Mexico", "Circles", "Late Summer", "Hospital II", "Records", "In Harriet's Yearbook", "Communication", "In the Mail", "Winter and London", "Summer Tides", and others; Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 268 ff.; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, pp. 192 ff. -- relation to RL

James Russell Lowell (I6616), 1819-1891, Lowell's great-granduncle, see above; see also the poetic memoir "91 Revere Street" and the poems "Hawthorne", "Ford Madox Ford"; Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 79; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, pp. 170, 618 -- relation to RL

Percival Lawrence Lowell (I6594), 1855-1916, his great-grandfather and Robert Lowell's great-great-grandfather were stepbrothers (both were sons of Hon. John Lowell II (I6584), 1743-1802); see Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 269-70, 652; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, p. 194 -- relation to RL

Ralph Lowell (I7160), 1890-1978, both he and Robert Lowell were three times great-grandsons, through different wives, of Hon. John Lowell II (I6584), 1743-1802; see Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 165, 216-17 -- relation to RL

Rev. Robert Traill Spence Lowell, Sr. (I6580), 1816-1891, Lowell's great-grandfather; see Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 245, 512; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, p. 214 -- relation to RL

Robert Traill Spence Lowell, Jr. (I6578), 1860-1887, Lowell's grandfather, see Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 254 -- relation to RL

Robert Traill Spence Lowell III (I6549), 1887-1950, Lowell's father; see the poems "Rebellion", "91 Revere Street", "Dunbarton", "Commander Lowell", "Terminal Days at Beverly Farms", "Father's Bedroom", "Middle Age", "Anne Dick 1. 1936", "Father", "Mother and Father 1", "Mother and Father 2", "Returning", "Father in a Dream", "To Daddy", "Robert T. S. Lowell", "Unwanted", and many others; Letters of Robert Lowell, passim; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, pp. 70, 108, 214 -- relation to RL

Sheridan Lowell (I6546), Lowell's and Blackwood's son; see the poems "Marriage", "Another Summer", "Sheridan", "For Sheridan", "Summer Tides", and others; Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 576 ff.; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, pp. 692 ff. -- relation to RL

Lieut. Commander Theodorus Bailey Myers Mason (I6758), 1849-1899, son of Col. Theodorus Bailey Myers (I6756) and Lowell's first cousin twice removed, founder of the US Office of Naval Intelligence; see the poetic memoir "91 Revere Street" -- relation to RL

Capt. Mordecai Myers (I6754) 1776-1871, Lowell's great-great-grandfather; see the poetic memoir "91 Revere Street" (Myers's father, Lowell's three times great-grandfather, who is mentioned but unnamed in "91 Revere Street", was Myer Benjamin (or Benjamin Myers), about 1723-1776); Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 255 -- relation to RL

Col. Theodorus Bailey Myers (I6756), 1821-1887, Lowell's great-granduncle; see the poetic memoir "91 Revere Street" -- relation to RL

Mary Sophia Nelson (I6553) 1827-1903, Lowell's great-grandmother, mother of Arthur Winslow (I6550); see the poem "Dunbarton" -- relation to RL

Sarah Pierpont (I6720), 1709-1758, Lowell's five times great-grandmother; see the poem "Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts" -- relation to RL

Franklin D. Roosevelt (I6740), 1882-1945, Lowell's seventh cousin once removed, see above; see the poem "Memories of West Street and Lepke" -- relation to RL

Elizabeth Savage (I6567), 1704-1778, Lowell's four times great-grandmother; Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 255 -- relation to RL

Col. Robert Gould Shaw (I6903), 1837-1863, Civil War hero, brother-in-law of Brig. Gen. Charles Russell Lowell III (I6899), 1835-1864, Lowell's first cousin twice removed, who was married to Josephine Shaw (I6900), 1843-1905, the Progressive reformer, and R. G. Shaw's sister; see the poem "For the Union Dead"; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, p. 556 -- relation to RL

Jean Stafford (I6559), 1915-1979, Lowell's first wife; see the poems "The Old Flame", "Flight to New York", "Jean Stafford, a Letter"; Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 26 ff.; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, pp. 41 ff. -- relation to RL

Charlotte Stark (I7162), Lowell's three times great aunt; Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 241 -- relation to RL

Gen. John Stark (I6701), 1728-1822, Lowell's four times great-grandfather; see the poem "In Memory of Arthur Winslow" -- relation to RL

Sarah Stark (I6555), 1794-1819, Lowell's great-great-grandmother; Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 254 -- relation to RL

Alice Thorndike Winslow (I6708), 1895-1964, Lowell's aunt; in "My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow" -- relation to RL

Anne Goodwin Winslow (I6927), 1875-1959, also known as Anne Goodwin, poet, the wife of Lowell's third cousin, once removed, Brig. Gen. E. E. Winslow (I6926), 1866-1928; see Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 276; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, p. 202 -- relation to RL

