Memoirs

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Poet Lowell (1917--1977) looks back in amusement, angst, and madness in these scintillating memoirs. The work consists of mostly unpublished autobiographical writings by Lowell--a pioneering confessional poet and America's 1947--1948 poet laureate--and includes unfinished memoirs of his boyhood and his fraught relationships with his domineering mother, who was obsessed with Napoleon Bonaparte, and his feckless, decidedly un-Napoleonic father; accounts of his manic-depressive episodes, which sometimes landed him in jail or the psych ward; and published reminiscences of literary acquaintances, from poets Ezra Pound and Robert Frost to political philosopher Hannah Arendt. Lowell freely inserts surreal fantasies and fictional elements, including imagined scenes from his parents' courtship, along with sensuous, Proustian renderings of decor and vivid character sketches. Throughout, his writing is full of subtle, witty, and slightly off-kilter evocations of people ("Father's voice made me think of a robot criticizing strawberry shortcake"), psychotic breaks ("I felt as if I were squatting on the bottom of a huge laboratory bottle and trying to push out the black rubber stopper before I stifled"), and poetry (the "terrible audacity, rightness and ease" of Sylvia Plath's verses "make most other poems sound like birthday odes to George the First"). Lowell's rich language and startling perceptiveness are nothing short of captivating. (Aug.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

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 This volume gathers several unpublished chapters and some literary profiles into a kind of impressionistic autobiography.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 However, the previously unpublished sections feel raw, unfinished, and slightly exhausted (and exhausting).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

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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