The Letters of Robert Lowell

This collection of Robert Lowell letters is an excellent supplement to Lowell's Collected Poems. Like the Collected Poems, this book is heavily annotated (which is a very good thing) and well-edited. The letters are divided into 8 sections, with each section covering a period of 5-7 years, and grouped according to major events or publications in Lowell's life. The letters are fascinating and wonderfully written. With the annotation, they're also easy to follow, and you really get a sense of what it must have been like to be one of the poets in Lowell's inner circle. You also get an up-close and personal sense of Lowell as a human being: his ambitions, frustrations, and judgments are all very clearly spelled out. I would highly recommend this book to any serious fan of Lowell's poetry. It would also be an excellent resource for anyone interested in the American poetry scene in the 1950's and 60's.

Saskia Hamilton, a New York based poet, proves her mettle as an editor with this fat collection of Robert Lowell's letters. He wrote great letters, and this surprised me a bit, but every one of them shows an insane desire to please, to flatter, to make the recipient feel good about himself or herself; he's marvelously attentive to nuance and knows exactly how to push the right buttons of his correspondents, telling them just what they want to hear. And he's sincere, which is a plus. Over and over again I was impressed by the facility with which he was blessed, or maybe he worked it up over time, because the earliest letters aren't that great, it's not until he gets into the 1940s that the familiar Lowell manner takes over. This volume explains so much! Mostly how it was that, with all the truly awful things Lowell did, people still loved him. If it wasn't red-baiting the director of Yaddo and forcing the board to impeach her in 1947, it was publishing all those poems about Elizabeth and Harriet against their wishes, or it was wanting to marry Jackie Kennedy or whatever. Apparently all these were episodes of a manic nature in his bipolar disorder, including the car wreck that permanently disfigured wife #1 Jean Stafford. Well, of course none of them were really his fault but still. And now this book of letters unveils his real private voicem, gently coaxing reassuring, making sense of the world, interpolating, and penetrating the consciousness of whoever he was writing to at the time. The older and the famous got one style of letter; his peers got another. Hamilton's notes are sparse, but seem sensible. However printing over 700 of these letters is out of control. Like the Bidart-edited POEMS, the book physically becomes too big to handle, it takes two strong men just to lift it off the shelf. Why so many? Plus, one gets the feeling that this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the letters go, and that in a year's time we may have the first of many annual sequels, "More Letters by Robert Lowell." Never underestimate how many times a manic genius (with, as he boasts, unearned income and lots of free time) will reach out to others to make himself heard and understood. The word is the life.

Robert Lowell was a great poet to be sure. These letters shine a bit of light on his non-public side. He is rude to his parents, snide in fact. In the 1st 2 sections he asks for money from them again and again, though he treats them as imbeciles and abuses them through his letters and in person. He boasts about his brilliance and believes that the path he is on will lead to fame, as it does. But at what price? It is hard to like R. Lowell as a person. I had moments when I wanted to yell at him (crazy, huh?). I believe that we should sometimes settle for art rather than the artist.

This big collection of letters is remarkable in so many ways. Lowell was a tireless and prolific correspondent and never dull. He expressed love, wonder, and a surprisingly cheerful interest in mundane things and events. He wrote, for example, to Elizabeth Bishop, congratulating her (somewhat self-consciously) on her weight loss, among many other achievements. To Elizabeth Hardwick (second of his three wives) he sent tender and intimately newsy letters - often with an ache. Randall Jarrell, another friend, received a letter that began "Lying awake in bed the other night after my reading, I thought of the joy of seeing you." Lowell would have loved email: he complains every now and then about the slowness of the mails, especially between the US and Europe. He is by turns thrilling and everyday in these letters, and often tender and loving. Much has been made posthumously of Lowell's bipolar disorder. It's sad and sweet to read his notes to his mother. After beginning "psycho-therapy" in the late 1940's he writes to her that "I've been trying to understand my first six or seven years, and have many questions to ask you." He is uncynical and open. After her death in 1954 (also documented in letters) he had a psychotic break during which, as ever, he wrote letters. Editor Saskia Hamilton has arranged these chronologically so you can read them as a sort of a biography. This is a terrific window on Lowell and his world.