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The Dolphin
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 1974 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, The Dolphin was controversial from the many of the poems include the letters that 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.
- GenresPoetry
78 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
21 people are currently reading
347 people want to read
About the author
Robert Lowell
182 books269 followersRobert 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 - 22 of 22 reviews
April 27, 2025
Sometimes the mere act of creation reveals truths about what it describes!
A friend on GR yesterday was enthusiastic when he saw I was reading this book. I said to him that I couldn't understand it.
But now, writing this, I think I know why...
The Dolphin, for me today, is unreadable. I can read Lowell's early poetry, because passionate, and if passionate, literature becomes relatable. This work is neither. DNF. I regret my not persevering, but see now by now Lowell was Chronically Schizophrenic.
It was no longer possible to live with him. His wife, Elizabeth Hardwick appealed to him emotionally, but he no longer understood emotion. His life, as his schizophrenia became chronic, became unworkable, as only cerebral.
He must have lived in hell. His wife did now too, and ended their marriage.
Hardwick has co-authored a parallel book called The Dolphin Letters, in which she has her own say. A famous poet in her own right, she valued her unhindered life - not Robert's life of perpetual conflict - and left him. She had tried everything.
Folks like Lowell, who negatively emotes more intellectually than viscerally, rely on an eternal "sane" naysaying. It's a world of hurts out there, but they no longer feel them. They have no empathy for the world, being beyond its emotional reach.
My bipolar reading has saved me from a dead finish like these chronics face, and - incredibly, kept my reading imagination young and sybaritic - so my illness is now in remission. And qua emotion, has finally taught my impulsive heart maturity.
And so now my meds only put into balance my emotions and common sense.
But Lowell no longer had an emotional investment in the world. Or in his marriage. Though his brain was hyperactive his heart was dead.
And that is why his Dolphin leaves me cold. Lowell was no longer connected with civilization and its awful emotional discontents, the reading about which had fuelled my bipolarity at first and has now belatedly healed me empathetically.
And I could not discover why someone else showed interest in reading a book of the dead (for that's what it is).
That's when I began this, saw the reason, and completed my review, as if to respond to him.
A friend on GR yesterday was enthusiastic when he saw I was reading this book. I said to him that I couldn't understand it.
But now, writing this, I think I know why...
The Dolphin, for me today, is unreadable. I can read Lowell's early poetry, because passionate, and if passionate, literature becomes relatable. This work is neither. DNF. I regret my not persevering, but see now by now Lowell was Chronically Schizophrenic.
It was no longer possible to live with him. His wife, Elizabeth Hardwick appealed to him emotionally, but he no longer understood emotion. His life, as his schizophrenia became chronic, became unworkable, as only cerebral.
He must have lived in hell. His wife did now too, and ended their marriage.
Hardwick has co-authored a parallel book called The Dolphin Letters, in which she has her own say. A famous poet in her own right, she valued her unhindered life - not Robert's life of perpetual conflict - and left him. She had tried everything.
Folks like Lowell, who negatively emotes more intellectually than viscerally, rely on an eternal "sane" naysaying. It's a world of hurts out there, but they no longer feel them. They have no empathy for the world, being beyond its emotional reach.
My bipolar reading has saved me from a dead finish like these chronics face, and - incredibly, kept my reading imagination young and sybaritic - so my illness is now in remission. And qua emotion, has finally taught my impulsive heart maturity.
And so now my meds only put into balance my emotions and common sense.
But Lowell no longer had an emotional investment in the world. Or in his marriage. Though his brain was hyperactive his heart was dead.
And that is why his Dolphin leaves me cold. Lowell was no longer connected with civilization and its awful emotional discontents, the reading about which had fuelled my bipolarity at first and has now belatedly healed me empathetically.
And I could not discover why someone else showed interest in reading a book of the dead (for that's what it is).
That's when I began this, saw the reason, and completed my review, as if to respond to him.
