Product Description

National Book Award nominee Paul Mariani offers a passionate, highly readable biography of one of America's great poets. Using many of Robert Lowell's unpublished letters as well as interviews with his friends and relatives, Mariani captures the greatness, humor, and heartbreak of this literary giant.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #597260 in Books
• Published on: 1996-07-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Lowell's (1917-1977) difficult life and path-breaking work as a so-called confessional poet are well considered by critic, poet and biographer Mariani ( Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman ), who, rather than offer a large-scale critical reassessment, concentrates on the daunting personal complexities and chronologies of the manic-depressive writer. Lowell's difficulties included his uneasy moral heritage (giving way to spiritual crises) as a member of one of New England's august families, and the obligations he experienced as an only child; his periodic breakdowns, seemingly not preventable by medicine or doctors; and his general recklessness. In aiming for sustained characterization over a more academic treatment, Mariani keeps a reader's attention; during his research, he had access to previously unavailable correspondence. One hopes that Mariani's biography will help lead Americans back to a writer who is seminal, if now neglected. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Lowell was known to his friends as "Cal" (a school name stemming from both "Caliban" and "Caligula"), and indeed at times Lowell comes across as a monster born of an imagination as fevered as his own. His wife-to-be Jean Stafford described him as "an uncouth, neurotic, psychopathic murderer-poet," and this biography leaves the impression of someone who spent his days ping-ponging among teaching stints, hospital stays, marriages and affairs, bouts of drunkenness, and mania. Along the way, though, Lowell gave poetry new life, muscling aside T.S. Eliot's dry, academic verse and supplying a welcome vigor. Surprisingly short on assessment, especially given Mariani's (English, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst) evident affection for the poet, this new biography, based in part on heretofore unavailable materials, provides plenty of detail for a thorough reconsideration of a brilliant, complex, and tragic figure. For general collections.
--David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Exemplary biographer Mariani not only specializes in the lives of poets, but is a poet himself. His firsthand experience enriched his earlier portraits of William Carlos Williams and John Berryman and enables him here to understand how Lowell's poetry surfaced from the stormy sea of his mental illness. Mariani believes that Lowell was the "last of our influential public poets," and, indeed, some of the most striking anecdotes from his crisis-filled life revolve around his dramatic protests against the Vietnam War. A Boston Brahmin, Lowell's full name was Robert Trail Spencer Lowell IV, but he quickly acquired the nickname Cal, from both Caliban and Caligula, for his rather beastly ways. Large and imposing yet myopic and somehow frail, thuggish yet brilliant and creative, Lowell played varsity football and wrote poetry in his youth, approaching everything with the extreme and irrational passion that defines a manic-depressive. As Mariani tracks the progress of both Lowell's genius and madness, the suffering and sacrifice of Lowell's wives, Jean Stafford and especially the heroic Elizabeth Hardwick, emerge as the most distressing aspects of his life. Equally cursed and blessed, Lowell struggled mightily with his illness and forged poetry of tremendous resonance and tortured beauty. We do, however, have to wonder if the Lowell we know and treasure could have existed without the love and loyalty of Hardwick and close friends. Donna Seaman

Customer Reviews

Excellent biography
Robert Lowell is condidered one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century; some rank him second only to Frost. His poetry, always extremely personal and frank, and displaying great technical skill (he wrote in strict classical forms; only late in life did he write in free verse), was highly praised and prized: he won three Pulitzers. A Catholic convert, later an agnostic, he wrestled mightily with the Creator in his work. He suffered 8 nervous breakdowns during his life and was married three times. During the 1960s, he was a visible participant in the anti-war movement. Mariani is an excellent writer himself and tells Lowell's life story, from the successes to the heartbreaks, interestingly and well.

Robert Lowell - Poet, Puritan, Prophet
Robert Lowell has always seemed to me to be just out of reach. I was too young to witness his poetry readings to the Washington crowds protesting the war in Vietnam. By the time I was set "Skunk Hour" in my final year of secondary schooling, Lowell had been dead for a half dozen years. Based on Lowell's letters, poetry and critism and of those who knew him; this work is an exhaustive and comprehensive account of the poet's priveliged and frequently turbulent life. His three marriages are discussed, as are his spell in jail,( as a Conscientious Objector)and his numerous admissions to psychiatric hospital due to manic depression. From his aristocratic but dysfunctional childhood to his last years, the reader is made aware of Lowell's progression and prowess as a poet. Of fascination too is his interactions with other great poets, most notably Frost, Pound and Eliot; the latter described as 'The Master', a mantle passed to Lowell on Eliot's death. "Lost Puritan" is illuminating and revealing, it will bring Lowell into reach for anyone who is an afficianado of his poetry. A scholarly salute to the greatest poet of the second half of the twentieth century.

A poetic biography
This is truly a wonderful biography of a poet written by a poet. I found that MANY passages flow like poetry. If you are interested in Lowell and his times, you will not be able to put this book down. My favorite period is the mid-to late fifties in and around the New England area. It was an extremely fertile time: Richard Wilbur, Ann Sexton, Sylvia Plath and on and on. The country was coming out of the deadening 50's and moving on to the New Frontier 60's with all it's social and cultural upheavals. If you're a teacher of any grade, tell your students this book has somewhere in the neighborhood of 1400 footnotes. That might stop their complaints when they have to make ONLY 2 citations. More than 'just' a biographer, Mariani is himself, a writer and a poet, and he uses his skills deftly to bring Lowell to life. An excellent read!!!!!!!!