Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1117765 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-20
• Released on: 2007-03-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 888 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Already excerpted in the New Yorker and elsewhere, these letters have been awaited at least since Ian Hamilton's monumental 1985 biography of Lowell (1917– 1977). Brilliant, intimate, free, sculpted, various and wildly desirous of communication, the letters were worth the wait. The letters to Randall Jarrell and John Berryman have a peculiar professional intimacy. Those to his various wives, particularly Elizabeth Hardwick, have a raw pleading that often centers on the aftermath of episodes of mania or depression, but they never veer into bathos. The letters to Elizabeth Bishop form the core of the collection, and they are extraordinary, particularly the letters describing Maine, where both summered (though almost never at the same time): Lowell's eye for physical detail and feel for emotional valence seem directly wired into his prose. There are love letters to an Italian mistress, and lovely, frank letters in friendship to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Lowell corresponded at one time or another with many major modernists (Eliot, Pound, Frost, Williams); watching Lowell simultaneously assert, defer and posture without obsequiousness is fascinating. Over the course of this vast volume, Lowell's reading, moods, professional obligations, political engagements, family life and final sense of isolation come through with often searing clarity. Even for those who don't care for Lowell's verse (or any verse), this is a major epistolary life. Photos not seen by PW. (June)
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From The Washington Post
Two major poets, two volumes of letters: Robert Lowell, certainly one of the best poets of his generation and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes; James Wright, 10 years younger with a Pulitzer of his own. Similar careers, starting with graduation with honors from Kenyon College after studying with John Crowe Ransom. But they got to Kenyon in different ways. Lowell came from one of the oldest families in Boston, an exclusive prep school and two years at Harvard. Wright came from an obscure family in a dismal town on the Ohio River and went to college on the G.I. Bill.

Both married about the time of graduation, published their first major books at age 29 and wrote spontaneous, unrevised letters, primarily to other poets, with a considerable overlap in correspondents. Both deepened their talents during the wrenching revolution in poetry in the late 1950s. Both abused alcohol. And both suffered debilitating mental illnesses.

Lowell began as a follower of the difficult and impersonal modern poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and although Eliot published "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" the year Lowell was born and Pound was older still, Lowell eventually corresponded with both. But when the Beats arrived like a fresh breeze through a broken window, Lowell became more open, simpler and more self-revealing in his great collection Life Studies. Allen Ginsberg and friends even came to visit him once; Lowell described the visit as perplexing, but readers will probably find it high comedy. Unfortunately, he almost never wrote detailed letters about his poetic processes, and the reasoning that led to his personal revolution remains obscure.

Meanwhile, Wright went through a revolution of his own, fully dramatized in his letters during the second half of 1959, which take up a fifth of this collection -- a wise decision on the part of the editors, Anne Wright, his second wife, and Saundra Rose Maley. His intense correspondence at that time with his contemporaries James Dickey, Robert Bly and Donald Hall convinced him that he should try to abandon his earlier models, the traditional metric forms of Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson. This conversion was an epic struggle: "I am trapped by the very thing -- the traditional technique -- which I labored so hard to attain." After thinking of giving up poetry altogether, he had a breakthrough: "I have a new son, and I am in touch with poetry again -- not metrical tricks, but the fire of the daemon!"

Too often the brilliance of our best authors is credited to some kind of mental problem rather than to their genius, but how should we deal with a poet who actually had a mental illness? When Wright was asked to write about his friend Anne Sexton, he replied that her suicide was "a totally meaningless pain in the ass": "The thing to concentrate on is the poetry itself." The same, of course, should apply to Lowell and Wright.

But a collection of correspondence is a form of biography. While Lowell was strikingly able to recollect his illness in the tranquility of some of his best poetry, he wrote some of these letters while in the throes of his attacks. Here the pattern of Lowell's breakdowns is clear: He would become interested in Hitler or Napoleon, begin an affair, declare to everyone that he and his current wife had agreed on an amiable divorce and finally create bizarre public scenes; then he would be hospitalized, return to normal, apologize to his wife and friends and drop the new girlfriend. It makes for harrowing reading.