April 11, 2016
I've been intrigued by the Lowell-Hardwick-Blackwood mythos since a couple winters ago, when I first read Hardwick's
Sleepless Nights
and Blackwood's
Never Breathe a Word
. Strangely, although Lowell is the glue that links the other two, he has always been the member of the love triangle who interested me the least, perhaps because in my youth I internalized the not-quite-true idea that Lowell was just some stodgy Boston brahmin, the antithesis of my long-time hero, the spontaneous New York sprite Frank O'Hara. Despite these negative preconceptions, I was moved to pick up this book the other day because, at a time when my poem-making faculties were largely lying dormant, I found myself curious to see how Lowell transformed the raw material of life into poems. How did he take the stream of mundane minutiae that constitutes daily existence -- letters, phone calls, dreams, meals, health problems and hospitalizations -- and hammer it into art? How does anyone hammer water?
The short answer is "Not easily," as Lowell himself admits in the unrhymed sonnet "The Friend":
Some meaning never has a use for words,
truth one couldn't tell oneself on the toilet,
self-knowledge swimming to the hook, then turning --
in Latin we learned no subject is an object.
The Dolphin consists of 102 unrhymed sonnets like this one (unrhymed sonnets were a favorite form of Lowell's and also featured prominently in the other Lowell collection on my bookshelf, Notebook, 1967-1968). The prevailing theme of this collection is divorce and remarriage: the 55-year-old Lowell's divorce from 56-year-old Hardwick in America and his remarriage to 41-year-old Blackwood -- the titular siren with her "Alice-in-Wonderland straight gold hair" and "bulge eyes bigger than your man's closed fist" -- in England. Notwithstanding his disclaimers about "self-knowledge swimming to the hook then turning," Lowell is able to scrutinize the bitterness and hurt that followed from his divorce with eyes wide open, from all angles, as in the standout poem "The Mermaid Children," in which Lowell considers the impact of divorce on the children of broken families:
In my dream, we drove to Folkestone with the children....
Only parents with children could go to the beach;
we had ours, and it was brutal lugging,
stopping, teasing them to walk for themselves.
When they rode our shoulders, we sank to our knees;
later we felt no weight and left no footprints.
Where did we leave them behind us so small and black,
their transistors, mermaid fins and tails,
our distant children charcoaled on the sky?
The Dolphin is very much a "concept album": that is, it's one of those poetry collections wherein very few poems stand as well on their own as they do in the context of the group. It's essentially a memoir in verse, divided into sonnet-sized vignettes rather than chapters. One of the meager handful of poems in the book that bears being quoted as a stand-alone entity is "Plotted," a highly relatable poem about feeling trapped by one's life:
Planes arc like arrows through the highest sky,
ducks V the ducklings across a puckered pond;
Providence turns animals to things.
I roam from bookstore to bookstore browsing books,
I too maneuvered on a guiding string
as I execute my written plot.
I feel how Hamlet, stuck with the Revenge Play
his father wrote him, went scatological
under this clotted London sky.
Catlike on a paper parapet,
he declaimed the words his prompter fed him,
knowing convention called him forth to murder,
loss of free will and license of the stage.
Death's not an event in life, it's not lived through.
You could go one of two ways with this book. I imagine that not a few readers of The Dolphin will take the route of exasperation, losing patience with Lowell's rather solipsistic stream-of-consciousness meanderings. My own inclination is to look more charitably on Lowell. Why? It's hard to say, but I guess it comes down to this: it's impossible for a non-robot reader to wrangle with such a "confessional" poet as Lowell without at some point pronouncing judgment on the poet's personality, either favorably or unfavorably. If there's something in Lowell's personality that wins you over, you'll be inclined to look more charitably on the weaker segments of his oeuvre. For me, it's the fact that Lowell was married to three of the most talented writers of the 20th century (Hardwick, Blackwood, and Jean Stafford). I hold that a man who marries not one but three brilliant women writers can't be all that bad. :-) (I mean, compare that to e.e. cummings, who was also married three times, but to three women famous for their beauty rather than for their brains....)
