Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell

by Paul Mariani

Overview

"Thorough and just. . . . Quietly, surely in touch with its distinguished subject."—Richard Wilbur

Robert Lowell's poetry radically altered the American literary landscape, combining as it did family drama and an apocalyptic view of the history of our times. He won three Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards for poetry. Married three times, always to writers, he had his dark side, suffering from crippling bouts of manic depression and alcoholism.

Using hundreds of Lowell's unpublished manuscripts and letters, and dozens of interviews, Paul Mariani has given us a balanced, passionate, and readable life, capturing the man, his age, and his place in literary history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393313741
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/17/1996
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	552
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Poet, scholar, essayist, critic, Paul Mariani is the author of many books, including William Carlos Williams and The Great Wheel. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Editorial Reviews

[Mariani's] vigorous narrative style sparkles with rich details. . . . These pages bring out the sheer interestingness of Lowell's mind as it is encountered in letters, prose reflections, and in a lifetimes of poems.

William Pritchard

Lowell's (1917-1977) difficult life and path-breaking work as a so-called confessional poet are well considered by critic, poet and biographer Mariani ( Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman ), who, rather than offer a large-scale critical reassessment, concentrates on the daunting personal complexities and chronologies of the manic-depressive writer. Lowell's difficulties included his uneasy moral heritage (giving way to spiritual crises) as a member of one of New England's august families, and the obligations he experienced as an only child; his periodic breakdowns, seemingly not preventable by medicine or doctors; and his general recklessness. In aiming for sustained characterization over a more academic treatment, Mariani keeps a reader's attention; during his research, he had access to previously unavailable correspondence. One hopes that Mariani's biography will help lead Americans back to a writer who is seminal, if now neglected. Photos not seen by PW. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Lowell was known to his friends as "Cal" (a school name stemming from both "Caliban" and "Caligula"), and indeed at times Lowell comes across as a monster born of an imagination as fevered as his own. His wife-to-be Jean Stafford described him as "an uncouth, neurotic, psychopathic murderer-poet," and this biography leaves the impression of someone who spent his days ping-ponging among teaching stints, hospital stays, marriages and affairs, bouts of drunkenness, and mania. Along the way, though, Lowell gave poetry new life, muscling aside T.S. Eliot's dry, academic verse and supplying a welcome vigor. Surprisingly short on assessment, especially given Mariani's (English, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst) evident affection for the poet, this new biography, based in part on heretofore unavailable materials, provides plenty of detail for a thorough reconsideration of a brilliant, complex, and tragic figure. For general collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/94.]-David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee

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