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Collected Poems
Frank Bidart and David Gewanter have compiled the definitive edition of Robert Lowell's work, from his first, impossible-to-find collection, Land of Unlikeness; to the early triumph of Lord Weary's Castle, winner of the 1946 Pulitzer Prize; to the brilliant willfulness of his versions of poems by Sappho, Baudelaire, Rilke, Montale, and other masters in Imitations; to the late spontaneity of The Dolphin, winner of another Pulitzer Prize; to his last, most searching book, Day by Day. This volume also includes poems and translations never previously collected, and a selection of drafts that demonstrate the poet's constant drive to reimagine his work. Collected Poems at last offers readers the opportunity to take in, in its entirety, one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry.
1186 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
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About the author
Robert Lowell
162books258followersRobert Lowell, born Robert Traill Spence Lowell, IV, was an American poet whose works, confessional in nature, engaged with the questions of history and probed the dark recesses of the self. He is generally considered to be among the greatest American poets of the twentieth century.
His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, at the age of thirty), were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy.
Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he wrote rigorously formal poetry that drew praise for its exceptionally powerful handling of meter and rhyme. Lowell was politically involved—he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War and was imprisoned as a result, and actively protested against the war in Vietnam—and his personal life was full of marital and psychological turmoil. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized.
Partly in response to his frequent breakdowns, and partly due to the influence of such younger poets as W. D. Snodgrass and Allen Ginsberg, Lowell in the mid-fifties began to write more directly from personal experience, and loosened his adherence to traditional meter and form. The result was a watershed collection, Life Studies (1959), which forever changed the landscape of modern poetry, much as Eliot's The Waste Land had three decades before.
Considered by many to be the most important poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century, Lowell continued to develop his work with sometimes uneven results, all along defining the restless center of American poetry, until his sudden death from a heart attack at age 60. Robert Lowell served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1962 until his death in 1977.
His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, at the age of thirty), were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy.
Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he wrote rigorously formal poetry that drew praise for its exceptionally powerful handling of meter and rhyme. Lowell was politically involved—he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War and was imprisoned as a result, and actively protested against the war in Vietnam—and his personal life was full of marital and psychological turmoil. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized.
Partly in response to his frequent breakdowns, and partly due to the influence of such younger poets as W. D. Snodgrass and Allen Ginsberg, Lowell in the mid-fifties began to write more directly from personal experience, and loosened his adherence to traditional meter and form. The result was a watershed collection, Life Studies (1959), which forever changed the landscape of modern poetry, much as Eliot's The Waste Land had three decades before.
Considered by many to be the most important poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century, Lowell continued to develop his work with sometimes uneven results, all along defining the restless center of American poetry, until his sudden death from a heart attack at age 60. Robert Lowell served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1962 until his death in 1977.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
August 11, 2017
Lowell has long been one of my favorite 20th century American poets. I especially like his early work--there's something about the stern, stentorian rhythm of the verse, combined with a hardscrabble New England outlook on life, that never fails to thrill. He's a formal master, alive to his influences, who also has a keen eye for the arresting detail and a penetrating honesty. Some of his poems, like The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, have haunted me for years.
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May 7, 20189.0/10
I have run the emotions of life through Robert Lowell -- not a mean feat, in a few weeks. No wonder I'm exhausted. And elevated. Depressed. And inspired.
Who is Robert Lowell? And how much time do you have?
Thoughts that occurred to me, in reading this collection: Prophetic. Pessimistic. Awe-Inspiring. Eccentric. Fun. And funny. Affectionate. Intimate. Gossipy. Private. Confessional. Self-centered. Self-effacing. Devoted. Formidable.
And, if read all in one go, much as I have done, overwhelming. Overwhelming in his scope, capacity, and understanding.
I did not know, until after reading this collection, that Robert Lowell suffered from bipolar disorder, which suddenly made clear all the emotions I had been experiencing. To be in such a mind! ... for a day, for a week, was an electrifying and emotional privilege; to have to live in it, for the better part of his life would have been exhausting; depleting.
This is poetry in which my mind finds a home.
READING MYSELF
Like thousands, I took pride and more than just,
struck matches that brought my blood to a boil;
I memorized the tricks to set the river on fire —
Somehow never wrote something to go back to.
Can I suppose I am finished with wax flowers
And have earned my grass on the minor slopes of Parnassus…
No honeycomb is built without a bee
adding circle to circle, cell to cell,
the wax and honey of a mausoleum —
this round dome proves its maker is alive;
the corpse of the insect lives embalmed in honey,
prays that its perishable work lives long
enough for the sweet-tooth bear to desecrate —
this open book … my coffin.
