Lowell’s Limits

All one needs to establish oneself as a great poet is to write three or four great poems, poems that ring, sing, stay forever in the memory of their readers. Yet in the modern age how few poets have been able to do so. T.S. Eliot did. So did Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost. Marianne Moore, I do not know; Elizabeth Bishop, alas, does not make the cut. Philip Larkin does. In a poem called "Reading Myself" Robert Lowell writes that he has "earned my grass on the minor slopes of Parnassus." But did Lowell ever get anywhere near the top of that mountain sacred to Apollo and to the Muses?