HOME COMING AND OLD MAN IN THE LEAF SMOKE

              AMERICAN LITERATURE 

                          GROUP II 

2213312005006 - AYESHA AMBREEN M

2213312005007 - DEEPIKA R

2213312005008 - DHIVYA P

2213312005009 - DIVYADHARSHINI A

2213312005010 - DIVYADHARSHINI S P

                      HOME COMING

Robert Lowell (1917-1977)

On March 1, 1917, Robert Lowell was born into one of Boston’s oldest and most prominent families. He attended Harvard College for two years before transferring to Kenyon College, where he studied poetry under John Crowe Ransom and received an undergraduate degree in 1940. He took graduate courses at Louisiana State University where he studied

with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. Lowell’s first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (Harcourt, Brace and

Company, 1944) and Lord Weary’s Castle (Harcourt, Brace and Company,1946), for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947 at the age of thirty, were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America’s Puritan legacy. Under the

influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he wrote rigorously formal poetry that drew praise for its exceptionally powerful handling of meter and rhyme. Lowell was politically involved—he became a conscientiousobjector during the Second World War and was imprisoned as a result,

and actively protested against the war in Vietnam—and his personal life was full of marital and psychological turmoil. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized. Partly in response to his frequent breakdowns, and partly due to the

influence of such younger poets as W. D. Snodgrass and Allen Ginsberg, Lowell in the mid-1950s began to write more directly from personal experience, and loosened his adherence to traditional meter and form. The result was a watershed collection, Life Studies (Faber and Faber,1959), which forever changed the landscape of modern poetry, much as

T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land had three decades before. Considered by many to be the most important poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century, Lowell continued to develop his work with sometimes uneven results, all along defining the restless center of American poetry, until his sudden death on September 12, 1977, from a heart attack at age sixty. Robert Lowell served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American

Poets from 1962 until his death. Posthumous publications.In 1987, Lowell's longtime editor, Robert Giroux, edited Lowell's Collected Prose.The collection included Lowell's book reviews, essays,

excerpts from an unfinished autobiography, and an excerpt from an

unfinished book, tentatively titled A Moment in American Poetry. Lowell's Collected Poems, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, was published in 2003. The Collected Poems was a very comprehensive volume that included all of Lowell's major works with the exception of

Notebook 1967-1968 and Notebook. However, many of the poems from these volumes were republished, in revised forms, in History and For Lizzie and Harriet. Soon after the publication of The Collected Poems, The Letters of Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton, was published in 2005. Both Lowell's Collected Poems and his Letters received positive

critical responses from the mainstream press.Confessional poetry:The phrase “confessional poetry” burst into common usage in September of 1959, when the critic M.L. Rosenthal coined it in his review

of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies in the Nation. The book, which contained poems that unsparingly detailed Lowell’s experiences of marital strife, generational struggle, and mental illness, marked a dramatic turn in his career. The personal had always been fodder for poetry, but Lowell, Rosenthal claimed, “removes the mask” that previous poets had worn

when writing about their own lives. The poems in Life Studies felt like a “series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal.”

Robert Lowell’s Poem “Homecoming” as a confessional poem : Robert Lowell's poem "Homecoming" describes the feeling of loss experienced by the aging speaker, who is returning to his hometown aftera long absence. Through allusions to Homer's Odyssey, Lowell simultaneously elevates the speaker's situation to the level of epic drama and deflates that drama by suggesting that the contemporary world is not heroic enough to support that kind of emotion.

ABOUT THE POEM:

Homecoming" describes the feeling of loss experienced by the aging speaker, who is returning to his hometown after a long absence. Through allusions to Homer's Odyssey, Lowell simultaneously

elevates the speaker's situation to the level of epic drama and deflates that drama by suggesting that the contemporary world is not heroic enough to support that kind of emotion.