The short answer is "Not easily," as Lowell himself admits in the unrhymed sonnet "The Friend":
Some meaning never has a use for words,
truth one couldn't tell oneself on the toilet,
self-knowledge swimming to the hook, then turning --
in Latin we learned no subject is an object.
The Dolphin consists of 102 unrhymed sonnets like this one (unrhymed sonnets were a favorite form of Lowell's and also featured prominently in the other Lowell collection on my bookshelf, Notebook, 1967-1968). The prevailing theme of this collection is divorce and remarriage: the 55-year-old Lowell's divorce from 56-year-old Hardwick in America and his remarriage to 41-year-old Blackwood -- the titular siren with her "Alice-in-Wonderland straight gold hair" and "bulge eyes bigger than your man's closed fist" -- in England. Notwithstanding his disclaimers about "self-knowledge swimming to the hook then turning," Lowell is able to scrutinize the bitterness and hurt that followed from his divorce with eyes wide open, from all angles, as in the standout poem "The Mermaid Children," in which Lowell considers the impact of divorce on the children of broken families:
In my dream, we drove to Folkestone with the children....
Only parents with children could go to the beach;
we had ours, and it was brutal lugging,
stopping, teasing them to walk for themselves.
When they rode our shoulders, we sank to our knees;
later we felt no weight and left no footprints.
Where did we leave them behind us so small and black,
their transistors, mermaid fins and tails,
our distant children charcoaled on the sky?
The Dolphin is very much a "concept album": that is, it's one of those poetry collections wherein very few poems stand as well on their own as they do in the context of the group. It's essentially a memoir in verse, divided into sonnet-sized vignettes rather than chapters. One of the meager handful of poems in the book that bears being quoted as a stand-alone entity is "Plotted," a highly relatable poem about feeling trapped by one's life:
Planes arc like arrows through the highest sky,
ducks V the ducklings across a puckered pond;
Providence turns animals to things.
I roam from bookstore to bookstore browsing books,
I too maneuvered on a guiding string
as I execute my written plot.
I feel how Hamlet, stuck with the Revenge Play
his father wrote him, went scatological
under this clotted London sky.
Catlike on a paper parapet,
he declaimed the words his prompter fed him,
knowing convention called him forth to murder,
loss of free will and license of the stage.
Death's not an event in life, it's not lived through.
You could go one of two ways with this book. I imagine that not a few readers of The Dolphin will take the route of exasperation, losing patience with Lowell's rather solipsistic stream-of-consciousness meanderings. My own inclination is to look more charitably on Lowell. Why? It's hard to say, but I guess it comes down to this: it's impossible for a non-robot reader to wrangle with such a "confessional" poet as Lowell without at some point pronouncing judgment on the poet's personality, either favorably or unfavorably. If there's something in Lowell's personality that wins you over, you'll be inclined to look more charitably on the weaker segments of his oeuvre. For me, it's the fact that Lowell was married to three of the most talented writers of the 20th century (Hardwick, Blackwood, and Jean Stafford). I hold that a man who marries not one but three brilliant women writers can't be all that bad. :-) (I mean, compare that to e.e. cummings, who was also married three times, but to three women famous for their beauty rather than for their brains....)
December 12, 2021
I’m sorry, I run with the hares now, not the hounds.
I waste hours writing in and writing out a line,
as if listening to conscience were telling the truth.
Oh dear. During one of Robert Lowell’s manic phases he fell for Caroline Blackwood. He decided to eventually end his marriage with Elizabeth Hardwick. I thought of adding quotes around the eventually. Everything appeared so tenuous—at times. Otherwise it was a divine certainty, ordained as by nature itself. Alas this stunning cycle of poems is a vantage from within the protracted train wreck. Saskia Hamilton’s dazzling erudition is something to behold.
