Robert Lowell

A complete collection of Robert Lowell's autobiographical prose, from unpublished writings about his youth to reflections on the triumphs and confusions of his adult life. Robert Lowell's Memoirs is an unprecedented literary discovery: the manuscript of Lowell's lyrical evocation of his childhood, which was written in the 1950s and has remained unpublished until now. Meticulously edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, it serves as a precursor or companion to his groundbreaking book of poems Life Studies, which signaled a radically new prose-inflected direction in his work, and indeed in American poetry. Memoirs also includes intense depictions of Lowell's mental illness and his determined efforts to recover. It concludes with Lowell's reminiscences of other writers, among them T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Hannah Arendt, and Sylvia Plath. Memoirs demonstrates Lowell's expansive gifts as a prose stylist and his powers of introspection and observation. It provides striking new evidence of the range and brilliance of Lowell's achievement. Includes black-and-white photographs

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

Of the twenty chapters that make up these Memoirs, seventeen appear here in print for the first time, unearthed by the editors from the Harvard Archive. Memoirs demonstrates Lowell's expansive gifts as a prose stylist and provide further evidence of the range and brilliance of his achievement.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1864.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1864.

The Dolphin Letters offers an unprecedented portrait of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick during the last seven years of Lowell’s life, a time of personal crisis and creative innovation for both writers. Lowell’s controversial sonnet sequence, The Dolphin (for which he used Hardwick’s letters as a source), and Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights were written during this period. Centered on the letters they exchanged with each other and with other members of their circle - writers, intellectuals, friends, and publishers, including Elizabeth Bishop, Caroline Blackwood, Mary McCarthy, and Adrienne Rich - the book has the narrative sweep of a novel, telling the story of the dramatic breakup of their twenty-one-year marriage and their extraordinary, but late, reconciliation. Lowell and Hardwick are acutely intelligent observers of marriages, children, and friends, and of the feelings that their personal crises gave rise to. The Dolphin Letters, masterfully edited by Saskia Hamilton, is a debate about the limits of art - what occasions a work of art, what moral and artistic license artists have to make use of their lives as material, what formal innovations such debates give rise to. The crisis of Lowell’s The Dolphin was profoundly affecting to everyone surrounding him, and Bishop’s warning to Lowell - “art just isn’t worth that much” - haunts.

WINNER OF THE PEGASUS AWARD FOR POETRY CRITICISMThe Dolphin Letters offers an unprecedented portrait of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick during the last seven years of Lowell's life (1970 to 1977), a time of personal crisis and creative innovation for both writers. Centred on the letters they exchanged with each other and with other members of their circle - writers, intellectuals, friends and publishers, including Elizabeth Bishop, Caroline Blackwood, Mary McCarthy and Adrienne Rich - this book has the narrative sweep of a novel, telling the story of the dramatic breakup of Lowell and Hardwick's twenty-one-year marriage and their extraordinary, but late, reconciliation.Lowell's sonnet sequence The Dolphin (for which he controversially adapted Hardwick's letters as a source) and his last book, Day by Day, were written during this period, as were Hardwick's influential books Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature and Sleepless Nights. Lowell and Hardwick are acutely intelligent observers of marriage, children, friends and the feelings that their personal tribulations gave rise to.The Dolphin Letters, edited by Saskia Hamilton, is a debate about the limits of art - what occasions a work of art, and what moral and artistic licence artists have to make use of their lives and the lives of others as material. The crisis of Lowell's The Dolphin was profoundly affecting to everyone around him, and Bishop's warning that 'art just isn't worth that much' haunts us today.

The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972-1973 is an expanded edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning provocative poetry collection that crossed the line between art and life.I have sat and listened to too manywords of the collaborating muse, and plotted perhaps too freely with my life, not avoiding injury to others, not avoiding injury to myself--to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction, an eelnet made by man for the eel fightingmy eyes have seen what my hand did. Winner of the 1973 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, Robert Lowell's The Dolphin was controversial from the beginning: many of the poems include letters from Robert Lowell's wife, the celebrated writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick, wrote to him after he left her for the English socialite and writer Caroline Blackwood. He was warned by many, among them Elizabeth Bishop, that "art just isn't worth that much." Nevertheless, these poems are a powerful document of an impulsive love, and a moving record of Lowell's change from one life and marriage in America to a new life on new terms with a new family in England, rendered with the stunning technical power and control for which he was so celebrated. This new edition, which follows the 1973 edition, includes scans of the pages of Lowell's original manuscript, giving us a look into the brilliant and complicated mind of one of our most beloved and distinguished poets.