Arthur Winslow (I6550), 1860-1938, Lowell's grandfather; see the poems "In Memory of Arthur Winslow", "Winter in Dunbarton", "91 Revere Street", "My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow", "Dunbarton", "Grandparents", "Two Farmers" and others; Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 13 ff. -- relation to RL

Carlile Winslow (I7164), about 1884-1960, Lowell's first cousin once removed; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, p. 48 -- relation to RL

Charlotte Winslow (I6548), 1888-1954, Lowell's mother; see the poetic memoir "91 Revere Street", and the poems "Commander Lowell", "Terminal Days at Beverly Farms", "For Sale", "Sailing Home from Rapallo", "During Fever", "Clytemnestra I", "Mother and Father 1", "Mother and Father 2", "Returning", "Mother, 1972", "Hudson River Dream", "To Mother", "Ten Minutes", "Unwanted", and others; Letters of Robert Lowell, passim; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, pp. 70, 126, 153 -- relation to RL

Devereux Winslow (I6707), 1892-1922, Lowell's uncle; see the poems "My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow" and "Dunbarton"; Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 299; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, p. 235 -- relation to RL

Gov. Edward Winslow (I6799), 1595-1655, Lowell's eight times great uncle, see above; see the poem "In Memory of Arthur Winslow" -- relation to RL

Edward Winslow (I6568), 1669-1753, Lowell's five times great-grandfather, high sheriff of Suffolk County, Massachusetts between 1728 and 1743; see the poems "In Memory of Arthur Winslow" and "Dunbarton" -- relation to RL

Francis Winslow (I6552), 1818-1862, Lowell's great-grandfather; see the poem "Dunbarton"; Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 255 -- relation to RL

Harriet Patterson Winslow (I6828), 1882-1964, Lowell's first cousin once removed; see the poems "Soft Wood", "Fourth of July in Maine"; Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 95 ff.; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, pp. 106 ff. -- relation to RL

John Winslow (I6572), 1597-1674, Lowell's seven times great-grandfather; see the poem "At the Indian Killer's Grave" -- relation to RL

Rear Admiral John Ancrum Winslow (I6795), 1811-1873, Lowell's first cousin three times removed, commander of the USS Kearsage during the Civil War; see the poem "Buttercups" -- relation to RL

Gov. Josiah Winslow (I6945), 1629-1680, Lowell's first cousin eight times removed, see above; see the poem "At the Indian Killer's Grave" -- relation to RL

Joshua Winslow (I6554), 1785-1838, Lowell's great-great-grandfather; see Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 255 -- relation to RL

Marcella Comès Winslow (I6929), 1891-1986, the wife of Col. Williamson Randolph Winslow (I6928), about 1901-1945, a fourth cousin of Lowell; Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 276; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, pp. 96, 100, 101 -- relation to RL

Mary Winslow, (I7163), about 1888-1952, Lowell's first cousin once removed; Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 131 -- relation to RL

Mary Devereux Winslow (I6551), 1866-1944, Lowell's grandmother; see the poem "Mary Winslow"; Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 12 ff. -- relation to RL

Natalie Hess Winslow (I7168), the wife of Lowell's first cousin once removed, Cameron McRae Winslow, Jr. (I6176); Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 255 [identification uncertain] -- relation to RL

Pearson Winslow (I6978), about 1893-1950, Lowell's first cousin once removed; Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 158; Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air, pp. 48, 106 -- relation to RL

Sarah Stark Winslow (I6789), d. after 1938, Lowell's great aunt; see the poetic memoir "91 Revere Street" and the poem "My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow" -- relation to RL

Lieut. Warren Winslow (I6785), about 1919-1944, Lowell's second cousin once removed; see the poem "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" -- relation to RL

Unidentified ancestors and relations of Robert Lowell

I have not been able to identify a few people whom Lowell mentions or alludes to in his works. They are:

Admiral Ledyard Atkinson and his wife a "Schenectady Hoes" in the poetic memoir "91 Revere Street", Collected Poems, pp. 144 ff.

Helen Bailey, in the poetic memoir "91 Revere Street", Collected Poems, pp. 122-23

"cousin" Alfred Lowell, in Letters of Robert Lowell, pp. 23, 680

John Stark, in Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 241

"Grandfather's Aunt Lottie", in the poem "Dunbarton", Collected Poems, p. 168

"Liz Ross Winslow", "Uncle John [Winslow]", "Mother [presumably, Winslow]", "Aunt Daisy Anne [presumably, Winslow]" and the speaker of "Winslows", in the poem "Winslows", Collected Poems, p. 636

Naval background

Pouring over Robert Lowell's ancestry raises some interesting patterns and themes into one's mind. Chief amongst those, at least for me, has been the pervasiveness of the American Navy as an institution in the families of both Lowell's father and mother. Even though Lowell believed, perhaps rightly, that his mother Charlotte Winslow Lowell (I6548) hated the Navy, she had two uncles and a grandfather in the service (one of the uncles, Cameron McRae Winslow (I6787) was a rear-admiral), and she commented bitterly she herself had been "brought up by Papá to be like a naval officer, to be ruthlessly neat."

