American Poetry 1981

8: “Why Holland?”: Robert Lowell in Amsterdam

“…In the 1980s, Robert Von Hallberg dismissed American poems inspired by European travel as "tourist poems," which were oftentimes "conservative in terms of poetic technique." 37 They are much more than that. Counterintuitively or not, I cannot help but see this painting and the one by Rembrandt as self-portraits-not of the Dutch masters necessarily, but as an autobiographical text that Lowell infuses into the multidimensional space of these paintings.…”

“…Although it was popular among American poets at the time to write so-called "Fulbright poems," 5 Lowell refrained from writing verses about canals and cobblestones, pigeons, and quaint seventeenth-century edifices. 6 He wrote voluminous letters to friends back home, "made more friends in Amsterdam than anywhere even in America," 7 as he told Allen Tate, and read copiously, but had no literary output to speak of. By reconstructing Lowell's circle of friends, studying what he read in Amsterdam, and analyzing two poems-"Rembrandt" and "Epilogue"-that were indirectly inspired by visits to Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, I will argue that his stay in Amsterdam nevertheless had a formative influence on the rest of Lowell's career.…”