After a short discussion of the actual typescripts and manuscripts of Lowell’s letters, this chapter centers on the published books of letters, which have become a central, rewarding part of Lowell’s oeuvre. On the level of style, Lowell’s letters can help us hear the poems better: above all, they make audible the comic tones under-recognized in his poetry. On the level of content, the letters shed light on Lowell’s literary contexts, his interests, and his thinking in specific poems: When Lowell writes to other poets about their work, he frequently reveals quite a bit about his own. And finally, the letters create an autobiography that encompasses gossip, complaint, apology, argument, critique, and confession.

Throughout his career, Robert Lowell showed an immense respect and admiration for T. S. Eliot. The friendship between the two writers and the importance of Eliot’s example as a poet are well documented in Lowell’s letters and essays, as well as in poems written under Eliot’s potent influence. Eliot’s rendering of speech, his ironic intelligence, his adoption of myth and symbol, and his liberal use of quotation and allusion all find their way into Lowell’s poetry. At the same time, as this chapter reveals, there are some significant diversions and differences of opinion. Lowell perseveres in writing a poetry that is impersonal in the manner prescribed by Eliot, while also drawing on subject matter that is candidly autobiographical. One of the key points in the chapter is that Lowell acknowledged Eliot as a "confessional" poet several years before the term was applied to his own compositions in Life Studies. Although the two poets have much in common in terms of their theological interests, they also differ profoundly in their views on questions of sin, death, and salvation.

Robert Lowell both resisted and embraced the mantle of public poet. One way of tracking this ambivalence in Lowell’s poetics is by following the developments in his war poems. Though Lowell, along with Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill, is credited with pivoting poetry from the mannered verse culture of the 1950s to the autobiographical experiments of the 1960s, more recent appraisals of Lowell find a complicated grappling with whiteness and with overlapping historical and personal selves. The events of Lowell’s biography provide one rich context for thinking about his poetry’s treatment of war. Yet war is not only the near-constant background for Lowell’s life and the theater for his political engagement. It is also a spur to Lowell’s incessant revision of his poetic methods and commitments to verse forms. Focusing on war helps to bring Lowell’s prosodic changes into relief.

The chapter explores Lowell’s awareness of Boston’s complex class-marked topography. The Beacon Hill has become only a shorthand term for an anachronistically elite neighborhood, and we have become oblivious to the significance of its specific addresses. The Hill, however, was always intricately zoned and stratified, riven with class and ethnic conflict. Lowell’s story of his family moving from house to house within the Beacon Hill and then further and further east down the Back Bay is a dramatic story of social decline. The chapter also looks, in Lowell’s poetry and prose, for traces of the analogous class conflict over the downtown Boston’s public green spaces. The Lowells found themselves first “on the wrong side” of the Beacon Hill, then in the less prestigious section of the Back Bay impinged upon by the lesser castes. They enjoyed their leisure in the manicured Public Garden whose serenity was threatened by the messy, plebeian, enclosure-resisting Common.

Due in part to Claudia Rankine’s invocation of Robert Lowell’s poetry in Citizen: An American Lyric (2015), readers have begun to stress the poet’s status as the representative “of a (mostly white, mostly male) post-Romantic lyric tradition,” as Kamran Javadizadeh puts it. Rankine’s presentation of Lowell as a racial artist invites criticism not only to acknowledge racist dimensions of his poetics, but also to consider Lowell’s unusual interest in exploring the emotional contours of his own concept of whiteness. This chapter explores how forms of entitlement, anxiety, and desirous identification with non-white others coexist alongside Lowell’s attempts to reckon with the white supremacist undercurrents that shaped his family history, his social formation, and his earliest articulations of self. This complex coexistence generates a striking pattern in Lowell’s literary configurations of whiteness in terms of suspended states of liminal awareness: confusion, shadowy recollection, and the vague annunciations of dreams.