Volume 52, Number 11 · June 23, 2005
A Tragic Grandeur
By Jonathan Raban
The Letters of Robert Lowell
edited by Saskia Hamilton
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 852 pp., $40.00
Robert Lowell's star has waned very considerably since his death in 1977, when his obituarists treated him, along with Yeats, Eliot, Auden, and Wallace Stevens, as one of the handful of unquestionably great twentieth-century poets. The publication two years ago of Frank Bidart and David Gewanter's massive edition of the Collected Poems did much to restore his work to public and critical view, but even now Lowell's poems are, I would guess, less widely read, taught, and anthologized than those of his two friends and contemporaries Elizabeth Bishop and John Berryman—a judgment, if that is what it is, that would have astonished serious readers of poetry between the 1950s and the 1970s.
Review, 5167 words
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