This is the first, of what I believe will probably be a long series of blog entries about whatever topics I am currently researching. Today, I spent the majority of my day reading a biography on the poet Robert Lowell. Here are some of my rough thoughts:
Lowell is typically read as an aggressively independent minded, Catholic, New England author. Also, he is typically read as a man’s man sort of poet– fiercely masculine. I see a lot of this in his work as well, but I also see a lot of queer undertones that I plan to emphasize in his work. First, Lowell’s poem “First Love” is about his youthful attraction to a male schoolmate. In his poem, Lowell sees his attraction to women as “wisdom’s fear,” and something that developed with age. I want to consider what I see to be a strong homosocial undercurrent throughout his biography, arguing perhaps that his attraction to literature is a sublimation for his queer desires. For example, Lowell became a poet around the time that he started liking women and viewed literature as a primarily male discipline. Also, most of his relationships with other men seem to have circulated around literary texts, perhaps most striking was his “monastic” summer spent in a small cabin with a male friend rigorously reading classic literature (sort of sounds like a “Brokeback Mountain” of literature, probably without the sex though). Lowell clearly viewed literature as a form of religious asceticism, but my question is what did he deny or sublimate through this asceticism? There are also several homophobic notes in some of his poems, interspersed with other notes that might suggest queer desires. I believe that he saw homosexuality as something that could be overcome by sheer will, in the same way that he believed that he could become a poet through sheer will as well. Although I do not want to speculate if Lowell DID overcome his desires (I do not think he did, especially because he seems to have kept some contacts with several gay authors that might have been sexual), I want to portray Lowell as an author who partially used queer attractions as an unconscious, if not conscious, inspiration for his writing. I also read in Lowell a strong need for the author to ”prove himself” as a man. The author apparently worries about being emasculated, although I wonder what might be the source of this fear. Lowell was raised primarily around women, but would that be enough to make him worry about his manliness so much? I think that if I prod this question further, my persistence might bear some fruitful research (hehehe).
