The Collected Prose - Hardcover

Lowell, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374126259 ISBN 13: 9780374126254

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987

Synopsis

This vast collection of Robert Lowell's uniformly vigorous and well-written essays, which first appeared in 1987, was edited and introduced by Robert Giroux, his longtime editor and friend. Ranging chronologically from a student paper on the Iliad that Lowell composed in 1935 to the unfinished essay, "New England and Further," on which he was working when he died in 1977, Collected Prose is a telling and fascinating compendium of the ideas, arguments, and opinions of one of modernity's most important poets. With many critical writings and book reviews concerning all manner of poets old and new (from Vergil and Ovid to Frost and Stevens, from Hopkins and "Epics" to Bishop and Plath) as well as recently discovered autobiograpical writings, two extended interviews, and learned yet approachable musings on everything from the Gettyburg Address to the art and craft of translation, this prose ominbus is must-reading for all students and scholars of twentieth-century American literature.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert Lowell (1917-77) was the renowned and controversial author of many books of poetry, including Day by Day, The Dolphin, and History. FSG also published his Collected Prose in 1987.

From Library Journal:

This welcome collection of Lowell's prose is divided among his odd appreciations of poetic predecessors and contemporaries; a few general essays culled from his attempts at more formal criticism ("Art and Evil," etc.); and autobiographical material. Everything demonstrates the poet's intelligence, passion for literary history, and quirky balance between defensiveness and surety in his own powers, but the offerings in the first and third categories seem most valuable. Lowell's insights about specific poems and poets are almost always on the markilluminating, to the point, and rigorous without being ungenerouswhile the autobiographical sectionswhich flesh out Life Studies add a human gloss to the persona much more harshly projected in the poems themselves. An invaluable addition to Lowell's ouevre that should aerate and enhance the meanings of his poetrysurely the best of his generation. Earl Rovit, English Dept., City Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0374126259
• ISBN 13: 9780374126254
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 350