THE POETICS OF IMMANENCE AND EXPERIENCE - THE CASE OF ROBERT LOWELL

The paper demonstrates the inception of a poetic model I define as the poetics of immanence and experience in Lowell’s poetry written during the late 1950s, which I argue marked American poetry’s shift away from Modernism and its prevalent metaphoric and symbolic patterns. An analysis of a poem by W.B. Yeats (“The Second Coming”) and one of Lowell’s “life studies” (“Commander Lowell”), make the contrast between these two poetic models visible. I further define the concept of immanence as a structure-generating principle which presupposes the presence of a human consciousness as an individuated and immanent “I” in the poem, pointing at two essential forms of immanence in Lowell’s poetry: (i) the immanence of a lived experience, which occurs when the poet presents the full structure of an experience with precise and concrete details through the voice in the poem and (ii) the narrator’s immanence, which occurs when the narrator narrates himself through the selections of material and becomes the agent of the experience. Thus, the concept of immanence, this paper argues, materializes and produces an artistic effect, a simulacrum of a lived experience and a concrete, personalized immanent narrator.