Thomas Merton Critical Essay | Critical Review by Robert Lowell

Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

Thomas Merton's career has been varied and spectacular: Cambridge University, the New Yorker and the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani. One can understand only too easily why the Protean Mr. Laughlin of the New Directions Press would be fascinated. I am sure that Catholics altogether like the idea of an "experimental" Trappist. But American Catholic culture is...
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