I find that my used copy of Robert Lowell's Notebook 1967-68 has one uncut page, between the second and third from the last, the first page of the 'Afterthought'. The inked tops of the pages and the clean cut of the other pages shows that it was the only uncut page in the book. The dustcover is clean and whole and the inside front flap tells me, straight off, that '[f]or this new edition, the author has added three poems and made revisions.' The book was given to a son or daughter ('Pat') in March of 1972. I may have owned it for as much as a decade.
            The 'Afterthought' begins: 'NOTEBOOK 1967-68: as my title intends, the poems in this book are written as one poem, jagged in pattern, but not a conglomeration or sequence of related material.'

            '[A]s my title intends, the poems in this book are written as one poem[.]'

            I am not a scholar of Lowell, but a poet and student of poetry. So perhaps the scholars can adduce evidence in Lowell's published or unpublished writing that contradicts this statement. Lowell was obviously contradictory and ornery, among other things. Although, at this point, I have not picked them up in several years, I have worked with the Notebook and History for more than thirty years, having discovered them shortly after they were published.
            No doubt Lowell intended History as the final version of Notebook. The headnote, 'Note', in History, says, in its entirety, 'About 80 of the poems in History are new, the rest are taken from my last published poem, Notebook begun six years ago. All the poems have been changed, some heavily. I have plotted. My old title, Notebook, was more accurate than I wished, i.e. the composition was jumbled. I hope this jumble or jungle is cleared - that I have cut the waste marble from the figure.'
            The thrust of the 'Note' obviously suggests that History is intended to replace the Notebook. But, once again, we have the ambiguous use of 'poem' for the whole. Notebook was his 'last published poem'. Presumably, then, History - and each of the other, shorter texts spun out of Notebook - is also 'a poem', a complete cogent work.
            Four years after the publication of History, Lowell died of a heart attack at the age of 60. If he had lived longer - perhaps for another decade - one wonders if he would have viewed the two 'poems' as distinct and separable performances, each valid in its own right. We have to assume that at the point at which he wrote the 'Note' for History, he was still under the influence of the revisionary force implicit in the title. Notebook was clearly a history, but the history was intentionally intimate and personal. But the 'Afterthought' tells us that Lowell was already self-conscious and balking about the 'confessional' title that had been applied to his poetry. 'This is not my diary, my confession, not a puritan's too literal pornographic honesty, glad to share private embarrassment and triumph.' Which is true enough. But it is an extraordinary intellectual and aesthetic autobiography, not as confessional or recitation, but as exploration.
            Personally, I find the Notebook more cogent, both overtly and in that organic sense of unity which is the basic bread of poetry. The 'history' in History is arbitrary and forced, even though it intends, by indirection, the same panorama of intellectual and emotional acquisition and discovery. At the same time, there is an intense thematic unity of History that succeeds, much as 18th century English poetry succeeds, by a kind of reversion to formality itself. Moreover, the Lowell of History does stand in the mirror. Where we know Lowell 'from within' in the Notebook, we begin to get an Augustan distance in History, a formal armslength that begins to objectify both the surrealism and modernist intensity that Lowell had finally fully engrafted into the American tradition.
            In this, of course, History repeats its own history. Lowell was the long poem looking for the key. And the key, of course, was Berryman's Dream Songs. Berryman, not Pound, showed Lowell how to write the long poem. Berryman is the jongleur. We think we are looking through a keyhole at an actuality, when, now and again, the door swings open, and we see the apparatus for projection and screening, a strange and entrancing apparatus, as old as Homer and the Greek anthology, in some sense. But, like the Wizard of Oz, the exposure of the mastermind is an essential piece of the plot, part of the modernist reality. Berryman hovers on the brink of artifice, and turns artifice itself into an active principle of cogency that defies even the English technicians of the 17th and 18th century. God knows how it works. We mere mortals must witness the performance with peculiar awe, since he not only works without net, but also apparently without a wire. The price, of course, is a sudden disappearance as wrenching as his suicide, the mephisto transposition.
            Lowell brings it down to earth and back to the legible conditions of poetry.

            Perhaps we will cavil at the duplication of poems. But Lowell reworked his poems and republished them, sometimes repeatedly, in bound form. Each of his books gropes toward the wholeness of the long poem, even before the Notebook. His reworking of the same mass of material is the essence of his style. His total commitment to poetry means that the whole of his life is substance. Elephant's memory passes beyond the screened pavilions of early 20th century New England summers to the residual village memory of the puritan, and beyond the stacks of Widener and Boston Public to the inevitable bibliophilia of the poet, the browsing mania for the fugitive text.

            I may have picked up the Complete Poems, when it came out, and riffled through it. But I had read the reviews, both long and short. How is it possible to 'conflate texts' when it comes to Lowell? One hopes that, someday, the texts will once again be separated out and published in their original integrity.

- Jeremy