I have run the emotions of life through Robert Lowell -- not a mean feat, in a few weeks. No wonder I'm exhausted. And elevated. Depressed. And inspired.
Who is Robert Lowell? And how much time do you have?
Thoughts that occurred to me, in reading this collection: Prophetic. Pessimistic. Awe-Inspiring. Eccentric. Fun. And funny. Affectionate. Intimate. Gossipy. Private. Confessional. Self-centered. Self-effacing. Devoted. Formidable.
And, if read all in one go, much as I have done, overwhelming. Overwhelming in his scope, capacity, and understanding.
I did not know, until after reading this collection, that Robert Lowell suffered from bipolar disorder, which suddenly made clear all the emotions I had been experiencing. To be in such a mind! ... for a day, for a week, was an electrifying and emotional privilege; to have to live in it, for the better part of his life would have been exhausting; depleting.
This is poetry in which my mind finds a home.
READING MYSELF
Like thousands, I took pride and more than just,
struck matches that brought my blood to a boil;
I memorized the tricks to set the river on fire —
Somehow never wrote something to go back to.
Can I suppose I am finished with wax flowers
And have earned my grass on the minor slopes of Parnassus…
No honeycomb is built without a bee
adding circle to circle, cell to cell,
the wax and honey of a mausoleum —
this round dome proves its maker is alive;
the corpse of the insect lives embalmed in honey,
prays that its perishable work lives long
enough for the sweet-tooth bear to desecrate —
this open book … my coffin.
Read
March 11, 2012From the fall of Rome to that of the World Trade Center, a cloying, mindless and absurdist sincerity characterizes most political poetry, which often reads like paid-for newspaper memorials to lost loved ones. No one would have known better than Robert Lowell, whose long-awaited, monumental volume of collected verse appeared in June of this year, that politics suffers from the dangerous and inevitable curse of abstraction—simplistic “us vs. them” theories are perennial favorites—unless its practitioners leave behind the pleasures of bombast and partisan rivalries for the exponentially more difficult knowledge of history’s unending bloodshed.
This knowledge was both Lowell’s birthright, as a member of a Boston Brahmin family (though from the less distinguished branch, as he delighted in pointing out), and something he learned from his chief mentors, the Fugitive/ Agrarian writers John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, whose commitment to traditional aesthetics eventually morphed into a controversial economic and political movement. Lowell dropped out of Harvard and planned to attend Vanderbilt, which pleased none of the Lowells of any branch; instead he landed at Kenyon College when Ransom left Vanderbilt. At Kenyon, where Lowell followed Ransom’s advice to major in classics, he roomed with Randall Jarrell, another Nashvillian, and Peter Taylor, with whom he remained lifelong friends. Lowell addressed several poems to Jarrell and Taylor, as well as to Ransom, Tate and Warren. His years with these men, as well as his marriage to Kentuckian Elizabeth Hardwick, account for his odd Southern drawl, if not entirely for his deadly accurate understanding of questions of historical, literal and emotional hierarchies, which for Lowell were all encompassed and superseded by poetry itself.
Lowell’s most enduring subject might well be termed power: how it passes from one generation to the next; how it operates in both the public and private spheres, which collide more often than we tend to notice; how it waxes and wanes and even— terrifyingly—disappears at times; and how we use it to hurt and humiliate. Part of Lowell’s genius is to recognize himself in both the scepter-wielding emperor and his cowering, often doomed subject. For example, writing of Florence, the city which he called “patroness / of the lovely tyrannicides,” the poet’s gaze traverses the Piazza della Signoria and its statues of Perseus, David and Judith: “Pity the monsters! / Pity the monsters!” he proclaims. Why? “I have seen the Gorgon,” he continues; “The erotic terror / of her helpless, big-bosomed body / lay like slop. / Wall-eyed, staring the despot to stone, / her severed head swung / like a lantern in the victor’s hand.” The timeliness of poems like “Florence,” “The Exile’s Return,” “The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket,” “For the Union Dead” (a reply to Tate’s famous “Ode to the Confederate Dead”), “Waking Early Sunday Morning,” and entire books, like HISTORY, scarcely needs pointing out in this age of paranoiac patriotism.