Everywhere the eye gazes in Lowell's family history, there are connections of people with the sea. Here is what I have found (people are listed here by order of death-date):

Edward Winslow (1595-1655), governor of the Plymouth Colony, was Lowell's eight times great uncle. Perhaps he was the first famous of ancestor of Robert Lowell's linked to the sea, principally because he died on a ship and because of the well-known description of his sea burial in Nathaniel Moreton's "New England's Memorial": "[Winslow's] body was honorably committed to the sea, with the usual solemnity of the discharge of forty-two pieces of ordnance" -- relation to RL

Commodore Daniel Todd Patterson (I6829), 1786-1839, second cousin five times removed of Lowell's. Patterson was not an admiral because this did not become a line rank in the United States Navy until after the Civil War -- relation to RL

Rear Admiral Theodorus Bailey (I6890), 1805-1877, son by another marriage of Lowell's great-great-great-grandfather Judge William Bailey (I6887); he received the surrender of New Orleans in 1862 -- relation to RL

Rear Admiral John Ancrum Winslow, 1811-1873, first cousin three times removed, see above; commander of the USS Kearsage during the Civil War -- relation to RL

[Rear Admiral John Ancrum Winslow's inspiration was said to have been his mother's mother's mother's father, Colonel William Rhett (1666-1722), who in 1706 defended Charleston, South Carolina, against a French and Spanish force, in 1718 captured the "Gentleman Pirate" Stede Bonnet and was also on the trail of the pirate "Blackbeard" (Edward Teach).]

Admiral David Dixon Porter (I6885), 1813-1891, the husband of Lowell's third cousin, four times removed, George Ann Patterson (I6884), 1819-1893; Porter was a Civil War hero -- relation to RL

[Porter was the son of Commodore David Porter (I7096), 1780-1843, a hero of the War of 1812; he was the brother of Commodore William David Porter, 1808-1864; and the foster-brother of Admiral David Glasgow Farragut, 1801- 1870, another Civil War hero and the US Navy's first admiral.]

Capt. Carlile Pollock Patterson (I6819), 1816-1881, a third cousin, four times removed of Lowell; he was also the father of the sister-in-law of Lowell's grandfather Arthur Winslow (I6550); Capt. Patterson was the Superintendant of the US Coast Survey -- relation to RL

Rear Admiral Thomas Harmon Patterson (I6880), 1820-1889, a third cousin four times removed of Lowell -- relation to RL

Lieut. Commander Theodorus Bailey Myers Mason (I6758), 1848-1899, Lowell's first cousin twice removed; Myers Mason was the founder and first head of the US Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence -- relation to RL

[Myers Mason's brother-in-law was Rear Admiral Thomas Stowell Phelps, Jr. (I6894), 1848-1915; his father-in-law was Rear Admiral Thomas Stowell Phelps, Sr. (I6892) 1822-1901 -- relation to RL Myers Mason played an important role in the life of Robert Lowell's father: according to Cassie Mason Myers Julian-James, "One of the last of [Myers Mason's] acts of kindness, cherished by one of the compilers of this memoir, is the remembrance of the generous, whole-souled interest he expressed when he learned that his young kinsman, Robert Traill Spence Lowell, then, in 1898, in his twelfth year, ardently wished to follow as closely in his footsteps in the Naval profession, which the boy subsequently entered" (Biographical Sketches of the Bailey-Myers-Mason Families, 1776 to 1905: Key to a Cabinet of Heirlooms in the National Museum, Washington ((no place): privately printed, 1908), 70).]

Rear Admiral Herbert Winslow (I6808), about 1848-1914, a second cousin twice removed of Lowell -- relation to RL

Rear Admiral Cameron McRae Winslow (I6787), 1854-1932, Lowell's great uncle -- relation to RL

Commander Robert Traill Spence Lowell, Jr. (I6578), 1860-1887, Lowell's grandfather, see above -- relation to RL

Commander Robert Traill Spence Lowell III (I6549), 1887-1950, Lowell's father, see above -- relation to RL

Lieut. Warren Winslow (I6785), about 1918-1944, Lowell's second cousin once removed, see above -- relation to RL

Endpoint

Blogs are not commonly the places for the kind of mildly arcane family archaeology that I have undertaken here. Blogs indeed have become synonymous with instant opinions and historical shallowness. President Obama recently commented that he and his advisors did not spend a lot of time looking at blogs because posters on blogs typically sound off without examining an issue very carefully. Mostly true, no doubt. But here is my own attempt to do it a bit differently, at least once. I wanted to make a contribution to Lowell scholarship. With that in mind, as I read and searched, often melancholically, wondering if I was wasting my time, the words of another patrician American, Henry James, from that same lost world of New England ferocity and presumption out of which Robert Lowell too emanated, kept coming back into my thoughts. Or, to be more precise, the words of one of James's characters did. "We work in the dark," the man says, "we do what we can we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task." He brings one close to the ambitions of a researcher. And he concludes in a way that in retrospect cannot help but summon up Lowell's ghost and which brings the reader up against the never-to-be-forgotten limits attendant on research of this kind. "The rest is the madness of art."

