A Modernist at heart, writing in the wake of the polyglot tradition firmly established in the first half of the twentieth century by Joyce's operatic Babels and Pound's symphonic Cantos , Robert Lowell was a poet who spoke in many voices, a master of linguistic personae. Switching with baffling ease from the “otherworldly” Puritanic gloom shrouding his recreation of his New England ancestors, to the very worldly evocation of his own personal life, he was a writer with a keen ear for layering various types of discourse within the span of one poem. What is more, as was the case with Joyce or Pound, his mastery of tone and voice enabled him to let his readers overhear what I am tempted to call a “cultural polyphony” sounding in each of his texts, in the fleeting utterance of one single word — or better still, as I hope to demonstrate, in the discreet note of one syllable, one letter.