Sorry to sound unnecessarily apocalyptic in the heading above, but I'm actually referring to Robert Lowell's collection of sonnets niftily entitled History which I've been ploughing through in my great read-through of the Collected Poems. To be honest, my reading has been less than great since, as regular visitors to this Far Place will have most likely noticed, I've struggled to get through the sequence and it's been quite an effort to keep going. Basically a lot of the sonnets have gone way over my head. Partly I blame Lowell for being so darn learned, patrician and generally high & mighty; but largely I blame myself for lacking the necessary. I mean, I'm supposed to be reasonably good at this culture thing so it's a bit of a downer to discover I'm not. Especially in relation to a writer whose considerable best I greatly admire.
It's a bit like not being able to listen to late-period John Coltrane.
But here's the good news. I've started to enjoy whole sonnets now I've reached the 60s. Perhaps it's just a matter of my reasonably close familiarity with the context, but the stuff written about the events of the later years of the decade seems to work for me. This came home strongly when I came upon a sequence of four poems across two pages all of which I felt I 'got' in a way I didn't in relation to any of the early stuff. For those interested, the four poems in question were: Monkeys, Churchill 1970 Retrospective, De Gaulle's Chienlit, and De Gaulle est Mort. Mind you, I needed the notes at the back of the edition to explain chienlit which my incredibly poor French didn't stretch to.
I'm now keen to check in my Faber Robert Lowell's Poems, A Selection, edited (I think) by Jonathan Raban, as to which of the poems were picked for the selection. I can't say I recognise more than three or four from memory. But since it's on the shelves at Maison KL I'll just have to hold on.
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