Memoirs

Description

Of the twenty chapters that make up these Memoirs, seventeen appear here in print for the first time, unearthed by the editors from the Harvard Archive. They include intense depictions of Lowell's mental illness and his efforts to recover, and conclude with reminiscences of other writers - T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Hannah Arendt, and Sylvia Plath. Memoirs demonstrates Lowell's expansive gifts as a prose stylist and provide further evidence of the range and brilliance of his achievement.

Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was the ground-breaking author of many books of poetry, including Life Studies (1959) and For the Union Dead (1964). With John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath he shaped the fashion in American poetry for the confessional, autobiographical poetry that transformed the scene.