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Memoirs

Memoirs

by Robert Lowell

Farrar, Straus and Giroux ·2022 ·400 pages ·Poetry
Maybe Someday
Maybe Someday
I Index
38/99
Near the Top

65/99

Critics

Bottom of the Pile

10/99

Readers

n/a

Scholars

46/99

Rating

84/99

Volume

16/99

Rating

4/99

Volume

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About This Book

A complete collection of Robert Lowell's autobiographical prose, from unpublished writings about his youth to reflections on the triumphs and confusions of his adult life. Robert Lowell's Memoirs is an unprecedented literary discovery: the manuscript of Lowell's lyrical evocation of his childhood, which was written in the 1950s and has remained unpublished until now. Meticulously edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, it serves as a precursor or companion to his groundbreaking book of poems Life Studies, which signaled a radically new prose-inflected direction in his work, and indeed in American poetry. Memoirs also includes intense depictions of Lowell's mental illness and his determined efforts to recover. It concludes with Lowell's reminiscences of other writers, among them T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Hannah Arendt, and Sylvia Plath. Memoirs demonstrates Lowell's expansive gifts as a prose stylist and his powers of introspection and observation. It provides striking new evidence of the range and brilliance of Lowell's achievement. Includes black-and-white photographs


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Reviews

"Aside from the sheer beauty of the writing — the poet's naked confrontation of his own pain, the honesty with which he portrays a family dynamic, should strike any reader to the heart ..."

Erica Wagner· Financial Times Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Lowell's rich language and startling perceptiveness are nothing short of captivating."

Publishers Weekly Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"It deserves a wider audience."

August Kleinzahler· The New York Times Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Highly detailed, lucid, and precise, Lowell's writing is witty, sarcastic, and revealing about himself, his parents, his beloved grandfather, and others in his orbit ..."

Kirkus Read review ↗ Near the Top

"The book is rounded out by a dozen or so vignettes of fellow poets and friends."

Abhrajyoti Chakraborty· The Guardian Read review ↗ Near the Top

"His reminiscences fill out figures known to readers of his work ..."

Declan Ryan· The Guardian Read review ↗ Near the Top

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