Poetry: Notebook 1967-68

Overview
"Notebook 1967-68" collects the materials Robert Lowell recorded during a turbulent two-year span and presents them in a deliberately fragmentary, immediate form. The book reads as a running ledger of a poet confronting public upheaval and private disintegration, where handwritten impressions, aborted drafts, and near-complete poems sit side by side. The volume foregrounds process: thought in motion, language being made and unmade, often returning to images and phrases that refuse resolution.

Context and Composition
The late 1960s placed Lowell at the intersection of national crisis and personal crisis. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, urban unrest, and shifting cultural norms, Lowell's notebooks register an acute moral and political consciousness. Simultaneously, recurrent psychiatric struggle, family tensions, and grief give the entries an autobiographical intensity. The book reproduces moments of revision and hesitation rather than presenting finished polish, so the reader encounters the poet amid decision-making, tracking how public events and private memory commingle on the page.

Themes and Motifs
A persistent tension between the public and the intimate drives the material: civic guilt and outrage sit next to confessions about family, illness, and desire. Mortality, culpability, and the burden of history recur as Lowell interrogates both national myths and personal failings. Religious and classical allusions surface alongside contemporary references, creating a dialogue between tradition and the immediate present. Repetition and recurring fragments act like refrains, revealing how certain images, ruin, confession, witness, return as both obsession and organizing principle.

Form and Language
The book privileges brevity, rupture, and the provisional line. Fragments, spare couplets, clipped prose notes, and draft stanzas coexist, so the reader witnesses the scaffolding of poems: crossed-out lines, alternative phrasings, and sudden associative leaps. Lowell's diction swings between plain, confessional speech and erudite allusion, with a muscular syntax that can become rawly colloquial or formally ambitious within a few lines. The result is a hybrid literary object: part diary, part laboratory, part battlefield for poetic decisions.

Voice and Ethical Stance
A self-conscious, often chastened speaker moves through the pages, alternately defensive and solicitous, ironic and urgent. The ethical stakes feel immediate; Lowell frequently interrogates his own authority as witness and as writer. Where he records atrocities or political outrages, the language negotiates distance and complicity, asking whether poetic attention can or should encompass suffering without appropriation. That moral wrestling animates many of the notebook entries and gives them a sense of conscience in motion.

Reception and Legacy
Readers and critics have tended to regard the notebook as an important document of Lowell's method and mindset at a fraught historical moment. Some praised its candidness and its willingness to expose revision as part of art-making; others found the exposure unsettling, preferring more formally complete poems. Over time the volume has been read as a revealing bridge between Lowell's earlier confessional breakthroughs and later, more controversial work, influencing how poets think about the notebook as a legitimate literary form and how a public poet might bear witness through fragment and trial.