SOURCE: "Robert Lowell: The Problems and Power of Allusion," in Dalhousie Review, Vol. 60, No. 4, Winter, 1980–81, pp. 697-702.

In the following essay, Lane discusses Lowell's use of allusion and metaphorical reference in "Man and Wife," "Sailing Home from Rapollo," and "For the Union Dead."

Allusions, like symbols, can be divided broadly into explicit and implicit: separated, as Harry Levin says, by an equatorial line past which we can sail on problematically into the conjectural and, finally, the inadmissible. At the same time allusion to some entity otherwise wholly outside the text must be distinguished from reference to a similar entity which is actually presumed present within the world of the text. King Ahab is not present in Moby Dick; Captain Ahab is. Neither is present in Robert Lowell's "The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket," but both are alluded to: one explicitly, one implicitly. The allusions in Lowell's earlier, highly allusive...