From Publishers Weekly
One can't help, reading through this massive, spellbinding volume, mourning some of what has been lost in American poetry since the Partisan Review crowd was in the ascendant. Lowell's work evinces a contagious earnestness about writing (and rewriting) poetry in a bid for immortality, and an intellectual aggressiveness that is more ethical than metaphysical in nature (like Auden, Lowell's pacifist politics were often transparent). Lowell's embodied, phantasmagoric sense of history and geography highlights his generation's greater chronological proximity to Pound and, before him, Robert Browning. And the imagistic impulse that fueled much mid-century poetry is best typified by Lowell's unerring sense of visual detail: "...octagonal red tiles,/ sweaty with a secret dank, crummy with ant-stale;/ a Rocky Mountain chaise lounge,/ its legs, shellacked saplings." The greatest misfortune of Lowell's critical reception is that he has been lastingly deemed a confessional poet; as Bidart's closing essay notes, not only did Lowell carefully sift through details to preserve those with greatest aesthetic effect, but these details themselves were sometimes stolen from the lives of his peers. Either way, fans will be delighted to see the full version of The Mills of the Kavanaughs (which was cut down to a handful of stanzas for the Selected Poems) as well as the complete Land of Unlikeness, Lowell's debut which he never allowed to be reprinted. Not enough can be said to encourage the reader to absorb, and even attack, this book. From the earliest poems to several late, unfinished works, Lowell's style-"lurid, rapid, garish, grouped/ heightened from life,/ yet paralyzed by fact"-emerges as a sweeping constant, one that revealingly manages to accommodate successive poetic challenges and misreadings. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
In the quarter-century since his death, Lowell's personality and life have overshadowed his poetry. No more. Poets Bidart (who knew Lowell and who expertly dismantles Lowell's reputation as confessional poet) and Gewanter present the first collected volume of this pivotal American voice, a gathering astonishing in its breadth and power. Here are poems in manuscript; works "buried since first publication," including Lowell's first book, Land of Unlikeness (1944); and poems from his 11 ensuing collections, including Life Studies (1959) and The Dolphin (1973). As Bidart observes, Lowell, the recipient of many awards, including two Pulitzers and the National Book Award, labored intently over his work, writing and rewriting, just as he repeatedly plumbed the depths of his blueblood family history and grappled with humanity's perpetual struggles with love and war, inheritance and freedom. Substantial notes, a chronology, glossary, and critical essays make this an essential title. Readers who think they know Lowell's work will discover new facets, and readers just venturing into Lowell's potently rendered and ceaselessly evocative poetic universe will find much to contemplate. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"Lowell seems even larger now than he did when he was a living presence, our greatest poet. His work resonates with undiminished force." --James Atlas, The New Criterion

"Robert Lowell . . . is an American manifestation. A Lowell of the Lowells from Boston, he embodies the American history that he endures and subjects to fierce analysis. He studies and re-creates in his poems the stories of imperial Rome, and he is himself a citizen caught up in the issues of world power. His poems become crystallizations of what is most central and troublesome in the conscience of his times." --William Stafford, Chicago Tribune

"The singular strength of Robert Lowell's poetry has always been . . . to bring a sense of context to bear upon his poems, not just in local efforts but as a whole [and a] technical mastery that is inseparable from imaginative mastery." --Christopher Ricks, The New Statesman



Review
"Lowell seems even larger now than he did when he was a living presence, our greatest poet. His work resonates with undiminished force." --James Atlas, The New Criterion

"Robert Lowell . . . is an American manifestation. A Lowell of the Lowells from Boston, he embodies the American history that he endures and subjects to fierce analysis. He studies and re-creates in his poems the stories of imperial Rome, and he is himself a citizen caught up in the issues of world power. His poems become crystallizations of what is most central and troublesome in the conscience of his times." --William Stafford, Chicago Tribune

"The singular strength of Robert Lowell's poetry has always been . . . to bring a sense of context to bear upon his poems, not just in local efforts but as a whole [and a] technical mastery that is inseparable from imaginative mastery." --Christopher Ricks, The New Statesman



Book Description
For the first time, the collected poems of America's preeminent postwar poet

Edmund Wilson wrote of Robert Lowell that he was the "only recent American poet--if you don't count Eliot--who writes successfully in the language and cadence and rhyme of the resounding English tradition."
Frank Bidart and David Gewanter have compiled a definitive edition of Lowell's poems, from the early triumph of Lord Weary's Castle, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, to the brilliant willfulness of his Imitations of Sappho, Baudelaire, Rilke, and other masters, to the late spontaneity of his History, winner of another Pulitzer, and of his last book of poems, Day by Day. The book will also include several poems never previously collected, as well as a selection of Lowell's intriguing drafts.

