SOURCE: “The Empty Cathedral: Lowell and Adams,” in The Markham Review, Vol. 9, Winter, 1980, pp. 29-32.

In the following essay, Attebery views Lowell's The Cathedral as a significant transitional work thematically linked to the writings of Henry Adams and T. S. Eliot.

James Russell Lowell dismissed himself in A Fable for Critics as a poet “who’s striving Parnassus to climb / With a whole bale of isms together with rhyme … / The top of the hill he will ne’re come nigh reaching / Till he learns the distinction ‘twixt singing and preaching.”¹ Lowell's self-criticism is accurate enough to have become the common critical view: excepting only the Fable and a few of the dialect poems, his work is passed over as amateurish, didactic, and dated. Yet one other important exception—“The Cathedral”—should be added to the list of Lowell's lasting poetic contributions. It deserves to be re-examined by the...