BK Stefans includes an interesting canonizing review of Robert Lowell's recent Collected. The following passage is characteristic:


"One can't help, reading through this massive, spellbinding volume, mourning some of what has been lost in American poetry since Partisan Review crowd was in the ascendant: an earnestness about writing (and rewriting) poetry in a bid for immortality (Berryman's narcissism may have killed any frank courting of this instinct), an intellectual aggressiveness that was more ethical than theoretic in nature (like Auden, Lowell's pacifist politics were often transparent, and he was a conscientious objector in WWII), an imagistic impulse that was best typified by Lowell's unerring sense of visual detail ("...octagonal red tiles, / sweaty with a secret dank, crummy with ant-stale; / a Rocky Mountain chaise lounge, / its legs, shellacked saplings." [162]) and an embodied, phantasmagoric sense of history and geography, highlighting that generation's greater chronological proximity to Pound and, before him, Robert Browning (and the Victorian habit of comparing one's "age" with a prior historical epoch, especially that of the Roman Empire). "

Berryman often came under attack from his own generation for "bad writing" (Louise Bogan probably the most salient example of this). Here Stefans juxtaposes Berryman & Lowell : Berryman's narcissism vs. Lowell's earnest bid for immortality through careful (re)writing.

What stands out for me anyway about that circle of "establishment" American male poets from mid-century is the enormous weight of stress & torment. The lyrical balance of some of Schwartz's poems contrasts with his miserable neurotic personal life. Berryman & Lowell's work is remarkable for its lack of repose.

I think Berryman actually captured the historical flavor of his times, through his manic self-obsessed disintegration & the schizoid undertone of "black talk", than Lowell did with all his earnest & Olympian historicism. America & the West are a racial-ideological construct on certain levels, and in Berryman we begin to hear the unsettling African undertone of that deeper seismic-historical resonance.