Volume 23, Number 17 · October 28, 1976
Lowell's Comedy
By Irvin Ehrenpreis
Selected Poems
by Robert Lowell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 252 pp., $12.50
Going through Robert Lowell's Selected Poems, one realizes again how funny and witty his work can be—'With seamanlike celerity, / Father left the Navy, / and deeded Mother his property.' Lowell's comic power was manifest in Life Studies. But as the poet moved into middle age, humor became a subtler element of his work, displacing the vindictive sarcasm of his early books.
Review, 4037 words
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