Volume 50, Number 13 · August 14, 2003
The Return of Robert Lowell
By James Fenton
Robert Lowell: Collected Poems
edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1,186 pp., $45.00
In 1944, Robert Lowell published his first collection of poems, Land of Unlikeness. Later he refused to have it reprinted, and it is relegated to an appendix in the new Collected Poems, along with the introduction Allen Tate wrote for it. This is the kind of bibliographical rarity that circulates in the academic world in the form of old Xeroxes. An original edition, with a personal inscription to F.W. Dupee, is currently on sale at little short of $9,000. A book worth having, then, but also a book well worth reading, not because it contains any of the works on which Lowell's reputation is likely to rest, but because it shows us the sense of elevated purpose and the intense literary ambition which was with the young poet from the outset.
Review, 6702 words
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