The Collected Prose

by Robert Lowell, Robert Giroux (Introduction)

This vast collection of Robert Lowell's uniformly vigorous and well-written essays, which first appeared in 1987, was edited and introduced by Robert Giroux, his longtime editor and friend. Ranging chronologically from a student paper on the Iliad that Lowell composed in 1935 to the unfinished essay, "New England and Further," on which he was working when he died in 1977, Collected Prose is a telling and fascinating compendium of the ideas, arguments, and opinions of one of modernity's most important poets. With many critical writings and book reviews concerning all manner of poets old and new (from Vergil and Ovid to Frost and Stevens, from Hopkins and "Epics" to Bishop and Plath) as well as recently discovered autobiograpical writings, two extended interviews, and learned yet approachable musings on everything from the Gettyburg Address to the art and craft of translation, this prose ominbus is must-reading for all students and scholars of twentieth-century American literature.

Genres: Essays, Poetry, American, Nonfiction

350 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Robert 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.

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his art, too, Ransom found pain, or a harmony of disequilibrium.

Lowell remained measured--except when he wasn't. He may have erred towards generosity when regarding his peers and their tradition, but I think Lowell was always fair and relentlessly cagey. Derek Walcott said Lowell suffered from a "fanatical humility" but this was a heart's strategy for avoiding the pratfalls of hubris. Especially in the interviews featured here there is a humble bounce which keeps from being flat-footed, it isn't exculpatory, but Lowell appears to have found that most poetic issues lent themselves to a polemical configuration. That wasn't the point at all.

4.5 stars

[Jesse Hilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are sentences and insights on literature and life in this book that I actually feel…sad? that I won’t be able to re-experience them for the first time. I’ll study Lowell for the worldly polish of his writing. I want to reread sections of this book as well as rereading some of his poetry that I’ve looked at before. This collection of prose is recommended for those wanting insights into the poetry scene(s) of the post-war 20th century. Lowell was a critic to contend with. A lot of the pieces in this book were incomplete fragments of what could have been longer critical or memoirist works. Maybe next is wanting to read his letters to various other writers, which I guess were plentiful.