A complete collection of Robert Lowell's autobiographical prose, from unpublished writings about his youth to reflections on the triumphs and confusions of his adult life.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the manuscript of Lowell's lyrical evocation of his childhood, which was written in the 1950s and has remained unpublished until now.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
Robert Lowell(1917-1977) was the renowned and pathbreaking author of many leading works in American poetry, including Life Studies (FSG, 1959), For the Union Dead (FSG, 1964), and Day by Day (FSG, 1977). Steven Gould Axelrod is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, USA. He is co-editor of The New Anthology of American Poetry: Volumes 1-3 (2002-2012), editor of Robert Lowell's Memoirs (2019) and a former President of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Languages Association (2004-6).
Grzegorz Kosc is Professor of English and the Director of the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw. He is the author of Robert Lowell: Uncomfortable Epigone of the Grands Maitres (2005) and Robert Frost's Political Body (2014). He has articles in journals such as the Wallace Stevens Journal, PLL, and Partial Answers .
Picador
Available: 08/01/23
6.12 x 9.25 · 416 pages
9781250872869
CDN $37.00 · pb