Memoirs
by
49/99
Critics' Rating Index
41/99
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Scholars' Citation Index
84/99
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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A complete collection of Robert Lowell's autobiographical prose, from unpublished writings about his youth to reflections on the triumphs and confusions of his adult life.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the manuscript of Lowell's lyrical evocation of his childhood, which was written in the 1950s and has remained unpublished until now.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
Reviews
"Throughout, his writing is full of subtle, witty, and slightly off-kilter evocations of people...psychotic breaks...and poetry ..."
"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 ..."
"'My Autobiography' sat in Lowell's desk drawer for decades, unpublished and unread until Giroux plucked two more of its chapters and combined them for an essay in Collected Prose."
"Along with these recollections of his past are striking portraits of the effects of his bipolar disorder ..."
"At the same time, each essay becomes an occasion for a new self-portrait."
"As with nearly everything he wrote, there's a sense of wheels within wheels ..."
"These writings give us added glimpses into the life of a poet who made a new art form out of baring the soul, even while expertly keeping his words measured and precise ..."
"The family portraits, rich in stabbing detail, deepen our understanding of Lowell's childhood and his attempts at recovery in the 'balanced aquarium' of the hospital."
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