[Memoirs is] densely yet nimbly written, and you sense Lowell’s judgment and discrimination in every paragraph . . . Lowell freshens the eye . . . This book’s editors, Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, silently and deftly amend, in their footnotes, Lowell’s many small errors of fact, and point out where he seems to have invented characters.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“Excellent reading . . . Lowell was always a capable prose writer, but the language on display in this childhood memoir is a good deal more than that . . . Taken as a whole, ‘My Autobiography’ is nothing less than a treasure in the literary memoir genre. One might well wonder if it becomes, over time, the piece of writing Lowell is best remembered for.” —August Kleinzahler, The New York Times Book Review
"A collector's fantasia . . . some of the most wonderful prose ever written by an American poet . . . The editors have done an extraordinary job with this difficult material." —William Logan, The New Criterion
"Aside from the sheer beauty of the writing . . . the poet’s naked confrontation of his own pain, the honesty with which he portrays a family dynamic, should strike any reader to the heart . . . [Memoirs is] proof that Lowell remains an artist for the present moment." —Erica Wagner, Financial Times (UK)
"In an exceptionally gifted generation of American poets, Robert Lowell was, in his lifetime, number one . . . Memoirs publishes, mostly for the first time, the prose Lowell composed–chiefly in two spells between 1954 and 1957–and allows the reader to see it not only as origin story for the poems, but as a graceful, stately work in its own right." –Declan Ryan, The Observer
“[Memoirs] includes an unpublished gem: “My Autobiography”, a 150-page memoir composed in the years before he began work on Life Studies, his landmark volume of poems from 1959 . . . Vivid . . . Lowell seems reconciled to the idea of art being as necessarily contradictory and compulsive as the artist.” —Abhrajyoti Chakraborty, The Guardian
"It is the candour of [Lowell's] confession, the satiric self-critique of his earlier work, that continues to draw us to this astonishing body of poetry." —Marjorie Perloff, The Times Literary Supplement
"A good summation of the boy, the poet and the man . . . We might say of him what he said of his dearest friend, Randall Jarrell, that he was a 'noble, difficult, and beautiful soul.' And a great poet." —John Banville, The Independent (UK)
“Biting observations wrapped in elegant phrases . . . These writings give us added glimpses into the life of a poet who made a new art form out of baring the soul, even while expertly keeping his words measured and precise.” —Robert Weibezahl, BookPage
"Excellently edited . . . Memoirs, an unexpected gift, casts new light on his privileged and crippling background, his precarious life as a boy and bipolar man, his impressive intellect and shrewd insights." —Jeffrey Meyers, The Article
“Full of subtle, witty, and slightly off-kilter evocations of people, psychotic breaks, and poetry. Lowell’s rich language and startling perceptiveness are nothing short of captivating.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
“[Robert Lowell’s] memoirs offer an open and honest account of what it was to grow up with his brain and his illness. Memoirs is predominantly made up of unpublished childhood memories that demonstrate who Robert Lowell will become, as well as who he was: a child in pain, trying to find a way forward, a way to heal. Writing may not have cured all, but it did allow us to experience the great work of someone who had been to the darkest places and back and lived to tell us of it.” —Julia Hass , Lit Hub
“[Memoirs] vividly show[s] how a poet’s beginnings shape his end.” —Michael Knox Beran, Air Mail
"Highly detailed, lucid, and precise, Lowell's writing is witty, sarcastic, and revealing." —Kirkus Reviews
05/01/2022
After a series of mental breakdowns and brief stints in hospitals, Lowell, one of the most celebrated American poets of the mid-20th century, began work on an autobiography. Only a small portion of that work was ever published in his lifetime. This volume gathers several unpublished chapters and some literary profiles into a kind of impressionistic autobiography. For continuity, each section begins with an introduction providing historical and biographical context. The profiles of modern writers (Frost, Pound, Ford, Eliot, Williams, Plath, Sexton, etc.) are charming and sometimes beautiful in their clarity and simplicity. This section is a trove to be treasured by any reader of American modernism. However, the previously unpublished sections feel raw, unfinished, and slightly exhausted (and exhausting). These memoir chapters too often feel like curiosities best suited to the scholar researching Lowell or his milieu. They rarely achieve the energy needed to hold the attention of anyone but a scholar. Lowell, a father of confessional poetry, was quite a towering presence in his prime. And yet, it is perhaps the glow of his renown fading so abruptly that has left him seeming now lost in his own shadow. VERDICT Recommended for academic libraries.—Herman Sutter
2022-05-10
A collection of the renowned poet’s personal writing.
At the heart of this hodgepodge of Lowell’s work is what editors Axelrod and Kosc call “My Autobiography,” mostly previously unpublished childhood memories written in the 1950s followed by writings about his severe bipolar disorder. Taken together, the editors write, “they tell a powerful story of a soul in pain and a writer searching, with courage and discipline, for a way forward,” and they provided the source material for Lowell’s influential 1959 poetry collection, Life Studies. Highly detailed, lucid, and precise, Lowell’s writing is witty, sarcastic, and revealing about himself, his parents, his beloved grandfather, and others in his orbit. The well-off Bostonian, as the editors put it, wanted “to both mock and mourn his family, his social world, himself.” Some of the writing is tinged with the elitist racism of his clan, a “declining yet still powerful white” family who “insistently disrespect[ed] people who are not ‘of the right sort.’ ” At 8, he recalls, he was “thick-witted, narcissistic, thuggish,” and poet and biographer relative “Amy Lowell was never a welcome subject in our household.” These memoirs end in 1937, followed by a section called “Crisis and Aftermath,” highlighted by “The Balanced Aquarium,” one of the longest pieces, what the editors call “postmodern psychomachy, an invocation of his internal turmoil.” In many pieces, Lowell recounts his mental torments and hospitalization. Composed from 1959 to 1977, the section titled “A Life Among Writers” is a collection of perceptive, image-laced essays, some never published before, of authors he knew: Pound, Eliot, and his “dear old friend” Randall Jarrell. Visiting elderly Tennessee poet Allen Tate, Lowell writes, “Here, like the battered Confederacy, he still lived and was history.” Robert Frost was the “best strictly metered poet in our history.” An acquaintance of Lowell’s, Sylvia Path wrote the “most perfect and powerful poems…among the melancholy triumphs of twentieth-century imagination.”
A rich book for scholars and fans of Lowell’s poetry.
