Postscript on Jamison, _Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire_

JAMISON QUOTES FROM several of Lowell's 1977 obituaries: "fairly generally considered the most distinguished American poet, and indeed the most distinguished poet writing in English, of his generation" (the Times of London); "the most considerable poet since T. S.Eliot" (1974 Pulitzer Prize citation); "he dominated American poetry of the last 30 years" (Boston Globe); "the foremost American poet of his time" (Washington Post).

This got me wondering. Would any poet alive today be called the foremost poet of his or her time? Ashbery, perhaps? He's in the Library of America. But on the other hand, I know plenty of people who are poets that don't read Ashbery. Merwin is in the Library of America, too, and I think he is read even by quite a few people not professionally engaged with poetry, but he doesn't seem to loom over the landscape. Billy Collins and Mary Oliver have large readerships, but would you say of either, as the New York Times said of Lowell, that in their "poems we were obliged to relive so much of the history and so many of the terrible emotions of our time"? I don't know. Alice Notley? Ron Silliman?

But...maybe it's less that we lack a #1 Poet than that the role simply evaporated after Lowell. Strong American poets, pace Harold Bloom, no longer seem commensurate with each other, somehow. We stopped thinking about who was the best poet in the room because they were all in different rooms.

Or is it that poetry has somehow slipped beneath virtually everyone's radar? I was in grad school when Lowell died, and everyone in the English Department, and a good many people in other departments, knew who Robert Lowell was. But there are any number of poets with long-developed careers writing today whose work I (for one) find as rewarding to read as that of Lowell--Cole Swenson, Jorie Graham, Lucie Brock-Broido, Jennifer Moxley--but whose names probably half of my departmental colleagues (or about half of any English Department, for that matter) would not even recognize.

The longer I ramble on with this, the more I think it's just as well, maybe better, that we do not have a #1 Poet. But even so I wonder why we don't.