All [Lowell's] intelligence, his understanding of shifting levels of experience and of language, led him to complexity but not to a reduction of scale or a restriction of feeling. Certainly he lives with bathos, the ironies of mundanity, but when this comes it comes with a bang:

     In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother's coffin,
     Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL.
     The corpse
     was wrapped like panetone in Italian tinfoil….

The grandeur of Lowell's style reveals that triviality is simply no danger to him. His life-work has been pitched at a point most others dare not envisage. But the lines … do carry in them an antithetical problem to that of reduction, and even if they master it, it is not one Lowell always defeated. The lines are in themselves 'grandiloquent'.

Throughout his career, Lowell possessed and knew he possessed a seemingly incurable gift for words: a capacity to transform anything...