Or, to put it differently and less gracefully, and a bit more socratically: "all that I know is that I have put down here pretty much all that I know."

[note: These notes and charts are a lateral outgrowth of a larger piece of work, at a website titled "Family Ghosts", on W. H. Auden's genealogical history.]

Near the start of Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart, Thomas and Anna Quayne and Anna's teenage step-sister, Portia Quayne, go one evening to see a Marx Brothers "movie" (the preferred term for a "film" in 1930s England) at the giant, 3,000-seat Empire Cinema in Leicester Square. The serious, uncynical Portia does not enjoy the slapstick wisecracking. "The screen," Bowen writes, "threw its tricky light onto her unrelaxed profile." When the main feature is over, at once the "three Quaynes dived for their belongings and filed silently out -- they missed the News in order to miss the Rush."

Such indifference, even at times of great historical crisis, is neither uncommon or surprising. The trivial Thomas and Anna maintain a self-absorbed, expensively insular existence, their privacy "surrounded by an electric fence." What is the "News" to them? What is "History"? And, to go further, what is "History" to Bowen's novel with its apparently rigorous privileging of domestic and emotional dilemmas over participation in, or thought about the meaning of, public events? Is the novel as damagingly bourgeois in its purview as some of the novel's main characters are in theirs?

Bowen is obsessed by time in the book: dates, days, months, seasons are all carefully articulated; the plot's chronology is exquisitely modulated and manipulated with an almost heavy-handed "air of authority". But the novelist appears to maintain a calculated silence about the book's historical mooring. She seems to exercise a rigorous exclusion of historical reference. Dates, days, months, seasons all recur; but years, in Bowen's book, do not. Why not tell us when the events takes place? Why not allow us to anchor The Death of the Heart in the social world, in history?

In fact, without ever clearly mentioning the year in which the book's events happen, Bowen did obliquely tell readers when they occurred. And it is typical of this hyper-mandarin novel's deep-seated idiosyncracy that she should have done so by means of a reference to popular culture.

Only two Marx Brothers films opened at the Empire Cinema in London in the 1930s -- A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races. But the Quaynes and Portia visit the Empire (where the campy Canadian musician Sandy Macpherson, 1897-1975, who is mentioned with irritation by Anna, was the resident organist between 1928 and 1938) during a dark, cold part of the year. The women are wearing fur collars that night. So they cannot have watched A Day at the Races, which opened in Britain in August 1937. Thomas, Anna and Portia must have seen A Night at the Opera which opened at the Empire at the start of March 1936. (The Times's supercilious review of the Brothers' "sub-human antics" is "New Films in London", Times, 2 March 1936, p. 12.)

It is a wry, wearily-sophisticated little joke on Bowen's part that she deploys "Marx", albeit not Karl Marx, to place The Death of the Heart in a historical setting. But in so fastidiously planting a single clue to the dating of her book, Bowen decisively pivoted the novel into real time, into history. A couple of months after The Death of the Heart was published in October 1938, E. M. Forster commented approvingly that "from the artistic point of view" Bowen's fiction was "the best novel of the year." Forster's surface meaning in calling the book the "best novel of the year" was that The Death of the Heart appeared to him the most accomplished novel published in 1938. But he was also, simultaneously but more quietly, declaring that The Death of the Heart was the "best novel" about a particular year. And that year was 1936.

Once the ciphered historical reference point in Bowen's novel is decrypted, all of its private events become tinted differently as if from a new light source. "Everyone in England is waiting for the war to start", W. H. Auden told his brother in a letter written on 24 February 1936 within a few days of Portia and the Quaynes' fictional visit to the Empire Cinema. Subliminally, all the characters in The Death of the Heart are waiting for the war. Nothing, even of the most intimate, private kind, happens in the book that is not illuminated, or darkened, by largely unspoken anxieties about public events and the "collapsing society" Forster identified.

By allowing the beams projecting from a real screening booth to fall just momentarily onto her fictional page, Elizabeth Bowen let politics and war throw their tricky lights all across a young girl's profile. This obsessive, inescapable watching and waiting for a future without a shape are what lived, collectively-shared experience felt like in Britain in 1936. The atmospheres of exhaustion, malice and dread in The Death of the Heart are created as much by the pressure of events as they are by corrupted individuals. The novel's mournful poetry -- as Bowen indicated through a passing topical reference to a comedy -- is historical.

The strength of any piece of writing lies in its power to generate disagreement. By this measure, "The Darkling Thrush" is strong.