The collected work of America's pre-eminent post-war poet.Edmund Wilson wrote of Robert Lowell that he was the 'only recent American poet - if you don't count Eliot - who writes successfully in the language and cadence and rhyme of the resounding English tradition'.Frank Bidart and David Gewanter have compiled a comprehensive edition of Lowell's poems, from the early triumph of Lord Weary's Castle, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, through the brilliant wilfulness of his Imitations of Sappho, Baudelaire, Rilke and other masters, to the late spontaneity of his History, winner of another Pulitzer, and of his last book of poems, Day by Day. This volume includes several poems never previously collected, as well as a selection of Lowell's intriguing drafts.As Randall Jarrell said, 'You feel before reading any new poem of his the uneasy expectation of perhaps encountering a masterpiece'. Lowell's Collected Poems offers the first opportunity to view the entire range of his astonishing verse.

Robert Lowell (1917-1977) oli kiistelty ja kuuluisa, hämmästyttävän monipuolinen yhdysvaltalainen runoilija, joka julkaisi eläessään toistakymmentä teosta. Häntä pidettiin eläessään yhtenä Yhdysvaltojen runouden suurimmista nimistä. Hän oli aseistakieltäytyjä ja Vietnamin sodan äänekäs vastustaja. Lowell kärsi koko aikuisikänsä kaksisuuntaisesta mielialahäiriöstä ja vietti kolme vuotta elämästään psykiatrisessa sairaalassa. Pulitzer-palkinnon Lowell sai kahdesti. Lowell tuli tunnetuksi ”tunnustuksellisesta runoudesta” (confessional poetry). Lowell itse sävähti tai jopa paheksui termiä. Hänen mukaansa henkilökohtaisuuden illuusio syntyy keksimisestä ja järjestämisestä - ei pakkomielteisestä tai terapeuttisesta ”tunnustuksellisuudesta”. Päivä päivältä keskittyy Lowellin viimeiseksi jääneeseen, laajaan kokoelmaan Day by Day. Elämän ja rakkauden äkkiväärä rajallisuus askarrutti varsinkin vanhenevaa Lowellia. Rajallisuuden yksi kokemus oli myös se, kun lähes jokasyksyinen mania vei hänet sairaalaan joko vapaaehtoisesti tai pakolla.

'THE BEST AMERICAN POET OF HIS GENERATION.' - TIMEGathered on the occasion of Robert Lowell's one hundredth birthday, New Selected Poems offers a fresh and illuminating representation of one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry. The renowned and controversial author of many books of poems, plays, and translations, Lowell was one of the United States' most honoured poets, winning the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1947 and 1974, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His ongoing interrogation of his family legacy, his personal struggle with manic depression, and his mastery of the tradition of poetry in English formed the groundbreaking autobiographical foundation of Life Studies (1959) and the books that followed it, including For the Union Dead (1964), Near the Ocean (1967), History (1973), and Day by Day (1977).Katie Peterson's incisive selection of Lowell's poems draws attention to 'the perishability of life, its twinned quality of fragility and repetition, as framed by the structured evanescence of daily consciousness.' Lowell's own intense dramas and struggles are the substrate he drew on in his restless search to make sense of, and fix, shape-shifting experience - not his, but ours. As Peterson says, Lowell was 'constitutionally immune to any stultifying permanence either of form or of spirit.' Her brilliant new reading of Lowell shows us his work constantly breaking, renewing, transforming, as he strives restlessly, over and over, to find an elusive unity.

In this condensed edition of Selected Poems, Robert Lowell's poems are brought together from all of his books of verse. Chosen and introduced by Katie Peterson on the occasion of Robert Lowell's one hundredth birthday, New Selected Poems offers a perfectly chosen and illuminating representation of one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry.

Robert Lowell once remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop that "you ha ve] always been my favorite poet and favorite friend." The feeling was mutual. Bishop said that conversation with Lowell left her feeling "picked up again to the proper table-land of poetry," and she once begged him, "Please never stop writing me letters--they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I've been re-reading Emerson) for several days." Neither ever stopped writing letters, from their first meeting in 1947 when both were young, newly launched poets until Lowell's death in 1977. Presented in Words in Air is the complete correspondence between Bishop and Lowell. The substantial, revealing--and often very funny--interchange that they produced stands as a remarkable collective achievement, notable for its sustained conversational brilliance of style, its wealth of literary history, its incisive snapshots and portraits of people and places, and its delicious literary gossip, as well as for the window it opens into the unfolding human and artistic drama of two of America's most beloved and influential poets.

When first introduced to Robert Lowell in 1947, Elizabeth Bishop wrote that 'he was living in a basement room on Third Avenue . . . and was rather untidy. He was wearing a rumpled dark blue suit . . . I took to him at once.' Lowell was equally taken by Bishop, and thought she had 'more to offer, I think, than anyone writing poems in English'. The candid, affectionate, constrained and loving friendship of the two American poets is recorded in letters written over three decades. It begins after the publication of their first books, when they were 'as mischievous as children about the figures they held most in awe' (David Kalstone), and ends only with Lowell's death. The letters also record the complications of each other's lives - Lowell's mental illness, Bishop's struggles with alcohol, their mutually crossed love affairs. In their now celebrated correspondences, they performed best for one another, as the drama of their public and private lives unfolded.