The title of the poem suggests that the speaker is coming back to some sort of class reunion, where he will measure his own life experiences against the success of his friends, "the boys in my old gang/ [who] are senior partners" (ll.2-3). His situation parallels the homecoming of Odysseus, a heroic general from ancient Greek literature who went off to fight in the Trojan War, but due to a series of misadventures, was unable to return home again for many years. When he finally does

get back to his wife and son, he finds his house in disarray: assuming that he has died, a slew of suitors have encamped around his home to try to win his wife for themselves. His former status as ruler of his community is gone, and he must reestablish himself and reclaim his family. Similarly, the speaker of the poem has to face the loss of his old love, but it is here that the contemporary situation begins to pale in comparison to the epic; his memories of their younger days revolve

around casinos and martinis - not exactly the noble stuff of epic. Even his old cronies are "bald like baby birds" and ready for retirement (l.4), an image that ironically transforms extreme youth into a vehicle for old age. It seems that the speaker and the world he inhabits are both past their prime.

As the speaker continues to muse on the years that have passed, he reflects that "Fertility is not to the forward,/ or beauty to the precipitous" (ll.21-22). Unlike Odysseus, who has earned fame and

glory through his noble deeds in war, the speaker seems not to have achieved success, and indeed, he questions the very idea that the blessings of life can be earned through ambition or effort. His life seems to have been characterized by "things gone wrong" (l.23) in spite of the

earlier promise of his youth. Indeed, not even his homecoming will bring resolution to the longing he still feels; while Odysseus is ultimately able to defeat the rival suitors and win his wife back, there is no indication that the speaker has any hope of regaining his lost love; he is still "circling for [her] with glazed eye" (l.28).

The passage of time has not brought heroic closure to the speaker. Even when we see references to summer, which could symbolize the height of strength that Odysseus still possesses when he returns, we get instead an image of withering as "poplars sere/ in the glare" (ll.32-33). The

speaker, like the leaves, is sapped of strength, and we have no indication that he will be energized by his homecoming. The last stanza provides the final contrast with Odysseus. Although the hero came home so changed by many years and trials that not even his family recognized him, his faithful old dog still knows him, suggesting that despite his temporary weariness, he remains essentially unchanged. However, the speaker of our poem mourns that "No dog knows my smell" (l.36). Whatever loss he has experienced has altered him to such an extent that he is not recognizable anymore as the young boy who lived here in his "hour of credulity" (l.8). This is not the world of epic after all, and the poem closes with this vision of a modern world sadly fallen from the glory of the literary past, but which still holds it up as an ideal. The most the poetcan hope for, perhaps, is to find a way to "clothe summer/ with gold leaf" (ll.24-25), to make of irreversible loss a fabric from which to make art. Indeed, this would fit well with the project of the

Confessional poetry begun by Lowell himself: to make one's own life experiences, however sordid and messy, into subject matter for poetry, and in so doing, to give dignity even to the failed and the mundane.

     THE OLD MAN IN THE LEAF SMOKE

Author Introduction:

Archibald MacLeish (May 7, 1892 – April 20, 1982) was an American poet and writer, who was associated with the modernist school of poetry. MacLeish studied English at Yale University and law at Harvard University. He enlisted in and saw action during the First World War and lived in Paris in the 1920s. On returning to the United States, he contributed to Henry Luce’s magazine Fortune from 1929 to 1938. For five years, MacLeish was the ninth Librarian of Congress, a post he accepted at the urging of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was awarded three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.

Best Poems of Archibald MacLeish:

▪ Voyage

▪ The Too-late Born

▪ Baccalaureate

▪ The Silent Slain

▪ The Rock In The Sea

Critical appreciation:

Stanza lengths (in strings): 13

Closest metre: trochaic tetrameter

Сlosest rhyme: limerick Сlosest

stanza type: sonnet

Poem :

Yards for winter

Burning the autumn-fallen leaves.

They have no lives, the one or the other.

The leaves are dead, the old men live

Only a little, light as a leaf,

Left to themselves of all their loves:

Light in the head most often too.

Raking the leaves, raking the lives,

Raking life and leaf together,

The old men smell of burning leaves

But which is which they wonder &mdash                                                             whether

Anyone tells the leaves and loves &mdash

Anyone