Now to the Dolphin letters for more testimony from the destruction.
I waste hours writing in and writing out a line,
as if listening to conscience were telling the truth.
Oh dear. During one of Robert Lowell’s manic phases he fell for Caroline Blackwood. He decided to eventually end his marriage with Elizabeth Hardwick. I thought of adding quotes around the eventually. Everything appeared so tenuous—at times. Otherwise it was a divine certainty, ordained as by nature itself. Alas this stunning cycle of poems is a vantage from within the protracted train wreck. Saskia Hamilton’s dazzling erudition is something to behold.
Now to the Dolphin letters for more testimony from the destruction.
October 30, 2017
Maybe that’s the thing with classics. You know you’ll get back to them in a different phase of life, and with a different perspective.
February 12, 2023
This edition is great for the Lowell heads because you get some nice intimate access to a bit of his editing process. His heavily edited table of contents page stands as a great example as to why you should avoid “Selected Poems” books
July 1, 2025
divorce poems … manic pixie dream gf
obviously some beautiful moments
mostly read to pass time at the docks
obviously some beautiful moments
mostly read to pass time at the docks
October 29, 2025
I’m almost stunned a book like this exists.
Stunned not in an innocent “how could this be” way but stunned in a “imagine having the capacity” to do so.
It’s amazing poetry, but was the cost worth it? Part of me felt wrong reading this, the other half couldn’t stop. It’s such a vulnerable piece.
I feel like after hours of research into Lowell-Hardwick-Blackwood I’m still left wondering how this exists!
Stunned not in an innocent “how could this be” way but stunned in a “imagine having the capacity” to do so.
It’s amazing poetry, but was the cost worth it? Part of me felt wrong reading this, the other half couldn’t stop. It’s such a vulnerable piece.
I feel like after hours of research into Lowell-Hardwick-Blackwood I’m still left wondering how this exists!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 5, 2025
A favorite poet going through some rough times. Excellent!!!
January 21, 2020
What a dreadful book. Several months ago I spent a while (re)visiting Lowell after not paying much attention to him for quite a while. I read the Lowell/Bishop letters and the play created from them, as well as Old Glory, Notebook 1967-1968, History and the New Selected Poems. The letters are the best read, to be sure, but there are ups as well as downs in the poems too. But Dolphin is wretched: if “confessional” verse is normally just hysteria (neither verse nor poetry), Dolphin is arguably a kind of intellectual hysteria—the emotional aspects are all there, but so too a kind of highbrow discourse, much of which feels like either disjointed imagery or just chatter. Where is the connective tissue which makes this involving and interesting for readers who aren’t immersed in Lowell’s psyche. Notebook 1967-1968 and History are significantly better—though still self-indulgent—than this Pulitzer Prize-winning yawn.
December 7, 2023
Conscience incurable
convinces me I am not writing my life;
life never assumes which part of ourself is life.
Ours was never a book, though sparks of it
spotted the page with superficial burns:
the fiction I colored with first-hand evidence,
letters and talk I marketed as fiction--
but what is true or false tomorrow when surgeons
let out the pus, and crowd the circus to see us
disembowelled for our afterlife?
from "Marriage, 9: Heavy Breathing"
Robert Lowell blurs the lines between candid confession and creative fiction in the collection of sonnets making up The Dolphin. This is the collection his friend Elizabeth Bishop advised should not be published because of his use of personal letters from his second wife--letters which he admits revising or even rewriting to fit his poetic vision. He spends an inordinate time in bathtubs reflecting yet never emotionally connecting with anyone or anything.
I struggled with his collection because Lowell's persona is sleazy, even heartless. He's from old New England stock; because of his trust fund status, he's never had to work a day in his life. There's an arrogance coloring his outlook and reflection I find distracting. And yet, by the end, in the surprisingly moving sonnet sequence "Flight to New York," his verse reveals his cracked heart, his sadness that a third marriage and a new geography has not changed anything substantively.
