By July 1968 he was talking of the “long poem” he had almost finished—“I want this book to hit with a single impact: the parts are not meant to stand by themselves”1—but it was in October 1968 that he decided that the movement of his Notebook’s plot should be from summer 1967 through the fall of 1968: It is not a chronicle or almanac: many events turn up, many others of equal or greater reality do not. This is not my diary, my confession, not a puritan’s too literal pornographic honesty, glad to share private embarrassment, or triumph.2 Although Notebook makes much of its framework of public events—Lowell lists the year’s principal upheavals in a note at the end of the published text—and although Lowell’s own year had been hectically political, there are few poems that are explicitly “about” the headline sensations of 1967–68. Indeed, anyone reading the book now, without aid from any of the histories, would find it hard to recall even the main outlines of what happened.
What do You think about Robert Lowell: A Biography?
