“God was the omniscient author, but he died: now no one knows the plot…” (Ronald Sukenick) (1969). Explore how Robert Lowell's Skunk Hour supports or challenges this view of post-war American literature.

In his 1969 essay The Death of the Novel, Brooklyn writer Ronald Sukenick declared God to be dead, and that “now no one knows the plot” – an intriguingly bold, yet troublingly open, statement. The difficulty in analysing Sukenick’s declaration lies with the word “God”, and whether the usage of it here is to be taken literally or metaphorically. if we are to take Sukenick’s meaning of “God” to be a metaphor for morality, hope and order, then Robert Lowell’s Skunk Hour, with its apocalyptic prophecies of a post-nuclear fallout world, and its description of a society devoid of structure, is a perfect poem to read alongside. The theme of a demised society appears throughout Skunk Hour, with its peculiar poised characters – the “Nautilus Island’s hermit heiress” who lives a barren and sparse life “through winter in her Spartan cottage” – trapped in a bleak, dead summer resort in the frost, despite her apparent wealth. Throughout Skunk Hour there are hints towards T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem The Waste Land – for example, both open in the cold of winter – yet whilst in Eliot’s poem, “Winter kept us warm”, it is a harsh reminder of what could have been in Skunk Hour. Both poems are filled with prophetic overtones, climaxing with Lowell’s shocking vision of a future deserted America, brought upon by the theme of emptiness that is evident throughout the poem. Lowell’s futuristic world living under a cloud of nuclear warfare and disorder is not one that he dreams of or hopes for, but it is one that seemed a distinct possibility in Cold War America. The poem itself appears to be empty, with its lack of clear, evident structure and style, a hint towards the simultaneous decay of society along with the decay of traditional poetry – gone are the days of Wordsworth, replaced by the unconventional confessional words of Lowell and his contemporaries. Lines are sliced in half abruptly by the usage of caesura, whilst enjambment allows others float seamlessly into one another, with no clear purpose. The “fairy decorator” appears lost and alone, and despite the possession that appears throughout the poem, it is one of loneliness and despair, and there is a clear lack of any optimism or hope for salvation – God, in a metaphorical sense, is nowhere to be found here, as Lowell’s car climbs “the hill’s skull” and he sits, with “lights turned down”, and he watches “for love-cars”. Even his blunt acceptance that his “mind’s not right” appears out of place despite its blatant truth. Much like its writer, the poem is one that does not fit. It is a poem that speaks of “lobstermen” - a strange portmanteau that suggests a nuclear mutation - and also of “skunks” rising from the lower echelons of the world and taking over from the humans – the idea that humanity’s time at the top of society is at an end, or perhaps a call for rebellion to destroy the idealised American dream that the government was still keen to cling on to and promote. Lowell’s use of possession and his materialistic tendencies – naming his car as a “Tudor Ford” and namedropping “an L. L. Bean catalogue” showcase his privileged background – may appear vain and contradictory of his disdain for the modern world, yet they may be used in an ironic tone that suggests that perhaps this apocalyptic world that he is writing about is not too far distant from our own. God is very much present throughout Skunk Hour, thus meaning that in the literal sense religion had not faded away and was still as important – to literature in particular – as it had ever been, yet Lowell seems to suggest towards a decline in morality, values and order in America following the end of the Second World War, therefore agreeing that God had died alongside these issues, and that with the death of religion, morality was no more – and “no one knows the plot” – not even Harvard-educated Lowell.