Chapter 23 - Appropriation

Summary

The chapter argues that Robert Lowell erred morally, and thereby aesthetically – since art must be held to account – in his literary experiment of appropriating the epistolary voice of Elizabeth Hardwick, the esteemed literary critic, novelist, and co-founder of and regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, into The Dolphin (1973). Hardwick was Lowell’s second wife, then ex-wife at the time Lowell composed his sequence. Saltmarsh argues for a need to see her as a subject, and not an objectified "Lizzie" character. In quoting from many of Hardwick’s essays, letters, and writings, she hopes to restory what we think we know about the literary history of Lowell and Hardwick. Broadly, this chapter offers a reappraisal of both Lowell and Hardwick, and sheds light on the limits of confessional poetry, particularly when a writer is purporting to speak as an intimate other.