As poet and critic Randall Jarrell said, "You feel before reading any new poem of his the uneasy expectation of perhaps encountering a masterpiece."
Lowell's Collected Poems will offer the first opportunity to view the entire range of his astonishing verse.



About the Author
Robert Lowell (1917-77) was the renowned and controversial author of many books of poetry, including Day by Day, The Dolphin, and History. FSG also published his Collected Prose in 1987.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Edmund Wilson wrote that Robert Lowell was "the only recent American poet -- if you don't count Eliot -- who writes successfully in the language and cadence and rhyme of the resounding English tradition." Randall Jarrell observed of him, "You feel before reading any new poem of his the uneasy expectation of perhaps encountering a masterpiece." He was the English-speaking world's preeminent postwar poet. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter have compiled the definitive edition of Lowell's work, from his first, impossible-to-find collection, Land of Unlikeness; to the early triumph of Lord Weary's Castle, winner of the 1946 Pulitzer Prize; to the brilliant willfulness of his versions of poems by Sappho, Baudelaire, Rilke, Montale, and other masters in Imitations; to the late spontaneity of The Dolphin, winner of another Pulitzer Prize; to his last, most searching book, Day by Day. This volume also includes poems and translations never previously collected, and a selection of drafts that demonstrate the poet's constant drive to reimagine his work. Frank Bidart has contributed an introduction and an afterword that discuss Lowell's idiosyncratic approach to poem-making. The book includes voluminous notes and a glossary of important names. Robert Lowell's Collected Poems at last offers readers the opportunity to take in, entire, one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

[The] introduction (quite properly) doesn't make a case for Lowell's pre-eminence as a 20th-century American poet, but stresses instead the editors' attempt to look at every published instance of a Lowell poem and to include, in their notes, versions and lines that appeared elsewhere than in the published volumes. It is good to have included, among many other things in the notes and appendixes, magazine versions of such central poems to the Lowell canon as ''Beyond the Alps'' and ''Waking Early Sunday Morning.'' But I would hazard that, just as is the case with Yeats or Auden -- other great revisers of their own verse -- Lowell's interest for us does not depend upon his revisionary zealousness or obsession. — William H. Pritchard

The Los Angeles Times

Regardless of the current state of the poet's reputation or how often his name is bandied about by lesser lights, the magnitude of Lowell's achievement ￯﾿ﾽ an achievement won against horrific odds ￯﾿ﾽ can now come fully and magnificently into view. "We only live between / before we are and what we were," Lowell once wrote, but his work in this Collected Poems stands secure, timeless, outside the relatively brief span that was his bedeviled life. — Caroline Fraser

The Washington Post

Poems such as the frequently anthologized "Skunk Hour" also crave that freedom, even as they diagnose the sickness and decay of an old order. Lowell, with the double burden of his madness and his distinguished New England heritage, thirsted for liberation more than most. He ultimately found it in several places -- by becoming a conscientious objector during World War II, by befriending Southern writers such as Peter Taylor and Randall Jarrell, by participating in the political life of the 1960s -- but nowhere is his pained quest more obvious than in Collected Poems, a monument to his sprawling, untidy talent and his courageous attempts to make it cohere. — Sunil Iyengar

Publishers Weekly

One can't help, reading through this massive, spellbinding volume, mourning some of what has been lost in American poetry since the Partisan Review crowd was in the ascendant. Lowell's work evinces a contagious earnestness about writing (and rewriting) poetry in a bid for immortality, and an intellectual aggressiveness that is more ethical than metaphysical in nature (like Auden, Lowell's pacifist politics were often transparent). Lowell's embodied, phantasmagoric sense of history and geography highlights his generation's greater chronological proximity to Pound and, before him, Robert Browning. And the imagistic impulse that fueled much mid-century poetry is best typified by Lowell's unerring sense of visual detail: "...octagonal red tiles,/ sweaty with a secret dank, crummy with ant-stale;/ a Rocky Mountain chaise lounge,/ its legs, shellacked saplings." The greatest misfortune of Lowell's critical reception is that he has been lastingly deemed a confessional poet; as Bidart's closing essay notes, not only did Lowell carefully sift through details to preserve those with greatest aesthetic effect, but these details themselves were sometimes stolen from the lives of his peers. Either way, fans will be delighted to see the full version of The Mills of the Kavanaughs (which was cut down to a handful of stanzas for the Selected Poems) as well as the complete Land of Unlikeness, Lowell's debut which he never allowed to be reprinted. Not enough can be said to encourage the reader to absorb, and even attack, this book. From the earliest poems to several late, unfinished works, Lowell's style-"lurid, rapid, garish, grouped/ heightened from life,/ yet paralyzed by fact"-emerges as a sweeping constant, one that revealingly manages to accommodate successive poetic challenges and misreadings. (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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