Robert Lowell's The Old Glory

Extract

Lowell the dramatist matches Lowell the poet, and his manner is unabashedly theatrical. The Old Glory, taut and laconic, the center of gravity less in words than in the action behind them, achieves in its three plays a classic fusion of style and substance, projecting an impersonal vision in tones of the gravest personal authority. Part of the spell is no doubt Lowell's gift, familiar from Imitations, of being past and present, self and other, here and there, all at once. He set out to dramatize a group of tales by Melville and Hawthorne and their voices sounded through him. For a moment Lowell made the old voices his own. Under the direction of Jonathan Miller at the American Place two years ago, it was immediately evident that the ground of this necromancy was a capacity for suffering the issues of the moral life at its most perplexing, for following them out to the end.