Another reader might find it absurd that James Fenton spends the bulk of his NYRB review of Robert Lowell: Collected Poems nitpicking the annotations; I, on the other hand, am delighted. Anyone can rhapsodize about Lowell’s verse, but it takes dedication, an eye for detail, and a well-stocked mind to go through the footnotes as Fenton has—and, as it happens, I love footnotes. I’ve spent much of my life trying to understand things foreign to my experience, and I long ago learned the value of a well-annotated text. This, alas, does not appear to be one.
Fenton introduces the subject by saying:
These editors are very keen to tell us things we might well know or easily look up: the meanings of vino rosso, Dummkopf, hors de combat, bête noire, in ovo, coup de théâtre. They inform us that Boulder is in Colorado…. they tell us that Fraülein [sic] means a young woman. So they clearly do not expect us to have been out and about very much. In which case it follows that, in the same poem, they ought to let us know that the English Garden is, rather surprisingly, the main park in central Munich.
The editors do not explain the background of the burning of the city, very important to the poem. And not only do they not regularize punctuation or spelling, they do not even explain Lowell’s errors:
If he had been careful he would have written “homo homini lupus,” not “homo lupus homini.” He would have written “Sturm und Drang” rather than “sturm und drang“—but then, would he ever have described an acquaintance as comical “in the manner of the crusading sturm und drang liberal scholars in second year German novels”? What precisely does this description connote? If the editors know, why don’t they tell us? If Lowell is both misusing and misspelling the German term, they should quietly inform us, and we can then move on.
They also fail to explain the ultramontane connotations of the title “Beyond the Alps,” the epithet “our black classic” for Paris, the borrowing of a line from Empson (who borrowed it from Anita Loos), the fact that Sir Walter Raleigh was a poet (and thus a presumed stand-in for Lowell), the source of the Sappho poems used in “Three Letters to Anaktoria,” and many other things. But they do “explain” that the Parthenon honors Minerva (sic), who was born from the head of Zeus (sic). Fenton says, “In the end, one falls back, defeated. It is too depressing to go on.”
Now, you can say that he’s being picky, that the poetry is what matters. And so it is—but if I’m going to add a weighty, expensive volume like this to my already groaning shelves, I have to trust the editors (Frank Bidart and David Gewanter), and after Fenton’s evisceration I cannot. There is nothing I despise more in an editor than plodding annotation of what the reader can be expected to know (and sloppy annotation at that) and not of what the reader needs explained. How can such editors be trusted to make the right decisions about the text of the poems? I shall not be buying this book.