Robert Lowell

by Robert Lowell, Michael Hofmann (Editor)

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published February 19, 2001

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 4 out of 5]

and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.

I bought this collection on the basis of the introduction which was all of two pages.

Despite that, the collection appeared to fit on a beery evening when Rilke is an apt curator and the heat outside offers a hey, the planet is aflame and time spent on anything remotely social
is likely wasted in terms pragmatic.

Lowell was likely a weirdo but he’s also one of my favorite poets.

[Mattia Agnelli]

At the altar of surrender
I met you
in the hour of credulity

[M. Rought-Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems from Life Studies and For the Union Dead are terrific.

Waking Early Sunday Morning is a superb poem which captures the ambience of the 60s and its questioning of all that was considered unchangebly true.

Beyond the Alps is another great poem where Lowell finds his Catholicism has a fatal flaw.

Others add to the sense of a poet in their prime but haunted by his disordered mind but using all his experiences in the creation of art.

[Genevieve · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Favorite" seems like a little bit of a sick thing to say about any of these, but "To Speak of the Woe that Is in Marriage" will stick with me. E.g., "Gored by the climacteric of his want,/he stalls above me like an elephant."

Reading straight through the selections, I could feel the gaps in time between poems but not necessarily in a bad way. I disliked Hofmann's fawning introduction, but the choices about what to include seemed very good. I don't read a ton of poetry, and probably knew more about Lowell's personal life than about what to expect. These were dense and allusive, slow reading for me, which I struggle with. I'm working on how to read poems like this: I think for me I need to go through once very slowly, then a couple more times faster, to get any grasp of them.

I won't say a lot about the substance of the poems. It's best left discovered as you read them. The selections from The Dolphin were what I was most curious about, and they were as effective and as hard to read as promised. Like everything else here, they were extraordinary and made me want to read more Lowell. Just not right now.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting grouping of his poems, selected by English poet and translator Michael Hofmann. Lowell, I think, may be in the same category as Milton and Joyce--a writer who "made" himself through sheer intellectual endeavor combined with talent. The sense of striving toward greatness is palpable. It means, for me at least, that I don't necessarily "like" much of the writing, but its intelligence and mindfulness is impossible to deny.

[Brendan]

110 pages of poetry. Introduction by Michael Hofmann.

A lot of autobiographical pieces, the usual nature poems. Tangents abound. His intelligence is evident; at times a bit too evident.

Here are a few poems that stood out to me:

"Rimbaud 2. A Knowing Girl"
"Verlaine, Etc." - writers
"Last Things, Black Pines at 4 a.m." - Van Gogh / art
"New Year's 1968"

The line must terminate. - "Fishnet"

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

4

[Daniel Petrides · Rating 5 out of 5]

It would be impossible to read lowell and dislike his work. A master.