Among My Books. Second Series — A Closer Reading

The Critic's Shifting Register

Lowell's prose moves between two distinct registers. In the Dante essay, he writes with a nearly lyrical sweep: 'the great triumvirate of Italian poetry, good sense, and culture called her mother.' Yet he can pivot to a dry, almost legalistic precision, as when he notes that Spenser's allegory 'is too often forced upon us against our will.' This alternation is not random; it mirrors his argument about each poet's own handling of pace. When discussing Wordsworth, Lowell's sentences grow longer, more meditative, as if absorbing the poet's reflective tone. The reader attuned to these shifts will find that Lowell's style itself becomes a commentary on the works he examines.

Metaphor as Critical Tool

Lowell rarely states a judgment without embedding it in a metaphor. Spenser's measure is 'the mellow versatility of his pictures'; Ariosto, by comparison, is 'as Bologna to Venice.' The allegory of the Faerie Queene is likened to being 'driven to church' until one suspects 'defective inspiration.' These figures do more than decorate: they compress complex evaluations into memorable images. In the Milton essay, Lowell likely continues this practice, using analogy to gauge the epic poet's gravity against the lyric swiftness of Keats. Readers should watch how each metaphor reveals Lowell's own sense of what constitutes effective poetic pacing—whether it is the 'alacrity of his mind' he praises in Spenser or the 'tediously sincere' fighting he dismisses in medieval romance.

Pace and the Problem of Allegory

Lowell's most sustained discussion of narrative pace occurs in the Spenser section. He catalogues the Faerie Queene's structural faults: vague characters who 'drop out of the story so often and remain out of it so long' that the reader forgets them; episodes that 'hinder the advance of the action'; a plot 'that shape has none.' Yet he insists the poem remains readable because of its 'musical felicity' and 'variety and sweep of measure.' This tension—between acknowledged structural weakness and enduring aesthetic pleasure—is central to Lowell's critical method. He does not resolve it but instead uses it to distinguish Spenser from Bunyan, whose allegory works because it is rooted in 'one man's real experience.' The comparison suggests that for Lowell, pace is not merely speed but the reader's sense of forward momentum and emotional engagement.

Lowell's essays reward attention to his own stylistic choices as much as to his judgments of others. Readers may find it useful to track how his sentence length and metaphorical density change from one essay to the next, and to consider whether those changes reflect an attempt to match the voice of the poet under discussion. The second series, like the first, is less a systematic treatise than a conversation with a learned friend—one who expects you to recognize his allusions and to argue back.

I came back to Lowell’s essays on Wordsworth late last night, lingering over how he pieces a poet’s life from the cadence of a single line. It reminded me, oddly, of how I once felt reading about Boswell’s patient assembling of Johnson’s voice—the same quiet detective work, the same trust in conversation. For that, I found Boswell the Biographer — Themes and Context a gentle companion.