It's a mistake with any lyric to look too rapidly in it for a message or a takeaway. That's the best way to miss such great details as the perceptual sequence by which Hardy's poem so sensitively captures "noticing". He shows that the way people usually see birds is first by hearing "a voice" and only then, by turning their gaze in the direction of the sound and scrutinizing the trees, glimpsing a "gaunt, and small" creature which is singing in a way strangely at odds with its fragile appearance. Then we turn away again or let our minds wander, precisely as the poem does here, because, emotionally speaking, the sound of the birdsong always amounts to so much more than the sight of the bird. Hardy gives us hearing preceding, and succeeding, seeing, which for denizens of a culture obsessed with ocular truth, feels like a moment of liberation.

If I wander around in the interior of the poem rather than rushing banally to its end for the deeply enigmatic conclusion, what strikes me is how complex and obsessive Hardy's fascination with boundaries is here. He sets himself on thresholds of time – large ones, the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, and, more local ones, the transition from day to night. (Incidentally, it's a wonderful "late afternoon" poem; which is a very rare time for poetry to describe, no doubt that's partly the attraction for Hardy.) He also positions himself between spatial axes, leaning, and thus neither fully upright nor prone, and on a spatial threshold – the gate. Moreover, we're at the interface of nature and culture, since a coppice is a small wood, where trees are allowed to grow for the purpose of being periodically cut for human use.

These checks, borders and encountered limits, the varying points of demarcation and contrast, some of which the reader only notices subliminally at first, are what bank up the emotion which is suddenly, almost violently released in that shining word "illimited".

Hardy's speaker – I use that term not to play dull epistemological games but just to gesture towards the exquisite dramatic calibrations Hardy manipulates; this is anything but a spontaneous, unpremeditated overflow of powerful feeling – can't quite bring himself madly, ecstatically to "fling his soul" into the growing gloom in the way the thrush seems to. Nor can he quite make himself step out of the tangible, solid world of fences, paths, hedges. Or liberate himself from well-organized stanzas and rhymes. But the poem trembles at its own brinks, emotional, sensory, literary. Look at those beautifully uncomfortable off-rhymes: "coppice gate"/"desolate" (nobody reading the poem sensitively will say "dess-oh-layte"), "seemed to be"/"canopy", or "among"/"evensong". Or at the way that each of the first two stanzas is made from two relatively crudely soldered-together quatrains, whereas each of the last two stanzas, under the influence of the speaker's simultaneous excitement at and distrust of the bird's song, melts into a single, more fluid, but still not completely deliquescent sentence.

Hardy uses these subtle chafings at self-imposed limits to show his words stretching, deliberately ineffectually, towards the ineffable which can, if conditions are right, be intuited but not spoken. Perhaps that's what modern poetry is? A via negativa, a lonely haunting of once-sacred spots, an overhearing of a strange, unsanctioned music which might or might not any longer be redemptive, a "desolate" searching in the fading light for numinous signs? The authenticity of the experience in "The Darkling Thrush", as in so many Hardy poems, comes not from fulfillment but doubt, not from messages but withholdings, from a mind showing how it is possible to dwell in uncertainties, to find beauty (of a kind) in absences and, if they are seized hold of in language acutely enough, poetry in the very feelings of finitude, incomprehension and unawareness.

Nature: Restorative. "It's a wonderful thing, Nature."

Modern poetry: Privative. "That's what modern poetry is -- subtractions, demythologizations, a via negativa."

Contributors (in no particular order): my father-in-law, my father, myself.

[Notes: Saw an ugly little Chevy rolling along El Camino this morning – a yellow 'Cobalt' (I thought of Eluard's 'La terre est bleue comme une orange'); in Geoffrey Hartman's Wordsworth's Poetry read a few stunning pages this afternoon on the transcendence of nature; later, on our walk, felt that I heard the creaking of the joints in the wings of the geese passing overhead; as Earth hurtles towards its perihelion, which will be achieved this Sunday morning, Venus is prominent high in the southwestern night sky, Orion shines in the south, Betelgeuse glittering red and Rigel blue, while, far more faintly and much nearer the horizon, Mercury and Jupiter, if I could see them, would look unusually closely conjoined; this is my first post written on an iMac.]

(When will people stop moaning about their own simple-minded misreadings of what Auden, who had not in the first place wanted to burden Adrienne Rich with an introduction by him to her book, said about Rich in the essay which Yale required him to contribute to A Change of World, and focus instead on the fact that he chose her?)

Recently, one Jascha Kessler, born in New York in 1929 and a professor of English at UCLA since 1961, has sluggishly stirred the Yale Younger Poets pot. In late November 2008 Kessler, a little-studied poet, playwright, novelist and translator, wrote an account for the TLS letters page which explained some of the reaons why Kessler was, in his own view, beaten to the Yale prize by Ashbery. (Kessler had won a Major Hopwood Award for Poetry at the University of Michigan in 1952 but had published nothing in book form in the next few years which is perhaps one reason why he believed himself entitled to the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1956.) Kessler's TLS explanation of his failing to be selected by Auden has something to do with anti-Semitism on Auden's part and homosexual chauvinism. The ever-interesting Ashbery responded with humour and vigour in the same venue the following week.

