Frank Bidart and David Gewanter have compiled the definitive edition of Robert Lowell's work, from his first, impossible-to-find collection, "Land of Unlikeness"; to the early triumph of "Lord Weary's Castle," winner of the 1946 Pulitzer Prize; to the brilliant willfulness of his versions of poems by Sappho, Baudelaire, Rilke, Montale, and other masters in "Imitations"; to the late spontaneity of "The Dolphin," winner of another Pulitzer Prize; to his last, most searching book, "Day by Day." This volume also includes poems and translations never previously collected, and a selection of drafts that demonstrate the poet's constant drive to reimagine his work. "Collected Poems "at last offers readers the opportunity to take in, in its entirety, one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry.

Over the course of his life, Robert Lowell impressed those who knew him by his "refusal to be boring on paper" (Christopher Benfey). One of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, Lowell was also a prolific letter writer who corresponded with many of the remarkable writers and thinkers of his day, including Elizabeth Bishop, Edmund Wilson, Robert Kennedy, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Frost. These letters document the evolution of Lowell's work and illuminate another side of the intimate life that was the subject of so many of his poems: his deep friendships with other writers; the manic-depressive illness he struggled to endure and understand; his marriages to three prose writers; and his engagement with politics and the antiwar movement of the 1960s. The Letters of Robert Lowell shows us, in many cases for the first time, the private thoughts and passions of a figure unrivaled for his influence on American letters.

The letters of Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell The Dolphin Letters offers an unprecedented portrait of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick during the last seven years of Lowell's life (1970 to 1977), a time of personal crisis and creative innovation for both writers. Centered on the letters they exchanged with each other and with other members of their circle--writers, intellectuals, friends, and publishers, including Elizabeth Bishop, Caroline Blackwood, Mary McCarthy, and Adrienne Rich--the book has the narrative sweep of a novel, telling the story of the dramatic breakup of their twenty-one-year marriage and their extraordinary, but late, reconciliation. Lowell's controversial sonnet-sequence The Dolphin (for which he used Hardwick's letters as a source) and his last book, Day by Day, were written during this period, as were Hardwick's influential books Seduction and Betrayal: Essays on Women in Literature and Sleepless Nights: A Novel. Lowell and Hardwick are acutely intelligent observers of marriages, children, and friends, and of the feelings that their personal crises gave rise to. The Dolphin Letters, masterfully edited by Saskia Hamilton, is a debate about the limits of art--what occasions a work of art, what moral and artistic license artists have to make use of their lives as material, what formal innovations such debates give rise to. The crisis of Lowell's The Dolphin was profoundly affecting to everyone surrounding him, and Bishop's warning to Lowell--"art just isn't worth that much"--haunts.

The last book published before the poet's death, "Day by Day" was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award prize for poetry in 1977 and cements Lowell's reputation as one of the great poetic voices of the century.

A combined edition of the poet's early work, including Lord Weary's Castle, a collection of forty-two short poems, which won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize, and The Mills of the Kavanaughs, a narrative poem of six hundred lines, and five other long poems.

Robert Lowell, with Elizabeth Bishop, stands apart as the greatest American poet of the latter half of the twentieth century--and "Life Studies and For the Union Dead "stand as among his most important volumes. In "Life Studies," which was first published in 1959, Lowell moved away from the formality of his earlier poems and started writing in a more confessional vein. The title poem of "For the Union Dead "concerns the death of the Civil War hero (and Lowell ancestor) Robert Gould Shaw, but it also largely centers on the contrast between Boston's idealistic past and its debased present at the time of its writing, in the early 1960's. Throughout, Lowell addresses contemporaneous subjects in a voice and style that themselves push beyond the accepted forms and constraints of the time.

Not quite translations--yet something much more, much richer, than mere tributes to their original versions--the poems in "Imitations "reflect Lowell's conceptual, historical, literary, and aesthetic engagements with a diverse range of voices from the Western canon. Moving chronologically from Homer to Pasternak--and including such master poets en route as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rilke, and Montale--the fascinating and hugely informed pieces in this book are themselves meant to be read as "a whole," according to Lowell's telling Introduction, "a single volume, a small anthology of European poetry."

"Selected Poems" includes over 200 works culled from Robert Lowell's books of verse--"Lord Weary's Castle," "The Mills of the Kavanaughs," "Life Studies," "For the Union Dead," "Near the Ocean," "History," "For Lizzie and Harriet," and "The Dolphin." Edited and with a foreword by the poet Frank Bidart, who also edited Collected Poems of Robert Lowell, this volume is a perfectly chosen representation of "the greatest American poet of the mid-century" (Richard Poirier, "Book Week").

Robert Lowell once remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop that "you ha ve] always been my favorite poet and favorite friend." The feeling was mutual. Bishop said that conversation with Lowell left her feeling "picked up again to the proper table-land of poetry," and she once begged him, "Please never stop writing me letters--they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I've been re-reading Emerson) for several days." Neither ever stopped writing letters, from their first meeting in 1947 when both were young, newly launched poets until Lowell's death in 1977. The substantial, revealing--and often very funny--interchange that they produced stands as a remarkable collective achievement, notable for its sustained conversational brilliance of style, its wealth of literary history, its incisive snapshots and portraits of people and places, and its delicious literary gossip, as well as for the window it opens into the unfolding human and artistic drama of two of America's most beloved and influential poets.

Robert Lowell once remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop that "you ha ve] always been my favorite poet and favorite friend." The feeling was mutual. Bishop said that conversation with Lowell left her feeling "picked up again to the proper table-land of poetry," and she once begged him, "Please never stop writing me letters--they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I've been re-reading Emerson) for several days." Neither ever stopped writing letters, from their first meeting in 1947 when both were young, newly launched poets until Lowell's death in 1977. The substantial, revealing--and often very funny--interchange that they produced stands as a remarkable collective achievement, notable for its sustained conversational brilliance of style, its wealth of literary history, its incisive snapshots and portraits of people and places, and its delicious literary gossip, as well as for the window it opens into the unfolding human and artistic drama of two of America's most beloved and influential poets.