Lowell's editor, Saskia Hamilton, notes that although "many people who knew him judged his manic behavior as a moral failing," his family and friends "thought that his 'real' self was the person they knew when he was well." Nevertheless, a well Lowell was still a difficult person. He kept his prep-school nickname, Cal (for Caligula), throughout his life. He was often domineering, arrogant and controversial. This collection begins with a confident 1936 letter to Pound in Italy, asking to be taken on as an apprentice and playing his trump card, a family connection from Pound's early days: "I am 19, a freshman at Harvard, and some relation, I don't know what, to Amy Lowell." In the middle of World War II, after first trying to enlist, he became a conscientious objector; the politics seem bizarre, but his letter to President Roosevelt is a masterpiece. During the Vietnam War, he privately accepted an invitation to the White House but publicly took it back in a published letter to President Johnson. He also published outrageously inaccurate translations of famous poems and didn't seem to care: "It's a mistake to invent something [in] one's translating only if faithfulness does better." Worse, after their divorce, he quoted Elizabeth Hardwick's letters in his poems although he had promised not to: "It's oddly enough a technical problem as well as a gentleman's problem," he wrote defensively to his friend Elizabeth Bishop. "How can the story be told at all without the letters."

Obviously, Lowell was no gentleman. Still, he was courteous and certainly interesting. His long series of letters to fellow poet Bishop shows him at his best, full of interest in his correspondent and in communicating his own feelings, with cheerful gossip about other poets as a happy bonus.

Touchingly, Wright wrote to his high school teachers throughout his life. Like Lowell, he corresponded with Theodore Roethke, another manic-depressive poet, who was his professor in Seattle, and with Allen Tate and John Berryman, who taught with him in Minneapolis. Wright gushes, announcing in these letters that 50 different contemporary poets are magnificent or about to become so. A letter to the president of his college sounds like sheer toadyism: "Oh, Arnold, I am deeply moved by the beauty of the plan you've asked me to help you to fulfill." After being invited to sit in on one of Lowell's seminars, Wright wrote: "Simply being invited was something that I can regard without hesitation as one of the few genuine honors I have ever been given." Together with these rather desperate attempts to flatter his correspondents, Wright often denigrates his own work ("that damn asinine book of mine") and his own person ("I am a cynic, a bad man, a hopeless, a brute"). His letters occasionally find him in the depth of an attack, "clutching about desperately for something that might keep me coherent until I can get to the doctor," or after a sleepless night "trying to summon up my forces of language and clarity so I can talk with the doctor over in Minneapolis." But otherwise we see the results of his worst days only in retrospect: "I was so god damned miserable that the only thing I could do was translate Theodor Storm from German, have a bad love affair, get sick, go to a hospital, . . . get habitually drunk, teach very well when I could bring myself to make a class, and, naturally, get fired." Suicide was often not far from his mind.

What did the two poets think of each other? Although Lowell never mentioned Wright in the letters published here, he did invite him to teach at his Harvard poetry seminar. And Wright wrote after hearing Lowell speak, "Though he is probably the world's worst public performer, he certainly is an appealing man. His poems are magnificent."

