I had hoped that Robert Lowell, after the disastrous collections of recent years, would emerge into old age with energy and genius as Yeats had done. But when Lowell died last September, he had just published Day by Day, a volume as slack and meretricious as Notebook and History which preceded it. The great poet died thirteen years earlier, with the publication of For the Union Dead.

One would not know it, from the book reviews or from the academy. The Literature Industry manufactures truisms like slogans. For years … we have known that Robert Lowell was our greatest living poet. No matter how self-indulgent his latest self-imitation, the New York Times Book Review would agree to its genius. I suspect that this inflation—made windier now by his death—helped precipitate the appalling decline in Lowell's achievement. (p. 7)

After I read Day by Day, depressed by its trashiness...