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From Life Studies to Day by Day:Robert Lowell's Rendezvous with Memory as an “Imaginative Reconstruction”
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Memory steers Robert Lowell's obsessive nature of self-interpretation-a Freudian therapeutic project-that governed most of his oeuvre. But rather than the therapeutic, a project of psychotherapy taken upon doctor's advice, Lowell's artistic purpose dominates most of his compositions of returns and reconstructions. Lowell introduced his Selected Poems by admitting that there are important differences between the poetic identity and the poet's personal identity: “My verse autobiography sometimes fictionalizes plot and particular” (vii). Memory here is a shaping power of the poet's artistic imagination incessantly reconstructed in the present. This imaginative reconstruction of memory, a recent appraisal, deviates from traditional self-analysis and assists to form an artistic poetic identity that guides his work to a coherent whole. This paper examines how the reconstructive process of memory is worked out through Life Studies (1959) to Day by Day (1977), the two ground breaking poetic works that watermarked the most creative part of Lowell's career, and explores how it helps create “an aesthetic effect.”
Keywords
Memory, Psychoanalysis, Autobiography, Poetic Identity.
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