For the lover of Lowell, the COLLECTED POEMS is cause for celebration and grumbling. Some of Lowell’s volumes have become difficult to find even through online bookstores specializing in out-of-print material, a problem that the appearance of COLLECTED POEMS largely erases. But editors Frank Bidart and David Gewanter’s decision to delete Notebook has its detractors. This collection, which Lowell continuously revised and expanded, became so thick with 14-line, unrhymed “sonnets” that he eventually divided the single volume into three: HISTORY, which contains the least personal poems; FOR LIZZIE AND HARRIET, which centers on his relationship with Hardwick and their child; and THE DOLPHIN, which focuses on Lowell’s decision to leave his family for the Anglo-Irish beauty Caroline Blackwood. While the poet didn’t think of NOTEBOOK as being replaced by HISTORY or
its two corollary volumes, when he assembled his SELECTED POEMS the year before his death, he chose to include HISTORY, not a mixture of its predecessors. If a similar choice had to be made for a one-volume collection, as Bidart and Gewanter assert, this one seems logical, If regrettable in other ways. Lowell's great theme was power, whether domestic or played out through centuries, and the counterpointing in NOTEBOOK (the second edition) argues for its emaining in print.
Longtime Lowell readers will support or argue with the editors’ decisions according to their own convictions. For those to whom Lowell remains a stranger, one hopes the release of COLLECTED POEMS attracts scores of new readers. The editorial notes help flesh out obscure places, names and allusions; they also give us biographical materials necessary to reading Lowell’s work in the often highly personal context it demands. Bidart and Gewanter pay just homage to Ian Hamilton’s and Paul Mariani’s biographies, which deepen that context and also chronicle the poet’s lifelong struggle with manic-depression, though the latter derives so much from Hamilton that questions of plagiarism arise.
Now, during our country’s latest resurgence of bloody, self-righteous imperialism, the COLLECTED POEMS not only represents the much larger chronicle of Lowell’s singular, genius-haunted life and work but also offers an indispensable perspective on the story of America since the 1940s. To protest the massive civilian bombing of cities like Dresden at the end of World War I, Lowell refused to serve and was sentenced to a year and a day in a New England state prison. What he called “the tranquilized Fifties” was a time—creepily like our own—when “giant finned cars nose[d] forward” like predatory fish, and “a savage servility [slid] by on grease.” In the ’60s, Lowell participated in the march on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War, served as advisor, to Bobby Kennedy, and, after Kennedy’s assassination, campaigned across the country for Eugene McCarthy.
Finally, Lowell lived through the fallout of the ’60s, particularly regarding the family life that had been one of his best subjects since the hallmark volume LIFE STUDIES. At the same time, he wrote elegies for nearly every one of his many friends and students who died—in the cases of Jarrell, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, by suicide—during his own last years. When we read a line like “[H]istory has to live with what was here,” we’re in the presence of a heavily felt responsibility, an imperative not merely to exist but to live in the history of our own time—even if, like Lowell, we’re constantly “clutching and close to fumbling all we had.”
(originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE)
This knowledge was both Lowell’s birthright, as a member of a Boston Brahmin family (though from the less distinguished branch, as he delighted in pointing out), and something he learned from his chief mentors, the Fugitive/ Agrarian writers John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, whose commitment to traditional aesthetics eventually morphed into a controversial economic and political movement. Lowell dropped out of Harvard and planned to attend Vanderbilt, which pleased none of the Lowells of any branch; instead he landed at Kenyon College when Ransom left Vanderbilt. At Kenyon, where Lowell followed Ransom’s advice to major in classics, he roomed with Randall Jarrell, another Nashvillian, and Peter Taylor, with whom he remained lifelong friends. Lowell addressed several poems to Jarrell and Taylor, as well as to Ransom, Tate and Warren. His years with these men, as well as his marriage to Kentuckian Elizabeth Hardwick, account for his odd Southern drawl, if not entirely for his deadly accurate understanding of questions of historical, literal and emotional hierarchies, which for Lowell were all encompassed and superseded by poetry itself.
Lowell’s most enduring subject might well be termed power: how it passes from one generation to the next; how it operates in both the public and private spheres, which collide more often than we tend to notice; how it waxes and wanes and even— terrifyingly—disappears at times; and how we use it to hurt and humiliate. Part of Lowell’s genius is to recognize himself in both the scepter-wielding emperor and his cowering, often doomed subject. For example, writing of Florence, the city which he called “patroness / of the lovely tyrannicides,” the poet’s gaze traverses the Piazza della Signoria and its statues of Perseus, David and Judith: “Pity the monsters! / Pity the monsters!” he proclaims. Why? “I have seen the Gorgon,” he continues; “The erotic terror / of her helpless, big-bosomed body / lay like slop. / Wall-eyed, staring the despot to stone, / her severed head swung / like a lantern in the victor’s hand.” The timeliness of poems like “Florence,” “The Exile’s Return,” “The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket,” “For the Union Dead” (a reply to Tate’s famous “Ode to the Confederate Dead”), “Waking Early Sunday Morning,” and entire books, like HISTORY, scarcely needs pointing out in this age of paranoiac patriotism.
