MEMOIRS

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heart of this hodgepodge of Lowell’s work is what editors Axelrod and Kosc call “My Autobiography,” mostly previously unpublished childhood memories written in the 1950s followed by writings about his severe bipolar disorder.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.