I confess that in general I do not feel comfortable with the poems of the American poet Robert Lowell. To which some may say, since when was it the function of poetry to make us feel comfortable? Fair point, but it surely is, or should be, the function of poetry, in the words of Matthew Arnold, ‘to see life steadily and see it whole’, and I don’t feel that Lowell does this. But I do like this affectionately elegiac portrayal of T.S.Eliot, which shows a generosity of spirit not always accorded by poets to their peers (think Philip Larkin).
Notes:
Harvard: an American Ivy League university.
Memorial Hall: a Harvard building in memory the University’s Civil War dead.
‘warden’s pace’: presumably implying slow and deliberate – Eliot was an air raid warden during the Second World War.
Poe: the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, who as well as being famous as a writer of macabre stories worked as a reviewer.
‘The Yard’: the campus at the center of Harvard University.
Pound: the American modernist poet Ezra Pound, who had a great influence on Eliot and others in the early twentieth century but moved to Italy in 1924 and threw in his lot with fascism, making broadcasts during the Second World War in support of eugenics and the Holocaust and urging American G.I.s to throw down their weapons and surrender. Captured by the Italian Resistance, he was handed over to the American authorities but ultimately judged unfit to stand trial and instead was interned for twelve years in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the criminally insane, in Washington, where T.S.Eliot visited him. Released in 1958, he returned to Italy to live in Rapallo, where he died in 1972.
I have a bit of a textual problem with the last line. The version of the poem I found and copied out years ago had ‘humor and honor’, which I have kept, but other versions online have ‘humor and boredom’ which seems to make much less sense – can anyone cast any light on this?
T.S.Eliot
Caught between two streams of traffic, in the gloom
of Memorial Hall and Harvard’s war-dead…. And he:
“Don’t you loathe to be compared with your relatives?
I do. I’ve just found two of mine reviewed by Poe.
He wiped the floor with them…and I was delighted.”
Then on with warden’s pace across the Yard,
talking of Pound, “It’s balls to say he only
pretends to be Ezra….He’s better though. This year
He no longer wants to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem.
Yes, he’s better. ‘You speak,’ he said, when he’d talked two hours.
By then I had absolutely nothing to say.”
Ah Tom, one muse, one music, had one your luck —
lost in the dark night of the brilliant talkers,
humor and honor from the everlasting dross!
Robert Lowell
David Sutton 
I checked Selected Poems First expanded edition (2006). You are correct. It’s “humor and honor”. Elsewhere in the text you haven’t got the italics quite right. I will email you a screenshot of the page.
Thanks Chris. Italics now corrected and release date of 1978 amended to 1958.
I’m trying to understand the last three lines. Eliot retains “humor and honor” despite being immersed (I don’t consider him “lost”) “in the dark night of the brilliant talkers”? Does that sound roughly correct?
Like you I find these closing lines open to interpretation. Is it Eliot who is lost in the dark night of the brilliant talkers – lost in the sense that brilliant conversation goes unrecorded, unless one has a helpful Boswell – and could there be an echo here of Eliot’s own line from ‘East Coker’: ‘O dark, dark, dark. They all go into the dark’? Or is it Lowell who feels himself lost, in the sense of being overshadowed by these superior talents, who are capable, in a way he feels he can only envy, of salvaging humour and honour from the mundane everyday? I incline to the latter interpretation, but am open to persuasion.
Indeed, the closing lines are open to interpretation! Grammatically it’s “Tom” who is lost. Lowell has just given two examples of Eliot’s conversation, so he considers Eliot amongst the “brilliant talkers”?
It appears that Eliot was not generally considered a great conversationalist, being rather stiff and formal in manner and given to awkward silences. Which just confuses the matter further. I suppose it could be that it is Pound who is being referred to as one of the ‘brilliant talkers’: he certainly seems to have been loquacious though whether in his later years he had anything to say worth saying is open to debate.