For the lover of Lowell, the COLLECTED POEMS is cause for celebration and grumbling. Some of Lowell’s volumes have become difficult to find even through online bookstores specializing in out-of-print material, a problem that the appearance of COLLECTED POEMS largely erases. But editors Frank Bidart and David Gewanter’s decision to delete Notebook has its detractors. This collection, which Lowell continuously revised and expanded, became so thick with 14-line, unrhymed “sonnets” that he eventually divided the single volume into three: HISTORY, which contains the least personal poems; FOR LIZZIE AND HARRIET, which centers on his relationship with Hardwick and their child; and THE DOLPHIN, which focuses on Lowell’s decision to leave his family for the Anglo-Irish beauty Caroline Blackwood. While the poet didn’t think of NOTEBOOK as being replaced by HISTORY or
its two corollary volumes, when he assembled his SELECTED POEMS the year before his death, he chose to include HISTORY, not a mixture of its predecessors. If a similar choice had to be made for a one-volume collection, as Bidart and Gewanter assert, this one seems logical, If regrettable in other ways. Lowell's great theme was power, whether domestic or played out through centuries, and the counterpointing in NOTEBOOK (the second edition) argues for its emaining in print.
Longtime Lowell readers will support or argue with the editors’ decisions according to their own convictions. For those to whom Lowell remains a stranger, one hopes the release of COLLECTED POEMS attracts scores of new readers. The editorial notes help flesh out obscure places, names and allusions; they also give us biographical materials necessary to reading Lowell’s work in the often highly personal context it demands. Bidart and Gewanter pay just homage to Ian Hamilton’s and Paul Mariani’s biographies, which deepen that context and also chronicle the poet’s lifelong struggle with manic-depression, though the latter derives so much from Hamilton that questions of plagiarism arise.
Now, during our country’s latest resurgence of bloody, self-righteous imperialism, the COLLECTED POEMS not only represents the much larger chronicle of Lowell’s singular, genius-haunted life and work but also offers an indispensable perspective on the story of America since the 1940s. To protest the massive civilian bombing of cities like Dresden at the end of World War I, Lowell refused to serve and was sentenced to a year and a day in a New England state prison. What he called “the tranquilized Fifties” was a time—creepily like our own—when “giant finned cars nose[d] forward” like predatory fish, and “a savage servility [slid] by on grease.” In the ’60s, Lowell participated in the march on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War, served as advisor, to Bobby Kennedy, and, after Kennedy’s assassination, campaigned across the country for Eugene McCarthy.
Finally, Lowell lived through the fallout of the ’60s, particularly regarding the family life that had been one of his best subjects since the hallmark volume LIFE STUDIES. At the same time, he wrote elegies for nearly every one of his many friends and students who died—in the cases of Jarrell, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, by suicide—during his own last years. When we read a line like “[H]istory has to live with what was here,” we’re in the presence of a heavily felt responsibility, an imperative not merely to exist but to live in the history of our own time—even if, like Lowell, we’re constantly “clutching and close to fumbling all we had.”
(originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE)
July 17, 2018
It's probably a good thing to have this on my shelves for reference, since Lowell has such a strong reputation, but as a reader I would prefer to have a much smaller selection, with adequate footnotes, produced by a good judge. Even one poem, if it was presented in terms I could appreciate, would be preferable to this monolith, but I could not suggest which one would serve. As it stands, the sheer hard labour of working through this huge collection has left few impressions that stand out or make me keen to return - just a grey and rocky mountain that I have climbed and can now tick off the list. Maybe a few years down the road I will come across him in a more favourable context and be glad to have this reference book in my collection. Maybe.
January 15, 2015
Goodness gracious. I've been working through this gargantuan tome for several years and I've finally finished it.
What to say about Lowell...
I was so intimidated and excited to start reading him that I made sure to get a hardcover version of this book over at The Strand because I knew that I'd be taking extensive notes and that it would become holy to me.
I'm happy to say that I DID takes notes (so many on some pages that I can barely make out the poem) and it did become holy in the way that great works which you love so much they're hard to look at straight on become.
Lowell is a genius. I don't use that word frivolously. The poems in Lord Weary's Castle are so formally and acoustically PERFECT that it's daunting to even consider that those poems aren't his most famous. But they're difficult to LOVE in the sense that they're SO cold and PERFECT and MADE and, as is characteristic of his early work, quite abstract. I mean the latter in the sense that the poems are not yet fully lyrical or what later became known as "confessional" though Lowell despised that term.