In the late spring of 1955 Auden, staying on Ischia, read the submissions, including Kessler's, which Yale University Press had forwarded to him to consider for the 1956 prize. He was dismayed by their quality (as he had been by the submissions the previous year when he had ultimately decided not to award the prize). He consulted with the young Anthony Hecht, who was also on Ischia at the time. Hecht confirmed Auden's opinion, so Auden wired Chester Kallman, who was in New York, asking him to tell Ashbery and O'Hara to send copies of their manuscripts to him on Ischia. Edward Mendelson provides the essential background on the 1956 selection in his notes on pp. 772-773 of volume 3 of Auden's prose in the Princeton edition of Auden's Complete Works. Now, on the New York Times website, Gregory Cowles has an efficient rundown on the recent Kessler contra Auden and Ashbery spat, with links to Kessler's and Ashbery's letters, in "Ashbery and Prizes".

I think it would be fair to say -- speaking figuratively of course -- that during their joust in the TLS lists, the good Sir John unhorsed milord Kessler, then dismounted and rapidly slew his prone and bewildered foe. Finally the white knight took the time to discommode himself sufficiently to be able to, by natural means, irrigate his erstwhile opponent's battered literary corpse, perhaps in the unspoken hope that something rare and beautiful might one day grow from the remains.

There is probably more to be uncovered/discovered at some point about the 1956 Yale prize and, more generally, about Auden, Ashbery, Kallman and O'Hara. But, for the time being, Cowles's account of this impromptu tournament, which took place by an insignificant-seeming crossroads on the way towards the future, bears reading.

"You tell me that I am 'not accused of anything' but you ask me to give you my recollections of the period early in the Transformation, the run-up to Christmas 2008. Of course that moment is so distant in time now that it is hard to recollect much.

"But at least one memory does stand out. It is of a brisk, December morning when, as usual, I walked my youngest son to school. Times were getting harder economically, and I think everyone sensed that. Edifices, which had once seemed so solid that one had not even considered whether or not they were eternal, stood on the point of collapse. GM, for instance, announced that it was shutting down a third of its factories for a month. We hadn't hit the levels of catastrophe they experienced in Weimar in the early 1920s -- then even the lightbulbs and the doorhandles were being ripped out and taken away. But I remember thinking that the coldness in the air that morning was an analogue of the chill which had settled discernibly on the country.

"Everything felt pinched; people seemed just slightly wary, quieter than normal, introverted, preoccupied with their own thoughts. It was as if everyone had become just slightly more selfish, as a person does, for example, when they start to get hungry, when, you know, the rumbling in your stomach turns into a subtle, dull, enduring ache. We weren't hungry, you understand. But perhaps our spirits were. Anyway, somehow, it felt like that.

"My son and I walked along our street. By any measure except those of the income levels in the surrounding towns we were economically safe, cushioned, even though my wife and I worried about money all the time. Over the preceding weeks, as the rate of autoburglaries had risen sharply in our neighbourhood, I had started surreptitiously to 'check' parked cars for damage.

"We strolled along. We had grown used to passing houses with seasonal decorations and ornaments still glowing in the morning haze -- little strings of illuminated blue icicles hanging from the eaves, ruby-coloured lights wound round tree trunks, that kind of thing. Four of five houses up, on the left, a portly, cross-eyed neighbour, whom I quietly loathed, had set up some a family of glowing, wire reindeer on her lawn. ('For the children', she had simpered to me a few days before.)

"Except that this morning, when we passed her house, the reindeer were gone. The indentations made by their hooves on the frosty grass, like a fragile set of fingerprints, were still there, the little pressed-in shapes preserved for a while at least by the crystals of frozen dew which had formed round the hooves. But the metal animals themselves had vanished. Owen bowled on by without any comment. But I found myself lingering, thinking at first, as was my habit then, aesthetically, gazing at the view appreciatively as a scene of pure emptiness. Then I realized what had happened. The reindeer had been stolen. And that seemed eerie and slightly menacing to me. Even the cheap gimcrack-ornaments, surely almost worthless, were being taken away. We had come to that. Then I came to myself, picked up my pace and reached Owen before the crossing.

"I have come to feel that events of this kind -- so trivial in the light of what even then we understood about what was happening -- were not really to do with the simple desire on someone's part to make some fast money. How could that explain these stolen reindeer? No, instead this had to do with the moods of vengefulness and random destructiveness which we were all gradually, and to a greater or lesser degree, falling prey to. This was a glimmering of anarchy.

