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Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell (1917–1977) was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Life Studies, For the Union Dead, and The Dolphin are among his many volumes of verse. He was a co-founder of and contributor to The New York Review of Books.

IN THE REVIEW

Mary Mc Carthy (1912–1989)

THE IMMORTALS “Dear Mary, with her usual motherly solicitude for the lost overdog….” You’ve always wished to stand by a white horse, a Jeanne d’Arc by Albrecht Dürer, armed and lettered in the tougher university of the world…. Since your travels, the horse is firmly …

Near the Unbalanced Aquarium

One morning in July 1954 I sat in my bedroom on the third floor of the Payne-Whitney clinic of New York Hospital, trying as usual to get my picture of myself straight. I was recovering from a violent manic seizure, an attack of pathological enthusiasm. What I saw were the …

Three Poems by Eugenio Montale

These translations of three poems by Montale were found among Robert Lowell’s papers in the Houghton Library at Harvard. Like all Lowell’s versions of other poets, they are “free”: “Bellosquardo,” for example, is only the first half of Montale’s “Tempi di Bellosquardo.” They were probably written in the mid-Sixties. I …

Epics

During the summer of 1977, Robert Lowell finished a draft of a long essay on New England poets, “New England and Further.” The “further” refers (for the most part) to the conclusion of the essay, “Epics,” published here. He intended to spend the first two months of the fall school …

Executions

My executions begin at 10 P.M. and end with dawn. I sit under the royal oak raising most, condemning few with an inaudible whisper to my guard— these six years, these sixteen years… it doesn’t matter, the count was lost. Besides …

For John Berryman

(After reading his last Dream Song) The last years we only met when you were on the road, and lit up for reading your battering Dream— audible, deaf… in another world then as now. I used to want to live to avoid your …