Poetry: Imitations

Overview

Robert Lowell's Imitations (1961) is a sustained act of homage and alteration that brings a constellation of European and classical poets into a mid‑20th‑century American idiom. Rather than offering literal, scholarly translations, the volume presents Lowell's creative reworkings of poets such as Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, and Horace, among others. The pieces move between close fidelity to original lines and adventurous departures that assert Lowell's own voice, producing a hybrid text that reads as both tribute and revision.

Sources and Method

Lowell drew on a wide range of source languages and periods, treating the act of translation as an opportunity for imaginative engagement rather than mere reproduction. He labeled many pieces "imitations" to signal this freedom: the aim was not philological precision but the recreation of tone, rhetorical stance, and syntactic energy in English. His process often involved reweaving imagery, recalibrating rhythm, and inserting contemporary idioms or biographical echoes, so that the resulting poems register as conversations between the original writer's project and Lowell's own poetic concerns.

Selected Transformations

The volume's reworkings of Rimbaud and Baudelaire exemplify Lowell's balance of reverence and revision. From Rimbaud he adopts incandescent images and jagged syntactic turns, while from Baudelaire he takes a metropolitan sensibility and a moral ambivalence toward beauty. The Horatian pieces translate classical forms and ethical reflection into a modern register, playing with metrical suggestion and conversational diction. Across these transformations, Lowell frequently shifts perspective, merges historical distances, and repurposes rhetorical ironies so that each imitation feels like a new composition grounded in an older scaffolding.

Voice and Technique

Lowell's idiosyncratic voice, marked by muscular diction, abrupt enjambments, and a willingness to mix the colloquial with the elevated, animates the translations. He often foregrounds the translator's mediating role, allowing his gait of confession, scholarly allusion, and moral urgency to surface within poems that began as alien registers. The result is a series of performances in which voice is both adopted and interrogated: the poems sound like echoes of their originals while also revealing Lowell's preoccupations with history, authority, and the limits of representation.

Themes and Motifs

Recurring concerns across the imitations include mortality and decay, the ethics of artmaking, the tensions of exile or displacement, and the fraught pleasures of beauty. Urban landscapes, classical allusions, and bodily immediacy often collide, producing images that are at once antique and hyper‑modern. Through the act of rephrasing canonical lines, Lowell explores how cultural inheritance shapes the self and how personal memory refracts literary tradition, so that translation becomes a form of self‑interrogation.

Reception and Influence

Contemporaries responded with a mixture of admiration and skepticism: some praised the volume's daring and musicality, while others questioned the propriety of transmuting canonical texts so freely. Over time Imitations has been recognized as an important experiment in twentieth‑century poetic practice, one that loosened definitions of translation and influenced later poets who treat translated work as interpretive performance. The volume stands as a testament to Lowell's belief that engaging the past need not be a passive act of homage but can instead generate fresh, sometimes unsettling, linguistic life.