So of course, poems like "Skunk Hour" and "Beyond the Alps" are just breathtaking. But "Waking Early Sunday Morning" from Near The Ocean might just be the most perfect poem I've read. Its content is so majestically married to its form and sound that my first reaction upon finishing it was honestly to ask myself why I even bother to write at all. I'm still working through that.
No one is going to say something about the desperate sublimity of the modern condition BETTER than that. It's done. I suppose the best any artist can do is try again and again to get at that truth using the marble Lowell cut away to sculpt his masterpiece. Many have quite logically compared this poem to Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning." I would also pair it with Wilbur's "Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World" as well. As far as its comparison to Stevens goes, I prefer Lowell's poem both in terms of its outlook and its poetry. Stevens ends up in a more optimistic place than Lowell (surprise surprise) and I think that to be fair, if one had to take two poems with one to a desert island, taking those two to debate with each other would be a lifetime's joy. Stevens's poem is also beautiful, but I can't ever seem to fully chip away at the Euro-aristocratic gait of his verse. There's just something stuffy about him. But there's no need to insult Stevens to elevate Lowell here. Both poems are tremendous and I'd sacrifice a pretty essential organ to have written either.
As for the rest of this giant book, I don't know that Lowell ever matches the titanic brilliance of his early work again but, of course, there are many dozen gems along the way and his excellent poems are another poet's lifetime achievements.
In any case, if you're interested in getting into Lowell, I think this is a good place to begin (and end). Though I understand that most people jump in by reading Life Studies and For The Union Dead, I think Life Studies is far better appreciated if one's read Lord Weary's Castle (for which he won the Pulitzer by the way) first.
What to say about Lowell...
I was so intimidated and excited to start reading him that I made sure to get a hardcover version of this book over at The Strand because I knew that I'd be taking extensive notes and that it would become holy to me.
I'm happy to say that I DID takes notes (so many on some pages that I can barely make out the poem) and it did become holy in the way that great works which you love so much they're hard to look at straight on become.
Lowell is a genius. I don't use that word frivolously. The poems in Lord Weary's Castle are so formally and acoustically PERFECT that it's daunting to even consider that those poems aren't his most famous. But they're difficult to LOVE in the sense that they're SO cold and PERFECT and MADE and, as is characteristic of his early work, quite abstract. I mean the latter in the sense that the poems are not yet fully lyrical or what later became known as "confessional" though Lowell despised that term.
So of course, poems like "Skunk Hour" and "Beyond the Alps" are just breathtaking. But "Waking Early Sunday Morning" from Near The Ocean might just be the most perfect poem I've read. Its content is so majestically married to its form and sound that my first reaction upon finishing it was honestly to ask myself why I even bother to write at all. I'm still working through that.
No one is going to say something about the desperate sublimity of the modern condition BETTER than that. It's done. I suppose the best any artist can do is try again and again to get at that truth using the marble Lowell cut away to sculpt his masterpiece. Many have quite logically compared this poem to Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning." I would also pair it with Wilbur's "Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World" as well. As far as its comparison to Stevens goes, I prefer Lowell's poem both in terms of its outlook and its poetry. Stevens ends up in a more optimistic place than Lowell (surprise surprise) and I think that to be fair, if one had to take two poems with one to a desert island, taking those two to debate with each other would be a lifetime's joy. Stevens's poem is also beautiful, but I can't ever seem to fully chip away at the Euro-aristocratic gait of his verse. There's just something stuffy about him. But there's no need to insult Stevens to elevate Lowell here. Both poems are tremendous and I'd sacrifice a pretty essential organ to have written either.
As for the rest of this giant book, I don't know that Lowell ever matches the titanic brilliance of his early work again but, of course, there are many dozen gems along the way and his excellent poems are another poet's lifetime achievements.
In any case, if you're interested in getting into Lowell, I think this is a good place to begin (and end). Though I understand that most people jump in by reading Life Studies and For The Union Dead, I think Life Studies is far better appreciated if one's read Lord Weary's Castle (for which he won the Pulitzer by the way) first.
February 26, 2018
As to the edition at hand: Bidart and Gewanter have assembled a definitive Lowell text, encompassing all the major works, quite a couple of less significant contributions, as well as a wide array of alternative versions. The notes are especially extensive as to textual variants. The reader gets quite as much Lowell as he could ever want, if not more.
