THE FIGHTER.(Biography)

When Robert Lowell was alive, you could barely make him out beneath a forest of garlands. In April, 1947, after the publication of his second book, "Lord Weary's Castle,"he was awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize. Life ran a feature, and a Hollywood producer called Lowell's publisher to inquire whether the poet had considered a career in the movies. (Back came the answer: He had not, but thanks for asking.) After that, there were few periods in which Lowell was not harried by fame, or by infamy, its surly younger brother. A typical encomium was this, from Hayden Carruth in the autumn of 1967, dropping to his knees in the Hudson Review:

I envy Lowell. Everywhere I go among literary people I meet only others who envy Lowell. . . . Let anyone say what he will, Lowell is our leading poet. It is a fact. He has power, influence, and an enormous reputation. His books, for example, are kept in print and they sell steadily--what a joy that must be!

Ah yes, what joy. There have always been poets, Byron above all, whose lives, in the stained arena of the public mind, have fought for supremacy with their work, but in Lowell's case the struggle was unnaturally frantic, whipped along by his own reckonings of familial strife. His three marriages were cyclonic, but they were easily outnumbered, and outblasted, by his episodes of manic depression, and, more happily, by the gusts of his poetic enthusiasm. When he re-wrought Sappho, Montale, Rimbaud, Villon, Pasternak, and Baudelaire, among others, into "Imitations,"in 1961, the question of whether these were responsible translations, or manglings, or--as Lowell himself wished--the minting of something new was a matter of extravagant debate. By the time he died, in 1977, at the unjust age of sixty, he had spent twenty years or more as, if not an American pontiff, then, at least, as one of the more senior cardinals of the culture. As Elizabeth Bishop, whom Lowell loved and admired, wrote, in a tribute to "Life Studies," "In the middle of our worst century so far, we have produced a magnificent poet."

Since his death, Lowell has yielded the high, commanding ground in American letters that he held during his life; in the meantime, Sylvia Plath has consolidated her position, while time has been kind to Adrienne Rich and, especially, to Bishop herself. This is not merely a change of fashion. If the shade of Lowell is no longer central to our view of poetry, that may be because poetry itself is no longer central to our lives, or, at any rate, to the way in which we reach for other voices in the quest to lend articulate energy to those lives. He is not so much a lost figure, one might say, as the last of his kind. When he worked as an informal adviser to Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 Presidential campaign, there was some mockery of what was, in essence, an intellectual companionship, but it was not thought utterly strange that a poet should consort with a power seeker. Is that still the case? If somebody of Lowell's record sought to hang out with a Democratic challenger in 2004, for instance, would the Secret Service not invite him to leave by the nearest window?

Now we have a chance to revisit that eminence. Head for the poetry section of your bookstore and look for a cuboid chunk of verbal muscle: "Robert Lowell: Collected Poems"(Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $45), edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. To leaf through Lowell is to undergo not a seduction but an assault. What is at issue here is not merely the thrashing vehemence of his lines, whereby even the songbirds that herald spring can be recruited to the cause of the ominous ("the forest / Is noosed in the ropes of shrill feathered throats"). There is also the shocking bulk of his output, all those slight volumes piling up into a corpus of Wordsworthian proportion. The running order is as follows: "Lord Weary's Castle"(1946); "The Mills of the Kavanaughs"(1951); "Life Studies"(1959); "Imitations"(1961); "For the Union Dead"(1964); "Near the Ocean"(1967); "History"(1973); "For Lizzie and Harriet"(1973); "The Dolphin"(1973); "Day by Day"(1977); "Last Poems"(1977). Then, there is "Land of Unlikeness"(1944), which Lowell never permitted to reappear in his lifetime, and which the editors reprint here as an appendix. All told, the "Collected Poems"stretches to more than eleven hundred pages.

It's a long story, and it begins in 1917--or, to be snobbish about it, sometime around the arrival of the Mayflower. Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was born into a lesser branch of a distinguished Boston family, and from that source sprang most of his turbulent story. To put the matter at its simplest: his father, Bob, was a weak soul, never doing enough, under Boston eyes, to merit the name that sustained him, while the poet's mother, born Charlotte Winslow, was one of the implacably strong. Having hooked her man, she played him to the limits of fatigue; he was a naval officer, but she dragged him to shore and demanded that he leave the service. When he acceded, she mocked him for his acquiescence, and for the pride that he took in his job at Lever Brothers: "I think he is in love with his soap vat."Decades later, in "Life Studies,"his son returned to the fray:

He was soon fired. Year after year,, he still hummed "Anchors aweigh"in the tub--, whenever he left a job,, he bought a smarter car.