Chapter III: Poet and Prose Writer

Lowell’s prose is manly, direct, varied, flexible, generally harmonious, abounding in passages marked by grace, beauty, and sweetness, and capable of rising to genuine eloquence. In its overflowing vitality and human warmth it is an adequate expression of the man, imaging his mocking and humorous moods no less than his deep sincerity, his strength of purpose, and his passion. Much of it has the confidence and ease that go with successful improvisation. If Lowell was ‘willing to risk the prosperity of a verse upon a lucky throw of words,’ he was even more willing to take like chances with his prose.

His thought ran easily into figurative form, and the making of metaphor was as natural to him as breathing. He would even amuse himself with conceits, for he loved to play with language, to force words into shapes he might perchance have condemned had he found them in the work of another. But if style is to be representative, this playfulness, however annoying to Lowell’s critics, is a virtue. A Lowell chastened in his English and wholly academic would not be the Lowell we rejoice in.

He practised the art of poetry in many forms and always with success. Of everything he wrote you might say that it had been his study, though you might refrain from saying that ‘it had been all in all his study.’ In other words, as we read Lowell the question never arises whether or not the poet is working in unfamiliar materials, but whether he might not have given his product a higher finish, the materials and the form remaining the same. He was no aspirant after flawless beauty. He wrote spontaneously and was for the time wholly possessed by his theme. But what he had written he had written; and if never content with the result he at least compelled himself to be philosophical. He made a few changes, to be sure, but (as was said of a far greater poet) he would correct with an afterglow of poetic inspiration, not with a painful tinkering of the verse.

It is by tinkering with the verse, however (the ‘higher’ tinkering), that perfection is attained. And he who wrote with evident ease so many lovely and felicitous lines could as easily have bettered lines that are wanting in finish. It was not Lowell’s way. Too much may not be required of a man who often felt the utmost repugnance to reading his own writings, once they were in print.