Lowell can write incredible lines and, at times, enviable poetry. The real litmus test of whether or not you enjoy this collection depends on whether you can separate the cad from the artist, whether you find him sincere or crafty.
We are at home and warm,
as if we had escaped the gaping jaws--
underneath us like a submarine,
nuclear and protective like a mother,
swims the true shark, the shadow of departure.
from "Flight to New York, 11: Christmas"
convinces me I am not writing my life;
life never assumes which part of ourself is life.
Ours was never a book, though sparks of it
spotted the page with superficial burns:
the fiction I colored with first-hand evidence,
letters and talk I marketed as fiction--
but what is true or false tomorrow when surgeons
let out the pus, and crowd the circus to see us
disembowelled for our afterlife?
from "Marriage, 9: Heavy Breathing"
Robert Lowell blurs the lines between candid confession and creative fiction in the collection of sonnets making up The Dolphin. This is the collection his friend Elizabeth Bishop advised should not be published because of his use of personal letters from his second wife--letters which he admits revising or even rewriting to fit his poetic vision. He spends an inordinate time in bathtubs reflecting yet never emotionally connecting with anyone or anything.
I struggled with his collection because Lowell's persona is sleazy, even heartless. He's from old New England stock; because of his trust fund status, he's never had to work a day in his life. There's an arrogance coloring his outlook and reflection I find distracting. And yet, by the end, in the surprisingly moving sonnet sequence "Flight to New York," his verse reveals his cracked heart, his sadness that a third marriage and a new geography has not changed anything substantively.
Lowell can write incredible lines and, at times, enviable poetry. The real litmus test of whether or not you enjoy this collection depends on whether you can separate the cad from the artist, whether you find him sincere or crafty.
We are at home and warm,
as if we had escaped the gaping jaws--
underneath us like a submarine,
nuclear and protective like a mother,
swims the true shark, the shadow of departure.
from "Flight to New York, 11: Christmas"
May 11, 2025
so many good lines. quite funny at times. overall, exquisite.
"Cold summer London, your purer cold is Maine"
"We saw / the diamond glare of morning on the tar. / For a minute had the road as if we owned it."
"It's safer outside; in the open air, / the car flying forward to hit us, has room to swerve."
"It takes such painful mellowing to use error . . . "
"even big frauds wince at fraudulence"
"Nature, like philosopher, has one plot, / only good for repeating what it does well: life emerges from wood and life from life."
"The warm day brings out wasps to share our luck"
"I lack manhood to finish the fishing trip"
"Do you really want / to live in the same room with anyone?"
"I'm watching a scruffy, seal-colored woodchuck graze / on weeds, then lift his greedy snout and listen"
"I am doubtful . . . uncertain my big steps. / I fear I leave many holes for a quick knife / to take the blown rose from its wooden thorns."
"Only blood-donors retain the gift for words"
"The price of freedom is displacing facts"
"Must we die, / living in places we have learned to live in, / completing the only work we're trained to do?"
"the pure witchery-bitchery of kindergarten winters"
"Death's not an event in life, it's not lived through."
"I'd rather dose children on morphine than the churches."
"in your airy seizures of submission, / preferring to have your body broken to being / unbreakable in this breaking life."
"I have walked five miles, and still desire to throw / my feet off, be asleep with you . . . asleep and young."
"When most happiest / how do I know I can keep any of us alive?"
"Are teenagers the dominant of all ache?"
"It might have been redemptive not to have lived--"
"Everything is real until it's published."
"I too, / because I waver, am counted with the living."
"Cold summer London, your purer cold is Maine"
"We saw / the diamond glare of morning on the tar. / For a minute had the road as if we owned it."
"It's safer outside; in the open air, / the car flying forward to hit us, has room to swerve."
"It takes such painful mellowing to use error . . . "
"even big frauds wince at fraudulence"
"Nature, like philosopher, has one plot, / only good for repeating what it does well: life emerges from wood and life from life."
