Robert Lowell, with Elizabeth Bishop, stands apart as the greatest American poet of the latter half of the twentieth century--and "Life Studies and For the Union Dead "stand as among his most important volumes. In "Life Studies," which was first published in 1959, Lowell moved away from the formality of his earlier poems and started writing in a more confessional vein. The title poem of "For the Union Dead "concerns the death of the Civil War hero (and Lowell ancestor) Robert Gould Shaw, but it also largely centers on the contrast between Boston's idealistic past and its debased present at the time of its writing, in the early 1960's. Throughout, Lowell addresses contemporaneous subjects in a voice and style that themselves push beyond the accepted forms and constraints of the time.

The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972-1973 is an expanded edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning provocative poetry collection that crossed the line between art and life. I have sat and listened to too many words of the collaborating muse, and plotted perhaps too freely with my life, not avoiding injury to others, not avoiding injury to myself-- to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction, an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting my eyes have seen what my hand did. Winner of the 1973 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, Robert Lowell's The Dolphin was controversial from the beginning: many of the poems include letters from Robert Lowell's wife, the celebrated writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick, wrote to him after he left her for the English socialite and writer Caroline Blackwood. He was warned by many, among them Elizabeth Bishop, that "art just isn't worth that much." Nevertheless, these poems are a powerful document of an impulsive love, and a moving record of Lowell's change from one life and marriage in America to a new life on new terms with a new family in England, rendered with the stunning technical power and control for which he was so celebrated. This new edition, which follows the 1973 edition, includes scans of the pages of Lowell's original manuscript, giving us a look into the brilliant and complicated mind of one of our most beloved and distinguished poets.

Of the twenty chapters that make up these Memoirs, seventeen appear here in print for the first time, unearthed by the editors from the Harvard Archive. They include intense depictions of Lowell's mental illness and his efforts to recover, and conclude with reminiscences of other writers - 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 provide further evidence of the range and brilliance of his achievement.

'THE BEST AMERICAN POET OF HIS GENERATION.' - TIME Gathered on the occasion of Robert Lowell's one hundredth birthday, New Selected Poems offers a fresh and illuminating representation of one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry. The renowned and controversial author of many books of poems, plays, and translations, Lowell was one of the United States' most honoured poets, winning the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1947 and 1974, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His ongoing interrogation of his family legacy, his personal struggle with manic depression, and his mastery of the tradition of poetry in English formed the groundbreaking autobiographical foundation of Life Studies (1959) and the books that followed it, including For the Union Dead (1964), Near the Ocean (1967), History (1973), and Day by Day (1977). Katie Peterson's incisive selection of Lowell's poems draws attention to 'the perishability of life, its twinned quality of fragility and repetition, as framed by the structured evanescence of daily consciousness.' Lowell's own intense dramas and struggles are the substrate he drew on in his restless search to make sense of, and fix, shape-shifting experience - not his, but ours. As Peterson says, Lowell was 'constitutionally immune to any stultifying permanence either of form or of spirit.' Her brilliant new reading of Lowell shows us his work constantly breaking, renewing, transforming, as he strives restlessly, over and over, to find an elusive unity.

The Dolphin Letters offers an unprecedented portrait of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick during the last seven years of Lowell's life (1970 to 1977), a time of personal crisis and creative innovation for both writers. Centred on the letters they exchanged with each other and with other members of their circle - writers, intellectuals, friends and publishers, including Elizabeth Bishop, Caroline Blackwood, Mary McCarthy and Adrienne Rich - this book has the narrative sweep of a novel, telling the story of the dramatic breakup of Lowell and Hardwick's twenty-one-year marriage and their extraordinary, but late, reconciliation.

Lowell's sonnet sequence The Dolphin (for which he controversially adapted Hardwick's letters as a source) and his last book, Day by Day, were written during this period, as were Hardwick's influential books Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature and Sleepless Nights. Lowell and Hardwick are acutely intelligent observers of marriage, children, friends and the feelings that their personal tribulations gave rise to.

The Dolphin Letters, edited by Saskia Hamilton, is a debate about the limits of art - what occasions a work of art, and what moral and artistic licence artists have to make use of their lives and the lives of others as material. The crisis of Lowell's The Dolphin was profoundly affecting to everyone around him, and Bishop's warning that 'art just isn't worth that much' haunts us today.

The collected work of America's pre-eminent post-war 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 comprehensive edition of Lowell's poems, from the early triumph of Lord Weary's Castle, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, through the brilliant wilfulness 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. This volume includes several poems never previously collected, as well as a selection of Lowell's intriguing drafts.

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

Life Studies was first published in 1959. 'In Life Studies the pathos of the local colour of the past - of the lives and deaths of his father and mother and grandfather and uncle, crammed full of their own varied and placid absurdity - is the background that sets off the desperate knife-edged absurdity of the jailed conscientious objector among gangsters and Jehovah's witnesses, the private citizen returning to his baby, older now, from the mental hospital. He sees things as being part of history; if you say about his poor detailedly eccentric, trust-fund Lowells: 'but they weren't,' he can answer: 'They are now.'' Randall Jarrell