New essays providing fresh insights into the great 20th-century American poet Lowell, his writings, and his struggles. Robert Lowell (1917-1977) holds a place of unchallenged prominence in the poetic pantheon of the twentieth-century United States. He is an essential focal point for understanding the connection between poetry and American history,social justice, and personal identity. A recent spate of publications both by and about him, as well as allusions to him in the work of major American poets such as Wanda Coleman and Claudia Rankine, attest to his continued relevance. In March 2017, leading Lowell scholars from Europe and America gathered at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland in commemoration of his 100th birthday. The essays deriving from the conference and presented here aftercareful revision reveal new aspects of Lowell: for instance, the poet's influence on his peers, discussed by Thomas Travisano, the biographer of Elizabeth Bishop; or echoes of Milton in Lowell's work, discussed by Saskia Hamilton, editor of the forthcoming Dolphin Letters between Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. Other essays examine Lowell's struggles with bipolar illness, with marriage, and with money; his economic views and his early personality issues with respect to his poetic production; his extended sojourn in Amsterdam; and his special relationship with Ireland. Several essays focus on his 1961 volume Imitations, his major poetic engagement with the European tradition, unjustly neglected in the US. The essays will appeal to the wide audience that Lowell scholarship continues to command. Contributors: Steven Gould Axelrod, Massimo Bacigalupo, Philip Coleman, Ian D. Copestake, Astrid Franke, Jo Gill, Saskia Hamilton, Frank J. Kearful, Grzegorz Kosc, Diederik Oostdijk, Francesco Rognoni, Thomas Travisano, Boris Vejdovsky. Thomas Austenfeld is Professor of American Literature at the University of Fribourg.

This collection brings together new and original critical essays by eleven established European American Studies scholars to explore the 1960s from a transatlantic perspective. Intended for an academic audience interested in globalized American studies, it examines topics ranging from the impact of the American civil rights movement in Germany, France and Wales, through the transatlantic dimensions of feminism and the counterculture movement. It explores, for example, the vicissitudes of Europe's status in US foreign relations, European documentaries about the Vietnam War, transatlantic trends in literature and culture, and the significance of collective and cultural memory of the era.

With some features of an intellectual biography, this book offers a radical re-examination of Robert Lowell's entire oeuvre. The author finds in it a sustained, if erratic, effort to move beyond the high-modernist paradigm. The book begins by exploring the aesthetic and ethical dilemmas the poet was confronted with at the start of his career, dilemmas which were only temporarily resolved in the deceptive mode of confessionalism. Incorporating some material from the poet's unpublished manuscripts, the author argues that the late Lowell seeks a poetic mode that would be both more public and more empathic. Inspired by - among others - Hannah Arendt, the poet eventually refutes not just the high-modernist mode of the 1940s but also the crypto-modernist confessionalism of the 1960s. The book follows Lowell in his various post-modernist explorations to show finally that Martin Heidegger can be usefully employed to read the last volumes. Traces of Heideggerian critique of metaphysics and his literary hermeneutics found in The Dolphin and Day by Day illustrate the poet's unfulfilled ambition to develop an entirely new poetics.