"For some people -- perhaps many for all I know --, these feelings of anger and destructiveness remained purely private, promptly suppressed by their consciences from articulation even, let alone carried over into action. Or checked by social protocols. Looking back now, though, I think that we were all in some sense paying for something we had been complicit in. Which of us escaped whipping in what followed? And which of us deserved to? People who came through unscathed were people who were merely lucky. Their being unscathed was morally meaningless.

"I recollect most strongly that as I stood staring at the reindeer prints on that little lawn on that frosty morning, I had the sudden conviction that at some deep spiritual level we were thieves whom other thieves were robbing. Our god was the dollar, our evangelist was Hobbes. And this was our mean new world....

"Oh, it is all very inadequate, I know. But I cannot explain it any better than this. There it is. These are the memories I can speak of. I have told you what I can bear to remember. This is my version of the truth. And, now that I have complied with what you asked me to do, I would like to be silent. Ah, but wait, one other small thing: I do recall as well that the next day there were rumours from a block not far off that a pile of ashwood intended for the family's private fire had disappeared from a front yard. You see? Christmas 2008, yes, it was the season of disappearances, like a parody of an advent calendar, in which every day a door closed and something that had been present dissolved into thin air.... But enough. Obviously, one now sees these were just tiny symptoms of the playing out of an enormous process which we had absolutely no way to grasp. It was a process which you know as well as I do would crack many hearts."

Like many small men, I have been enjoying reading today about the death of a tyrant, Tiberius, the second Emperor of Rome.

Here is the passage; it is from Tacitus's Annals, bk 6, in the newly ancient translation of Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (their wonderful 19th century language sports handlebar moustaches and a central parting). Tacitus describes the despicable Praetorian prefect Quintus Naevius Sutorius Macro doing the right thing at Misenum in March, 37 AD:

"Tiberius's bodily powers were now leaving him, but not his skill in dissembling. There was the same stern spirit; he had his words and looks under strict control, and occasionally would try to hide his weakness, evident as it was, by a forced politeness. After frequent changes of place, he at last settled down on the promontory of Misenum in a country-house once owned by Lucius Lucullus. There it was noted, in this way, that he was drawing near his end. There was a physician, distinguished in his profession, of the name of Charicles, usually employed, not indeed to have the direction of the emperor's varying health, but to put his advice at immediate disposal. This man, as if he were leaving on business his own, clasped his hand, with a show of homage, and touched his pulse. Tiberius noticed it. Whether he was displeased and strove the more to hide his anger, is a question; at any rate, he ordered the banquet to be renewed, and sat at the table longer than usual, by way, apparently, of showing honour to his departing friend. Charicles, however, assured Macro that his breath was failing and that he would not last more than two days. All was at once hurry; there were conferences among those on the spot and despatches to the generals and armies. On the 15th of March, his breath failing, he was believed to have expired, and Caius Caesar was going forth with a numerous throng of congratulating followers to take the first possession of the empire, when suddenly news came that Tiberius was recovering his voice and sight, and calling for persons to bring him food to revive him from his faintness. Then ensued a universal panic, and while the rest fled hither and thither, every one feigning grief or ignorance, Caius Caesar, in silent stupor, passed from the highest hopes to the extremity of apprehension. Macro, nothing daunted, ordered the old emperor to be smothered under a huge heap of clothes, and all to quit the entrance-hall."

What a relief to find someone "nothing daunted." What a pleasure to read about an emperor, almost a god, being mundanely suffocated with a "huge heap of clothes." Tiberius was succeeded by his adopted grandson, Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, the third Emperor, better known as the hyperthyroidic, epileptic tyrant Caligula, who was wont to talk to the moon. A multitude of conspiratorial swords brutalized Caligula in 41 AD.

Does it signify anything? The conventional answer is -- no. That means the "poetic" answer is -- yes. But what? You tell me. I am not a poet; I am baffled. Still, it is success of a kind simply to be able to frame a simple question. If only half the paragraphs I write, or read, did as much.

There is a seedy prestige (and a sort of madness) in trying to make things more complex than they are. It is harder to make things simple. Estrangingly simple. Simplicity is a goal, as in a statement that is only a diagram.

Crazy curving beauty of interwoven skid-marks on tarmac, like scroll-work on Anglo-Saxon carved cross unearthed from ruin; slight, crazy mystery of pylons looming out of smog-haze, like monsters' swaying heads appearing through mist on Mercian moor; crazy-house, rippling reflections of Volvo in milk-tanker, like glints of attacker's face shining for terrified moment on enemy's shield.

Grim, teeth-clenched, crazy sadness of sundered bond between liege-lord and vassal, like distance over the whale-road between silent, angry father and silent, bewildered, angry, middle-aged son.

I sometimes feel that I live for surprises, for the unforeseen, for the sight which cracks the ice on my soul. It happened again this morning. I was shambling into Walgreens, ruminating uneasily on the frustrated comment (made by someone very close to me) that perhaps I suffered from ADD. My body followed, in an almost automatic way, the familiar path towards the pharmacy. I made a left turn at shoe supplies corner, intending to head up toy alley. And there it was. Or there she was.

