"Yet why not say what happened?"

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah)

Robert Lowell’s “Epilogue” is one of my favorite poems. I’ve long viewed it as an argument for factuality. The first part of it appears to be just the opposite – a rejection of facticity for being literal-minded (“paralyzed by fact”) and unimaginative (“the threadbare art of my eye”). Lowell seems to regret his “snapshot” poetics (“lurid, rapid, garish, grouped”). But then he thrillingly pivots and declares his fidelity to fact:

Yet why not say what happened?

Pray for the grace of accuracy

Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination

stealing like the tide across a map

to his girl solid with yearning.

We are poor passing facts,

warned by that to give

each figure in the photograph

his living name.

Yet why not say what happened? In the contest between fact and fiction, it’s a cardinal question. Why make it up? Why not say exactly what happened? Lowell sided with fact. I applaud him. 

Interestingly, Lowell borrowed the question from his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Langdon Hammer, in his absorbing “The Art of Losing” (The New York Review of Books, December 19, 2019, writes,

He doesn’t indicate it in the poem, but Lowell quoted that question – “Yet why not say what happened?” – from Hardwick, who had posed it to him when he was blocked while writing Life Studies, and he found the advice enabling. 

Hardwick’s question would’ve been lost to history. By remembering it and including it in his superb “Epilogue,” Lowell preserved it.