This chapter provides a concise narrative of the relationship and collaboration between Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound. It traces the attempts by the young Lowell to establish Pound as a mentor and the older poet’s ambivalent responses, as well as the two poets’ occasional correspondence and thoughts about one another’s mature works. It concludes with a depiction and discussion of some late addresses that each poet made to the memory and work of the other.

Lowell’s attraction to the sonnet was historical and architectural and yet the form itself, one he wrestled with above all others, had at its origin desire and unrequited love. For Lowell, the little song of the sonnet worked well as a house for the complaint, “an expression of grief, a lamentation, a plaint” (OED). As far back as the fourteenth century, Chaucer used it as a title for poems (“The Complaint unto Pity,” c. 1368) and complaints hold both an expression of torment or grief and a song. In the 1946 volume, Lord Weary’s Castle, Lowell uses the sonnet form to express such a plaint, in this case as a measure to aid in indirect self-reflection (“The North Sea Undertaker’s Complaint”). Life Studies (1959) finds Lowell still ruminating on the sonnet form and its expressive capacities, as we see in the triple sonnet “Beyond the Alps,” pivoting as it does between subjects and acting as an opportunity for historical rather than personal insight. Day by Day (1977) roots itself in the personal and introduces looser forms. The sonnet’s acoustic energies are not bottled here but the poems participate in sonnet-like thinking.

This chapter explores the representation of marriage in Robert Lowell’s poetry. It considers the often-controversial relationship between his biography and the published poems, and further explores how he uses marital dynamics to interrogate knowledge of self and other. At various times throughout his career, Lowell examines the social and domestic structures provided by marriage, representing the institution as a space of stability and emotional intensity, and therefore one that both inspires and supports creative achievement. Lowell’s third union, with Caroline Blackwood, intensified his engagement with the subject of marriage, prompting deeper analysis of states of intimacy and endurance in this final phase of his writing life. This chapter begins with Lowell’s late work, in particular with the volume Day by Day (1977), but argues that his preoccupation with marriage can be traced back through The Dolphin (1973) to the confessional mode of the era-defining Life Studies (1959) and to its radical approach to tone and form that, at that time, enabled Lowell to interrogate the vexed relationship between private and public histories in profound ways.

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.

How could Robert Lowell, a blue-blooded New England Brahmin, make the counterintuitive claim “I’m Southern” (as he did in a letter)? The chapter focuses on Lowell’s early apprenticeship to the Southern Agrarians and particularly Allen Tate, the author of a tense, neo-Metaphysical poetry that powerfully influenced Lowell. The traditionalist-modernist precepts of the Agrarians both gave Lowell a way of understanding his Puritan inheritance as an abstract Platonism and allowed him to counter it through the Catholic worldview of Tate. The chapter explains how the Civil War was central to Lowell’s verse, but how his interpretation of the conflict was partly skewed toward Southern readings of it. This especially emerges in “For the Union Dead,” Lowell’s answer to Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” Later, the literary South became less important to Lowell when he moved toward the more disconnected, personalistic style found in Life Studies.

Robert Lowell’s sense of connection with John Berryman was deep, so much so that one critic has suggested that “[a]lthough they never collaborated, their achievement was, in many respects, a joint one.” In his poem “For John Berryman,” Lowell references several points of contact between the two poets, from their “last years” back to their earlier “good days,” but Lowell’s sense of Berryman is still hard to pin down. This is partly a question of context – how the Lowell–Berryman relationship has been positioned in relation to various cultural and critical trajectories of twentieth-century American poetry – but it can also be explained in terms of the ways that Lowell’s poems record the poet’s shifting sense of his contemporary’s profile and achievement. Paying close attention to Lowell’s poetic engagement with Berryman, this chapter expands our sense of the relationship between two of the most important poets of the so-called Middle Generation.

It is conventional to assume that there was an unbreachable gulf between Robert Lowell and the experimental, “raw” poets associated with the broad avant-garde movement known as “The New American Poetry”; that he and poets like Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, and their descendants operated in almost wholly separate universes. However, this chapter argues that Lowell’s relationship with these poets and their work is more extensive, complex, and messy than has often been assumed. As it demonstrates, Lowell’s famous transformation that led to the publication Life Studies was profoundly shaped by his encounter with the avant-garde tradition. Although Lowell’s division of the poetry world into two starkly opposed camps (the “cooked” and the “raw”) quickly became gospel, Lowell actually believed his own new mode to be a bold compromise between the two poles – an attempt to split the difference between "cooked" and "raw," New Critical formalism and the New American Poetry.

The ten years that Robert Lowell lived in New York City – roughly, the 1960s – were among the happiest of his life as well as some of his most fertile artistically. The city promised a more energetic and engaged life than that he and Elizabeth Hardwick had had in Boston. Lowell’s celebrity was peaking, as he was courted by the most famous political and intellectual figures of the time. Later in the decade, the influence of lithium carbonate promised at last to alleviate the emotional torment that had plagued him and his loved ones. Finally, he began to discover a new kind of writing, one that announced a style and a subject matter beyond those of his “breakthrough” book Life Studies in 1959. But from the mid-1960s onward, Lowell’s view of New York City darkens. Many of his poems and letters indicate sadness and disappointment in New York’s and the nation’s situation.