The aisle was empty. Or was it? A large, soft doll -- female, youthful, caucasian model, brown hair, pink shirt, pink shoes with green soles -- lay prostrate (OED: "Of a person: lying with the face to the ground, in token of submission or humility, as in adoration, worship, or supplication; (hence more generally) lying stretched out on the ground, typically with the face downwards... Laid low in mind or spirit; submissive or abject; defeated or powerless... In a state of physical exhaustion or complete weakness; unable to rise or exert oneself; debilitated") on the linoleum like someone robbed and left for dead.

In her wounded pathos, she seemed for a moment uncannily, traumatically human. Or was it that for a moment I was magically transported out of my own inert human-ness to a doll-like simplicity? The thought crossed my mind that I ought to kneel down next to her and weep. For her? Or for myself? (Then I ran the movie a bit further and when I did I saw myself being led meekly away while the doll was replaced on her shelf.)

But perhaps it was not so much a matter of enigmatic subjectivity or of exchanged worlds as of sheer relief in me for the frisson of the unexpected moment? Kleist wrote that grace "appears to best advantage in that human bodily structure that has no consciousness at all -- or has infinite consciousness -- that is, in the mechanical puppet, or in the God." The transportation, the grace, the bliss, the sadness (so fractional and limited in time but still so strong), happened in a semi-deserted Walgreens in a Silicon Valley suburb. It means they could happen again anywhere. I just hope to God that they will.

When, perhaps 15 years ago, we sat chatting in his kitchen, just behind the sitting room in his beautiful old house, I would sometimes tell Lincoln Kirstein about things I had screwed up or done badly. Lincoln had a very complex understanding of the meaning and possibilities of disorder. And when I said things of this kind, he used to tell me, with his usual, unruffled, subtle smile, that Balanchine had never minded when a dancer fell over during a performance -- "it showed they were trying".

How can I apply that lesson to my life today? I know I need to.

In spite of the fact that the main thing I do is read y'know, like, poems, people in academia sometimes describe my work on Auden as "biographical" (which is a not very subtle scholastic codeword for "empirical", "positivistic" or "idea-free"). Whenever such interlocutors -- who usually have some heavy but unacknowledged "biographical" investments of their own -- make this sort of remark, I always try to smile politely and ignore the snub. After all, nothing worth anything is or should be immune from challenge. Whatever needs saying will meet resistance.

But this notion about my critical project does disappoint me because it constitutes a misunderstanding, even a mischaracterization, of my aims. To me, as to almost everyone else, the life of a poet is not the baseline to which that poet's oeuvre is tied. A love-affair, a meeting or a death does not explain a poem or circumscribe its meaning. Still, if you treat the events of a life -- journeys, remarks in letters, the places where things happened -- as having both a literal and a figurative status, as if, in additional to being historical data, they wove their own text as a kind of elliptical commentary on the poems which arose out in their vicinity, then sometimes biographical information contains clues, hints, suggestions which can lay bare energies and meanings which would otherwise lie occluded in a poem's deep subsoil.

You have to watch for these hints, like a dowser searching for water. Not everything is meaningful. Or, better, no-one (least of all me) can understand how to make use of everything that lies to hand. In any given pair of eyes, some anecdotes shimmer with a suggestive luster which others do not have.

Perhaps, for that glow to exist, it is essential that the incident seem to hint at something which runs counter to a received truth.

Today, for example, I find my mind running on Auden's imaginative interest in violence. It may be that the thought came into my mind because of a letter I received from Michael Auden, Auden's second cousin once removed (that is to say, Michael is the son of Auden's first cousin, Lt.-Col. Humphrey Auden). "I only met Wystan once, after the War", Mr. Auden comments, speaking about an encounter which took place at the family home, Danesgate, in Repton, Derbyshire. It may well have been during the trip which Auden made to Europe in the spring of 1948. He continues: "I was shooting young Rooks for the pot in the rookery trees at Danesgate, and Wystan asked if he could have a shot. The rifle had a hair-trigger, and he nearly put a bullet into his foot!"

What to do? Laugh at the punchline joke about a namby-pamby poet almost shooting himself in the foot? Or instead wonder whether any other eminent poet of the mid-century (a Pulitzer prize-winner in the very year when this incident probably occurred!) would have been curious to handle a gun? I prefer the latter option. It goes against everything we fondly imagine about the mildness and bookishness of poets. It goes against everything that Auden is supposed to stand for. It is the kind of clue -- tiny and ephemeral and disgard-able and provocative -- which could send one back to Auden's poems, re-sensitized, musing.

At the time when this incident happened, Auden was just beginning work on his "Horae Canonicae" cycle about the meaning of Chist's crucifixion. It was to be, if you look at it from a certain angle, a kind of murder story....