"The warm day brings out wasps to share our luck"
"I lack manhood to finish the fishing trip"
"Do you really want / to live in the same room with anyone?"
"I'm watching a scruffy, seal-colored woodchuck graze / on weeds, then lift his greedy snout and listen"
"I am doubtful . . . uncertain my big steps. / I fear I leave many holes for a quick knife / to take the blown rose from its wooden thorns."
"Only blood-donors retain the gift for words"
"The price of freedom is displacing facts"
"Must we die, / living in places we have learned to live in, / completing the only work we're trained to do?"
"the pure witchery-bitchery of kindergarten winters"
"Death's not an event in life, it's not lived through."
"I'd rather dose children on morphine than the churches."
"in your airy seizures of submission, / preferring to have your body broken to being / unbreakable in this breaking life."
"I have walked five miles, and still desire to throw / my feet off, be asleep with you . . . asleep and young."
"When most happiest / how do I know I can keep any of us alive?"
"Are teenagers the dominant of all ache?"
"It might have been redemptive not to have lived--"
"Everything is real until it's published."
"I too, / because I waver, am counted with the living."
July 13, 2023
I can’t believe the introduction was written by a recent Barnard professor who died :( it made me even more motivated to read this book.
I know this guy is also problematic for a lot of great reasons, but he’s a great poet. I really love how tight this collection is in adhering to its theme; indeed, all of them can be read as a single work. His poems deal with ruminations about womanhood, animalism vs humanism, spontaneity in life vs plotting, and flight. His continuous return to fishing and marine imagery is one that develops throughout the collection . Most other poetry collections can’t rlly meet this ideal of poetic coherency.
The events surrounding this poem are also really interesting, so make sure to read the introduction! Includes people such as both Elizabeth Hardwick and Elizabeth Bishop.
Lastly, his poems on the micro-level are just so rhythmically complex and heart-felt. So many of them inspired me either emotionally or intellectually. I have so many favorite quotes, that it would be exhausting to list them all.
“May the entertainment of uncertainty help me from seeing through anyone I love…”
I know this guy is also problematic for a lot of great reasons, but he’s a great poet. I really love how tight this collection is in adhering to its theme; indeed, all of them can be read as a single work. His poems deal with ruminations about womanhood, animalism vs humanism, spontaneity in life vs plotting, and flight. His continuous return to fishing and marine imagery is one that develops throughout the collection . Most other poetry collections can’t rlly meet this ideal of poetic coherency.
The events surrounding this poem are also really interesting, so make sure to read the introduction! Includes people such as both Elizabeth Hardwick and Elizabeth Bishop.
Lastly, his poems on the micro-level are just so rhythmically complex and heart-felt. So many of them inspired me either emotionally or intellectually. I have so many favorite quotes, that it would be exhausting to list them all.
“May the entertainment of uncertainty help me from seeing through anyone I love…”
February 7, 2023
these hurt my heart
Read
October 23, 2024Finishing poems not in ‘selected.’ Characteristically, looks like Lowell slightly tinkered some he reprinted there from this edition
July 19, 2025
Felt like I was jumping in and out of the water.
December 18, 2025
“I waste hours writing in and writing out a line,
as if listening to conscience were telling the truth.”
as if listening to conscience were telling the truth.”
