Early in the month I was moaning about not being able to get into Lowell's sonnets from 1973's History. Well I kept at it and have now reached roughly the halfway point of the book (which is very long at something like 200 pages) and I'm still not all that comfortable with what Lowell is doing here. I can't recall a single poem that seemed to me entirely successful despite occasional lines flaring into life. Once or twice whole sections have worked for me, as in a couple of the sonnets relating to Rimbaud, but this has been atypical of my reading.
So why am I keeping going? I keep asking myself that, and I think I've figured out an answer that goes beyond sheer bloody-mindedness, even though there's an element of that going on.
The thing is that I know Lowell is a great poet from his earlier books. I felt tuned in to almost everything in Life Studies, For the Union Dead and Near the Ocean. So assiduously reading the sonnets is my way of honouring that greatness, an act of something like gratitude. Also I'm hoping that I'm going to come across something that explodes in my consciousness as did Waking Early Sunday Morning. That would make it all worth it.
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