Lowell's poetry needs no new criticism by yours truly. It ranges from formalism in rhyme and meter to freer verse, including three books of 14-line sonnetesques. Lowell's quality, in my humble opinion, varies likewise: many poems are complex and expressive, but much of his middle and later output tends to be verbose and rather vapid, such as the borderline untackleable History volume. I am by no means an expert and confess to reding poetry almost entirely for enjoyment, but quite some of Lowell's sonnets seem to have been produced for mass and coverage rather than meaningful artistic expression. But that is merely my personal assessment.
Lowell's poetry needs no new criticism by yours truly. It ranges from formalism in rhyme and meter to freer verse, including three books of 14-line sonnetesques. Lowell's quality, in my humble opinion, varies likewise: many poems are complex and expressive, but much of his middle and later output tends to be verbose and rather vapid, such as the borderline untackleable History volume. I am by no means an expert and confess to reding poetry almost entirely for enjoyment, but quite some of Lowell's sonnets seem to have been produced for mass and coverage rather than meaningful artistic expression. But that is merely my personal assessment.
February 14, 2024
The essential volume from one of the greatest 20th century American poets.
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July 9, 2010The book is a comprehensive collection of Lowell’s work. Forever the tinker, one of the most interesting aspects of Lowell’s work is that he constantly revised. The collection contains not just the poems from his published collections, but also earlier versions published in literary journals. The book is fascinating in discovering Lowell’s process and how his poetry developed over time.
April 18, 2021
1,000 pages of poetry is a lot to wade through and much of Lowell’s output ain’t exactly a laugh-fest. But any volume that includes such epochal collections as ‘Life Studies’, ‘For the Union Dead’ and ‘History’ is a must for anyone with any real interest in twentieth century American poetry.
March 27, 2025
Lowell’s work is a crucible of personal and historical tension. He doesn’t just write poems—he wrestles with them. Take Life Studies, where he famously shifts from the high modernist armor of his early style to a raw, intimate voice. In “Skunk Hour,” he watches skunks march through a decaying town and admits, “My mind’s not right.” It’s a quiet gut-punch: the poet’s breakdown mirrors a rotting American landscape. Critics like Helen Vendler have called this shift a seismic event in poetry, trading Eliot’s impersonality for something nakedly human.
Then there’s his obsession with history, like in “For the Union Dead,” where he stares at a Civil War monument in Boston and sees “a savage servility” in modern life. Lowell’s not just observing—he’s indicting. His lines stab at complacency, mixing grandeur with disgust. The poem’s image of fish in an aquarium, “their little gills collapse,” sticks with you; it’s suffocation as metaphor, personal and political. His Catholic guilt, his manic-depressive swings, his patrician roots—all of it bleeds into the words, making them feel like confessions you weren’t meant to hear.
Later, in the sonnets from The Dolphin (1973), he gets messy—reworking his life, his marriages, his daughter’s voice into art. Some call it genius; others, like Elizabeth Hardwick (his ex-wife), saw it as betrayal. The ethical tangle adds depth: can you separate the poet from the man who mined his loved ones for lines? I’d argue the discomfort is part of the power—Lowell forces you to feel the cost of his craft.
His style evolves but never settles. Early poems lean on dense allusion—Donne, Milton, the Bible—while later ones loosen into freewheeling diaries. Yet there’s always a weight, a sense he’s dragging something heavy behind him.
Then there’s his obsession with history, like in “For the Union Dead,” where he stares at a Civil War monument in Boston and sees “a savage servility” in modern life. Lowell’s not just observing—he’s indicting. His lines stab at complacency, mixing grandeur with disgust. The poem’s image of fish in an aquarium, “their little gills collapse,” sticks with you; it’s suffocation as metaphor, personal and political. His Catholic guilt, his manic-depressive swings, his patrician roots—all of it bleeds into the words, making them feel like confessions you weren’t meant to hear.
Later, in the sonnets from The Dolphin (1973), he gets messy—reworking his life, his marriages, his daughter’s voice into art. Some call it genius; others, like Elizabeth Hardwick (his ex-wife), saw it as betrayal. The ethical tangle adds depth: can you separate the poet from the man who mined his loved ones for lines? I’d argue the discomfort is part of the power—Lowell forces you to feel the cost of his craft.
His style evolves but never settles. Early poems lean on dense allusion—Donne, Milton, the Bible—while later ones loosen into freewheeling diaries. Yet there’s always a weight, a sense he’s dragging something heavy behind him.