December 31, 2019
It’s interesting, at last, to have the chance to read the 1972 version of The Dolphin that so shocked Lowell’s beta readers that they urged him not to publish--or, at least, to seriously revise these unrhymed sonnets to avoid cruelty to his soon-to-be ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick. A series of love poems to his new paramour and soon-to-be third wife, the Lady Caroline Blackwood (the dolphin of the title), the poems not only cruelly portray Hardwick as the nagging wife (in contrast to the seductive Caroline character, the fertile muse), but also make--and rework--letters she had sent him into poems which, with quotation marks around them and titles such as “Letter,” purport to be the real thing. But Lowell had made significant changes to the letters. Due to the objections of those beta readers, especially Elizabeth Bishop (who, argued that it was wrong for him to mix fact with fiction), Lowell did rework his manuscript, and published a different version of it in 1973 (which won him his second Pulitzer and did, as Bishop and others had predicted, deeply wound Hardwick). This edition exposes how those revisions did little to blunt his cruel portrayal of Hardwick--and how he continued to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction by reworking the chronology of events, but not excising, or making significant enough changes, to the letter-poems. Hamilton’s introduction clearly explains the timeline and personal events that Lowell drew from to write these poems, and she also transcribes the hand-written revisions to the 1972 typescript. The facsimile of that typescript, however, is so faint that it’s difficult to read--which seriously undercuts the main purpose of this edition: to publish both versions, so that readers can “track changes,” weigh them against one another, and gain insights into Lowell’s writing process.
June 15, 2010
THE DOLPHIN is a collection of 14-line "love poems" by Robert Lowell published in 1973. At the time Lowell was writing these poems, a great storm was going on in his personal life, as he had left his wife Elizabeth Hardwick and their teenager daughter Harriet behind in New York and gone to London to live with Lady Caroline Blackwood. His relationship with these three forms the subject matter of the poems in THE DOLPHIN.
I don't particularly like Robert Lowell's poetry in general here. The man was a neurotic, and this is reflected in his poetry, which rarely seems to wield that neuroticism into something more. Still, there are a few good poems here. Lowell returns a few times to the subject of dreams, including the thought-provoking meditation "Is there an ur-dream better than words, an almost / work of art I commonplace in retelling / through the fearfulness of memory?". The final "Dolphin" addresses Caroline Blackwood to seek a way out of the pain that has produced the earlier poems to no relief: "When I was troubled in mind / you made for my body / caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines, / the glassy bowing and scraping of my will..."
But what particularly weakens this collection is that a great many of the poems are derived from letters from his ex-wife. Lowell has simply transformed into verse Elizabeth Hardwick's prose, but left it blatantly obvious what the source is. It's a cheap shot to publicize your ex-wife's perfectly valid concerns, and none of these make for good poetry. Take, for example, the poem "Records" which begins "'...I was playing records on Sunday, / arranging all my records, and I came on some of your voice, and started to suggest / that Harriet listen: then immediately / we both shook our heads."
I don't particularly like Robert Lowell's poetry in general here. The man was a neurotic, and this is reflected in his poetry, which rarely seems to wield that neuroticism into something more. Still, there are a few good poems here. Lowell returns a few times to the subject of dreams, including the thought-provoking meditation "Is there an ur-dream better than words, an almost / work of art I commonplace in retelling / through the fearfulness of memory?". The final "Dolphin" addresses Caroline Blackwood to seek a way out of the pain that has produced the earlier poems to no relief: "When I was troubled in mind / you made for my body / caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines, / the glassy bowing and scraping of my will..."
But what particularly weakens this collection is that a great many of the poems are derived from letters from his ex-wife. Lowell has simply transformed into verse Elizabeth Hardwick's prose, but left it blatantly obvious what the source is. It's a cheap shot to publicize your ex-wife's perfectly valid concerns, and none of these make for good poetry. Take, for example, the poem "Records" which begins "'...I was playing records on Sunday, / arranging all my records, and I came on some of your voice, and started to suggest / that Harriet listen: then immediately / we both shook our heads."
February 20, 2010
Picked this up randomly from the library after reading bits of Lowell's Life Studies. It's a pretty obscure collection, I enjoyed it despite not being much of a poetry person. While it's different from Life Studies, this collection further builds upon Lowell's tradition as a confessional poet.
March 11, 2020
Tedious, pretentious, opaque, self-serving and self-blind, vicious and cruel.
May 15, 2015
Simple badassery!
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