Robert Lowell “Memories of West Street and Lepke”

                The poetic nature of this poem lies in the way in which its stanzas are presented in a possible chronological order. The stanzas have seemingly little connection with each other, however they could be a timeline of memories throughout a person’s life just as the title suggests. Clearly the poem could be recounted as a summary of one’s life, but what is most exceptional about this poem is that it seems to recount a list of bad or darker things in life. the poem is also written in a romantic meter, however the topics are very dark; involving jail drugs and death by electric chair. This poem tries to communicate to me a sort of antiromantic picture of life. Clearly the third stanza seems to be the changing point of this story. It seems to describe the moment in the narrators life when everything went bad, and how it did. Given that no major story was made, its doubtful that he went to jail for something terrible, rather he may have gone against some sort of government regulation which landed him in jail.