November 26, 2022
"In Boston the Lowells speak only to the Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God".---Old Boston saying
When I was a houseguest of the U.S. government some years back I told the boys "this place was built in 1940, and one of the first men to be kept here was the great American poet Robert Lowell". Lowell was indeed incarcerated as a conscientious objector when Franklin Roosevelt re-introduced the draft in the U.S. that year. To appreciate the genius of these poems, consider that Robert was the scion of not only one of the wealthiest and most renowned families in New England but that his grandfather, Russell Lowell, is regarded as one on nineteenth-century America's greatest poets while his contemporary cousin, Amy Lowell, had distinguished herself in poetry back in the 1920s and became one of the few female members of the Lost Generation in Paris. What a legacy to live up, and yet Robert surpassed his whole family in artistic genius, though at a terrible cost to his mental health, including multiple stays at mental hospitals. The highlight of any collection of his poems is the small anthology "Lord Weary's Castle", in which Americanisms are entangled with poetic forms going back to the Greeks: "The Republic summons Ike/the mausoleum in her heart". Lowell's masterpiece is "For the Union Dead", celebrating not death in battle but the triumph of liberty over slavery and the men who took it upon themselves to see the Civil War to the end. Lowell never stopped being political, either. He read excerpts from "Lord Weary's Castle" ("I'll bellow, but it won't do any good") at the 1967 anti-Viet Nam war march on the Pentagon and publicly turned down an invitation to visit President Johnson at the White House. If this be madness, three cheers for madness.
When I was a houseguest of the U.S. government some years back I told the boys "this place was built in 1940, and one of the first men to be kept here was the great American poet Robert Lowell". Lowell was indeed incarcerated as a conscientious objector when Franklin Roosevelt re-introduced the draft in the U.S. that year. To appreciate the genius of these poems, consider that Robert was the scion of not only one of the wealthiest and most renowned families in New England but that his grandfather, Russell Lowell, is regarded as one on nineteenth-century America's greatest poets while his contemporary cousin, Amy Lowell, had distinguished herself in poetry back in the 1920s and became one of the few female members of the Lost Generation in Paris. What a legacy to live up, and yet Robert surpassed his whole family in artistic genius, though at a terrible cost to his mental health, including multiple stays at mental hospitals. The highlight of any collection of his poems is the small anthology "Lord Weary's Castle", in which Americanisms are entangled with poetic forms going back to the Greeks: "The Republic summons Ike/the mausoleum in her heart". Lowell's masterpiece is "For the Union Dead", celebrating not death in battle but the triumph of liberty over slavery and the men who took it upon themselves to see the Civil War to the end. Lowell never stopped being political, either. He read excerpts from "Lord Weary's Castle" ("I'll bellow, but it won't do any good") at the 1967 anti-Viet Nam war march on the Pentagon and publicly turned down an invitation to visit President Johnson at the White House. If this be madness, three cheers for madness.
July 6, 2023
Lowell is a poet whose imagery and writing weighs heavy on the study of American post war poetry. I have worked hard to want to be a person who is as inspired by his work as many are. Though I have to admit that struggle to find it as appealing as most do.
That said, this was an enjoyable collection that shows the authors range and is an accessible introduction for those new to the author.
That said, this was an enjoyable collection that shows the authors range and is an accessible introduction for those new to the author.
May 18, 2017
Outstanding insight into a complicated mind.
January 14, 2018
I'm not that impress with the poems that he collect.
June 28, 2019
Robert Lowell was a genius in his skill. His poetry is touching and brilliant.
December 11, 2019
Excellent.
February 10, 2023
reading through this has made lowell one of my favourite poets, i only really felt in the presence of even mediocre poetry with the last unfinished manuscript scraps
October 5, 2020
I can remember reading Lowell for the first time in a poetry class and the last stanza of 'For the Union Dead' felt almost taunting in its apparent ease and mastery of language. After reading his collected poems, I do find it funny that the first I read of him was his 'free verse'.
I definitely have no regrets whatsoever for delving into this book, even if it did take months to get through it. When Lowell is working for me, he hits the spot like very few poets I've read. The unfortunate thing is that there were moments (some quite extended) where he wasn't working for me. I don't think that's a poor reflection of the poetry, but rather of myself. If I wanted to, I could reel off a long list of obstacles between me and the poetry - like the fact I'm British, not American - but they all come down to the fact that there is much more in life that I need to learn and experience. I exist in a different context to Lowell, but that context is not totally cut off from me. Each time a line resonates with me or an image sticks in my mind, this disconnection is broken down a little bit more.
So I would definitely recommend this definitive collection of Lowell's poetry. The introduction and appendices are helpful and insightful. This is definitely something I'll be coming back to and I hope to grow with it.