Reviewed by Charles Nicol
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Given his status as a major American poet, Robert Lowell's manic depression, friendships with prominent people, and influence on other poets, including Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, have been well documented. Now, with this monumental volume of his letters to friends, family, peers, teachers, and even political leaders, those facets of his life are further illuminated. Lowell's correspondence offers personal thoughts and confessions, but it also embodies a calculated recognition of audience, meaning that his letters seem more carefully crafted than mere communication requires. And one of the most fascinating aspects of this collection is its documentation of the contact Lowell had with so many incredibly talented writers. From Robert Frost to Elizabeth Bishop to Flannery O'Connor, Allen Ginsberg, and Ezra Pound, Lowell had his finger on the pulse of writing during his lifetime and was motivated to stay in the thick of literary movements. Mainly for readers intrigued or inspired by Lowell, this collection is an invaluable primary resource, supplement to Lowell biographies, and companion to his fascinating poetry. Janet St. John
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Wonderful letters from a now-distant past
This big collection of letters is remarkable in so many ways. Lowell was a tireless and prolific correspondent and never dull. He expressed love, wonder, and a surprisingly cheerful interest in mundane things and events. He wrote, for example, to Elizabeth Bishop, congratulating her (somewhat self-consciously) on her weight loss, among many other achievements. To Elizabeth Hardwick (second of his three wives) he sent tender and intimately newsy letters - often with an ache. Randall Jarrell, another friend, received a letter that began "Lying awake in bed the other night after my reading, I thought of the joy of seeing you."

Lowell would have loved email: he complains every now and then about the slowness of the mails, especially between the US and Europe. He is by turns thrilling and everyday in these letters, and often tender and loving.

Much has been made posthumously of Lowell's bipolar disorder. It's sad and sweet to read his notes to his mother. After beginning "psycho-therapy" in the late 1940's he writes to her that "I've been trying to understand my first six or seven years, and have many questions to ask you." He is uncynical and open. After her death in 1954 (also documented in letters) he had a psychotic break during which, as ever, he wrote letters.

Editor Saskia Hamilton has arranged these chronologically so you can read them as a sort of a biography. This is a terrific window on Lowell and his world.

What Next?
Saskia Hamilton, a New York based poet, proves her mettle as an editor with this fat collection of Robert Lowell's letters.

He wrote great letters, and this surprised me a bit, but every one of them shows an insane desire to please, to flatter, to make the recipient feel good about himself or herself; he's marvelously attentive to nuance and knows exactly how to push the right buttons of his correspondents, telling them just what they want to hear. And he's sincere, which is a plus. Over and over again I was impressed by the facility with which he was blessed, or maybe he worked it up over time, because the earliest letters aren't that great, it's not until he gets into the 1940s that the familiar Lowell manner takes over.

This volume explains so much! Mostly how it was that, with all the truly awful things Lowell did, people still loved him. If it wasn't red-baiting the director of Yaddo and forcing the board to impeach her in 1947, it was publishing all those poems about Elizabeth and Harriet against their wishes, or it was wanting to marry Jackie Kennedy or whatever. Apparently all these were episodes of a manic nature in his bipolar disorder, including the car wreck that permanently disfigured wife #1 Jean Stafford. Well, of course none of them were really his fault but still. And now this book of letters unveils his real private voicem, gently coaxing reassuring, making sense of the world, interpolating, and penetrating the consciousness of whoever he was writing to at the time. The older and the famous got one style of letter; his peers got another.

Hamilton's notes are sparse, but seem sensible. However printing over 700 of these letters is out of control. Like the Bidart-edited POEMS, the book physically becomes too big to handle, it takes two strong men just to lift it off the shelf. Why so many? Plus, one gets the feeling that this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the letters go, and that in a year's time we may have the first of many annual sequels, "More Letters by Robert Lowell." Never underestimate how many times a manic genius (with, as he boasts, unearned income and lots of free time) will reach out to others to make himself heard and understood. The word is the life.

Excellent!
This collection of Robert Lowell letters is an excellent supplement to Lowell's Collected Poems. Like the Collected Poems, this book is heavily annotated (which is a very good thing) and well-edited. The letters are divided into 8 sections, with each section covering a period of 5-7 years, and grouped according to major events or publications in Lowell's life.

The letters are fascinating and wonderfully written. With the annotation, they're also easy to follow, and you really get a sense of what it must have been like to be one of the poets in Lowell's inner circle. You also get an up-close and personal sense of Lowell as a human being: his ambitions, frustrations, and judgments are all very clearly spelled out.

I would highly recommend this book to any serious fan of Lowell's poetry. It would also be an excellent resource for anyone interested in the American poetry scene in the 1950's and 60's.