The Critical Response to Robert Lowell

The Critical Response to Robert Lowell PDF Author: Steven G. Axelrod
Publisher: Greenwood
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
From the publication of his first major volume in 1946, Lord Weary's Castle, to a few years before his death in 1977, Robert Lowell held sway as the premier English-language poet of his time. Lord Weary's Castle seemed to push poetic language and cultural critique in exciting new directions, yet they were directions sanctioned by the New Criticism of his time. In 1959, Lowell's Life Studies dramatically broke the very traditions he had previously revitalized. During the 1960s, his works elaborated his new poetic mode and engaged with personal, political, and historical issues. But with the 1973 publication of his poetic trilogy, History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin, his reputation suffered. Though his final work, the autobiographical Day by Day—published shortly before his death in 1977—was favorably received, critics continued to attack him in the decades that followed. Thus Lowell's reputation, as this volume makes clear, has fluctuated, and at the close of the twentieth century, there is still no critical consensus about any aspect of his work. This book provides a representative sample of the critical discourse concerning Lowell's poetry, drama, and prose, and shows that discourse at its most varied and vital. An introductory essay surveys the response to Lowell's writings. The first three sections then track Lowell's volumes chronologically. Most of his books receive one or two reviews followed by several scholarly essays, arranged in the order of their publication. Along with the reprinted articles are two essays written specifically for this volume. The fourth section presents several broad overviews of Lowell and his works, and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources concludes the book. The volume also contains an essay by Lowell himself, in which he reflects on his career.

The Critical Response to Robert Lowell

The Critical Response to Robert Lowell PDF Author: Steven G. Axelrod
Publisher: Greenwood
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
From the publication of his first major volume in 1946, Lord Weary's Castle, to a few years before his death in 1977, Robert Lowell held sway as the premier English-language poet of his time. Lord Weary's Castle seemed to push poetic language and cultural critique in exciting new directions, yet they were directions sanctioned by the New Criticism of his time. In 1959, Lowell's Life Studies dramatically broke the very traditions he had previously revitalized. During the 1960s, his works elaborated his new poetic mode and engaged with personal, political, and historical issues. But with the 1973 publication of his poetic trilogy, History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin, his reputation suffered. Though his final work, the autobiographical Day by Day—published shortly before his death in 1977—was favorably received, critics continued to attack him in the decades that followed. Thus Lowell's reputation, as this volume makes clear, has fluctuated, and at the close of the twentieth century, there is still no critical consensus about any aspect of his work. This book provides a representative sample of the critical discourse concerning Lowell's poetry, drama, and prose, and shows that discourse at its most varied and vital. An introductory essay surveys the response to Lowell's writings. The first three sections then track Lowell's volumes chronologically. Most of his books receive one or two reviews followed by several scholarly essays, arranged in the order of their publication. Along with the reprinted articles are two essays written specifically for this volume. The fourth section presents several broad overviews of Lowell and his works, and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources concludes the book. The volume also contains an essay by Lowell himself, in which he reflects on his career.

Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell PDF Author: Ian Hamilton
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571282628
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
Born in 1917 into an aristocratic Boston family Robert Lowell was not yet thirty when his first major collection of poems, Lord Weary's Castle, won the Pulitzer Prize. With Life Studies, his third book, he found the intense, highly personal voice that made him the foremost American poet of his generation. He held strong, complex and very public political views. His private life was turbulent, marred by manic depression and troubled marriages. But in this superb biography (first published in 1982) the poet Ian Hamilton illuminates both the life and the work of Lowell with sympathetic understanding and consummate narrative skill. 'Our one consolation for Ian Hamilton's early death is that his work seems to have lived on with undiminished force... The critical prose, in particular, still sets a standard that nobody else comes near.' Clive James

Day by Day

Day by Day PDF Author: Robert Lowell
Publisher: New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374135256
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
Collected verses focus on the American poet's memories of family and school, marriage, recent life in England, and present home in Kent

Seeded Light

Seeded Light PDF Author: Edward Byrne
Publisher: Turning Point
ISBN: 9781934999783
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description


Randall Jarrell and His Age

Randall Jarrell and His Age PDF Author: Stephanie Burt
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231500955
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) was the most influential poetry critic of his generation. He was also a lyric poet, comic novelist, translator, children's book author, and close friend of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, and many other important writers of his time. Jarrell won the 1960 National Book Award for poetry and served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Amid the resurgence of interest in Randall Jarrell, Stephen Burt offers this brilliant analysis of the poet and essayist. Burt's book examines all of Jarrell's work, incorporating new research based on previously undiscovered essays and poems. Other books have examined Jarrell's poetry in biographical or formal terms, but none have considered both his aesthetic choices and their social contexts. Beginning with an overview of Jarrell's life and loves, Burt argues that Jarrell's poetry responded to the political questions of the 1930s, the anxieties and social constraints of wartime America, and the apparent prosperity, domestic ideals, and professional ideology that characterized the 1950s. Jarrell's work is peopled by helpless soldiers, anxious suburban children, trapped housewives, and lonely consumers. Randall Jarrell and His Age situates the poet-critic among his peers—including Bishop, Lowell, and Arendt—in literature and cultural criticism. Burt considers the ways in which Jarrell's efforts and achievements encompassed the concerns of his time, from teen culture to World War II to the Cuban Missile Crisis; the book asks, too, how those efforts might speak to us now.

Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire

Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire PDF Author: Kay Redfield Jamison
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307744612
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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Book Description
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • In this magisterial study of the relationship between illness and art, the best-selling author of An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison, brings an entirely fresh understanding to the work and life of Robert Lowell (1917-1977), whose intense, complex, and personal verse left a lasting mark on the English language and changed the public discourse about private matters. In his poetry, Lowell put his manic-depressive illness (now known as bipolar disorder) into the public domain, and in the process created a new and arresting language for madness. Here Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison brings her expertise in mood disorders to bear on Lowell’s story, illuminating not only the relationships between mania, depression, and creativity but also how Lowell’s illness and treatment influenced his work (and often became its subject). A bold, sympathetic account of a poet who was—both despite and because of mental illness—a passionate, original observer of the human condition.

The Critical Response to Robert Lowell

The Critical Response to Robert Lowell PDF Author: Steven G. Axelrod
Publisher: Greenwood
ISBN: 0313290377
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
From the publication of his first major volume in 1946, Lord Weary's Castle, to a few years before his death in 1977, Robert Lowell held sway as the premier English-language poet of his time. Lord Weary's Castle seemed to push poetic language and cultural critique in exciting new directions, yet they were directions sanctioned by the New Criticism of his time. In 1959, Lowell's Life Studies dramatically broke the very traditions he had previously revitalized. During the 1960s, his works elaborated his new poetic mode and engaged with personal, political, and historical issues. But with the 1973 publication of his poetic trilogy, History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin, his reputation suffered. Though his final work, the autobiographical Day by Day—published shortly before his death in 1977—was favorably received, critics continued to attack him in the decades that followed. Thus Lowell's reputation, as this volume makes clear, has fluctuated, and at the close of the twentieth century, there is still no critical consensus about any aspect of his work. This book provides a representative sample of the critical discourse concerning Lowell's poetry, drama, and prose, and shows that discourse at its most varied and vital. An introductory essay surveys the response to Lowell's writings. The first three sections then track Lowell's volumes chronologically. Most of his books receive one or two reviews followed by several scholarly essays, arranged in the order of their publication. Along with the reprinted articles are two essays written specifically for this volume. The fourth section presents several broad overviews of Lowell and his works, and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources concludes the book. The volume also contains an essay by Lowell himself, in which he reflects on his career.

For Lizzie and Harriet

For Lizzie and Harriet PDF Author: Robert Lowell
Publisher: London : Faber
ISBN: 9780571102969
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description
Poems.

Words in Air

Words in Air PDF Author: Elizabeth Bishop
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374722870
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 1156

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Book Description
Robert Lowell once remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop that "you ha[ve] always been my favorite poet and favorite friend." The feeling was mutual. Bishop said that conversation with Lowell left her feeling "picked up again to the proper table-land of poetry," and she once begged him, "Please never stop writing me letters—they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I've been re-reading Emerson) for several days." Neither ever stopped writing letters, from their first meeting in 1947 when both were young, newly launched poets until Lowell's death in 1977. Presented in Words in Air is the complete correspondence between Bishop and Lowell. The substantial, revealing—and often very funny—interchange that they produced stands as a remarkable collective achievement, notable for its sustained conversational brilliance of style, its wealth of literary history, its incisive snapshots and portraits of people and places, and its delicious literary gossip, as well as for the window it opens into the unfolding human and artistic drama of two of America's most beloved and influential poets.

My Poets

My Poets PDF Author: Maureen N. McLane
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374217491
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
A thrillingly original exploration of a life lived under poetry's uniquely seductive spell "Oh! there are spirits of the air," wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley. In this stunningly original book Maureen N. McLane channels the spirits and voices that make up the music in one poet's mind. Weaving criticism and memoir, My Poets explores a life reading and a life read. McLane invokes in My Poets not necessarily the best poets, nor the most important poets (whoever these might be), but those writers who, in possessing her, made her. "I am marking here what most marked me," she writes. Ranging from Chaucer to H.D. to William Carlos Williams to Louise Glück to Shelley (among others), McLane tracks the "growth of a poet's mind," as Wordsworth put it in The Prelude. In a poetical prose both probing and incantatory, McLane has written a radical book of experimental criticism. Susan Sontag called for an "erotics of interpretation": this is it. Part Bildung, part dithyramb, part exegesis, My Poets extends an implicit invitation to you, dear reader, to consider who your "my poets," or "my novelists," or "my filmmakers," or "my pop stars," might be.