I definitely have no regrets whatsoever for delving into this book, even if it did take months to get through it. When Lowell is working for me, he hits the spot like very few poets I've read. The unfortunate thing is that there were moments (some quite extended) where he wasn't working for me. I don't think that's a poor reflection of the poetry, but rather of myself. If I wanted to, I could reel off a long list of obstacles between me and the poetry - like the fact I'm British, not American - but they all come down to the fact that there is much more in life that I need to learn and experience. I exist in a different context to Lowell, but that context is not totally cut off from me. Each time a line resonates with me or an image sticks in my mind, this disconnection is broken down a little bit more.
So I would definitely recommend this definitive collection of Lowell's poetry. The introduction and appendices are helpful and insightful. This is definitely something I'll be coming back to and I hope to grow with it.
August 3, 2013
Robert Lowell's poems first came to my notice when I was studying at university. A short section on American writers, novels, plays and poetry. I was totally captivated by Lowell's poems. As a pacifist Lowell spent time in prison for his beliefs. In my view his self-portraits of his time as a patient, suffering from manic depression, in Maclean Hospital is probably the most important. His searingly honesty about his treatment and his portraits of other "in mates" is probably the most heartbreakingly devastating. I think saying one "loves" Robert Lowell's poems would be lacking in reality of the time when he was at his most vulnerable. Nevertheless, these poems are the most important in my view of all his work. The agony and pain of them left me in tears and in anguish for him. Wonderful poetry from a man who hid nothing of his sometimes tortured mind. For me he became one of the most important poets since the Second World War. Not for the faint hearted!!!
May 14, 2008
He'd dead--and deadly. I mean Lowell, for his generation, is the one most likely to have made a deal at the crossroads...to get such consistently twisted lines, tweaked for torsion beyond his days...he's got a rare combination of highly allusive literary hermeticism complicated by honest and straightforward delivery. He wasn't great to those around him, and his guilt surrounding interpersonal relationships (apparent in many poems) was probably earned, as most biographies relate. People look at early Lowell and confessional Lowell...I think he got better with age, and I like to look at the work, not the life, as critics of his generation did. Some of my favorite lines in his late-life book, History: "the vogue of the vague, what will it help the artist?" Indeed. "Say it in American." And he did.
November 13, 2010
i will always remember bob fondly for introducing me to poetry. i loved his life studies, which i bought while browsing gleebooks's deserted poetry section while i think it was the first harry potter installment was launched downstairs. i liked how the yellow of the fabe&faber edition was kinda pre-faded, and the turd-brown title fonts. i agree, life is shit. i wrote my first poem ever, which took me a few months, imitating lowell, the iambic pentameter, the likable, cute puppy-dog haughtiness. i think i have outgrown him though. too conservative, too old-money. just imagine his career if his name was robert pinsky.
May 20, 2007
Lowell for me, was the Heir apparent to Whitman... he can re-translate classical myth with American vernacular and make it sound so exhilirating to the ear... his verse drums softly like a New Hampshire breeze and crashes loudly like a marching band. Every line is peirced with an auto-biographic lucidity, in that to get inside his rhythms, one has to give up part of themselves and allow his narrations to take you to interesting places in his sensitive psyche...
Iam still reading again and again...
Iam still reading again and again...
Want to read
January 22, 2009I can't write poetry. But I'm beginning to be able to read it. What I find shocking is that I understand a lot of this book. I've spent my life watching TV and listening to the Beatles. But I get this. It can't be!
February 15, 2020
This is what it says, the collected works of Robert Lowell. It is an excellent book, well edited, but it is all poems, all the time, so you need to really be interested in Robert Lowell's work to read it. I have read perhaps 25% of it at this point, but I'm moving on to other books.
Read
February 12, 2013Lowell is a pain in the ass but ultimately rewards the patient reader. Most folks flock to Life Studies and For The Union Dead; I find myself returning again and again to his three sonnet collections (particularly History) and his swan song, Day By Day.
April 7, 2016
It's almost too much to take in. I've had this for years, but I'm still going back to it, poem by poem. I've noticed Lowell tends to over-work his poetry, as if they were probably better before he started tinkering with them.
July 27, 2007
Very good. But to me, the poems he turned into sonnets don't really work. He over-revised.
June 14, 2008
imitations is fantastic. "helen" after valery is indiscernably wonderful and frightening.
he goes off at the mouth sometimes, though...
he goes off at the mouth sometimes, though...
June 7, 2008
Massive 1000+ page book. I will confess that I have not read every piece of his work in the book. Great reference for Robert Lowell's work.
October 21, 2008
This was a gigantic book...my fav poem is Skunk Hour.
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