Lucretia

Rembrandt painted two Lucretias. The earlier one (in the National Gallery) is lyrical, almost dancelike. Lucretia is fully dressed, her waist tightly laced, and she wears a couple of necklaces. She looks at the knife she raises in her right hand. She hasn’t stabbed herself yet. If the knife wasn’t there, she might be Salome instead of Lucretia.

In the later painting, Lucretia wears what looks like a loose white nightgown under an open robe. Below her heart there is a long vertical red stain. She is still. The knife is in her right hand, but the hand is resting on a pillow. Her left hand seems to be pulling a cord. Alternatively, she might be holding herself up with the cord while supporting herself on the pillow. Though her eyes are open, she isn’t looking anywhere.

I saw this Lucretia at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in the summer of 1963. At nearly the same time, New York’s Met had acquired Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, which is contemporary with it. Aristotle’s pose is nearly a mirror image of Lucretia’s.

I was in Minneapolis to see if I could be a real poet. While my sister, in graduate school at the university, spent the summer in New York, I would live in her apartment and write poetry.

The apartment was the top floor of a two-storey house. Two opera students lived downstairs. Railroad tracks and one or two grain elevators were at the end of the street. The neighborhood was near the university.

I took long walks downtown, crossing the Mississippi. Where were the 10,000 lakes? The only skyscraper then was the Foshay Tower. I saw Moliere (The Miser, I think) at the new Guthrie Theater and heard a chamber music performance somewhere. On the hottest days, the asphalt in the streets became sticky.

I wrote on my sister’s typewriter on blue and yellows sheets of paper that my mother brought home from her job. I did my best to write every day, but it was frustrating. I was not a disciplined person. If I didn’t finish a poem in one sitting, it just got filed away. Any trivial distraction would shatter my mood.

At the university, I audited a couple of classes. “Modern American Poetry,” taught by James Wright (using Allen Tate’s syllabus, I believe) did not particularly interest me. It began with Jones Very at a time when I was encountering Donald Allen’s New American Poetry for the first time. When Theodore Roethke died that summer, Wright tearfully announced his death in class. Though I was sympathetic to Roethke’s work, I was a bit embarrassed by Wright’s emotional display. I may have been at fault for responding that way, but I stopped going to the class.

The other class, taught by Sarah Youngblood, whom my sister had recommended, was on Yeats. Though I don’t remember much about the class, I did take the opportunity to read and enjoy the Collected Poems. In the last class, Youngblood raised the question of Yeats’s greatness. Could a poet be great if he or she hadn’t written a major long work. Yes, she concluded. Yeats was a great poet! I returned to the apartment exhilarated. Even though I hadn’t written a major long work, I too could be a great poet!

Despite my frustration, I wrote a great deal that summer. The earliest poems in my first book were written in Minneapolis. I was twenty.