The Letters of Robert Lowell - Softcover

Lowell, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374530343 ISBN 13: 9780374530341

Verlag: FARRAR STRAUSS & GIROUX, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

One of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, Robert Lowell was also a prolific letter writer who corresponded with many of the remarkable writers and thinkers of his day, including Elizabeth Bishop, Ezra Pound, Hannah Arendt, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Edmund Wilson. These letters, conversations in writing, 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 in his influence on American letters.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was the renowned and pathbreaking author of many leading works in American poetry, including Life Studies (FSG, 1959), For the Union Dead (FSG, 1964), and Day by Day (FSG, 1977).

Saskia Hamilton was the author of several books of poetry, including Corridor, named one of the best poetry books of 2014 by The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review. She is the editor of The Letters of Robert Lowell and coeditor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.

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The Letters of Robert Lowell

By Robert Lowell

Farrar Straus Giroux

Copyright © 2007 Robert Lowell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780374530341

Chapter One

1. To Ezra Pound

A-12 Wigglesworth Hall Harvard College Cambridge, Mass. May 2, [1936]

Dear Mr. Pound:

I have been wanting to write you for several months, but haven't quite had the courage to until now. You will probably think that I am very impudent and presumptuous, but I want to come to Italy and work under you and forge my way into reality. I have no right [to] ask this of you, yet let me try to describe myself and explain my desire.

I am 19, a freshman at Harvard, and some relation, I don't know what, to Amy Lowell. All my life I have been eccentric according to normal standards. I had violent passions for various pursuits usually taking the form of collecting: tools; names of birds; marbles; catching butterflies, snakes, turtles etc; buying books on Napoleon. None of this led anywhere, I was more interested in collecting large numbers than in developing them. I caught over thirty turtles and put them in a well where they died of insufficient feeding. I won more agates and marbles than anyone in school, and gradually amassed hundreds of soldiers; finally leaving them to clutter up unreachable shelves. I could identify scores of birds, at first on charts, later it led me into nature. Sometime overcome by the collecting mania I would steal things I wanted. At 14 I went to St. Mark's and never mixed well or really lived in the usual realities. At one point I became very strong but never got very far in athletics because I didn't think in terms of the necessary technique. I was proud, somewhat sullen and violent.

The summer before last I was a counsellor at a charity camp, hit the swing of it, and felt for the first time that I was driving ahead and breathing thru all my pores. I determined to keep it rolling tried very hard at football, didn't make the team but did well and gained a tremendous amount from the experience, then drifted along till winter. At that time I began reading Homer thru the dish-water of Bryant's 19th century translation. I mulled over the ideas for some time, and somehow they gradually became very real. The tremendous growth of Achilles and above all Zeus the universal symbol which has begun become almost a religion with me. I had always chafed against what I thought was Christianity, the immortality of the soul, the idealistic unreal morality and the insipid blackness of the Episcopalian church. Homer's world contained a God higher than anything I had ever known, and yet his world blinked at no realities. The whoring of Zeus and the savagery of the heroes. I know that the beauty and richness of Homer are what impress you most. I found this later in Chaucer, but a poor translation is an ugly photograph.

Last spring I began reading English poetry and writing myself. All my life I had thought of poets as the most contemptible moth so you can see how violently I was molded and bent. I was encouraged by Richard Eberhart, whom you have perhaps heard of. I spent the summer alone with a friend reading and writing. Since then I have been sucking in atmosphere, reading; and writing dreaming. Writing and trying to help one or two friends have been the only real things in life for me. At college I have yearned after iron and have been choked with cobwebs. I have had a good chance to read, I have gained a lot of inevitable experience; but no one here is really fighting. The courses are catalogues rather than windows.

I am enclosing a few poems as samples, you will probably think they are not enough to prove me. I pray you to take me! I can bring sufficient money to support myself, in a few year[s] I'll have to make my own living and am glad of it. I am ignorant of languages, but want to do nothing more than to learn. Your Cantos have re-created what I have imagined to be the blood of Homer. Again I ask you to have me. You shan't be sorry, I will bring the steel and fire, I am not theatric, and my life is sober not sensational.

Very sincerely yours, R. T. S. Lowell

2. To Ezra Pound

[n.d. May? 1936]

Dear Mr. Pound:

I have to apologize in advance for this letter, because I am still in the dusk as to the exact meaning of "Why not try mediating on a few MORE of the implications of yrl letter." Probably you expected me to mediate for several months and not 3 days. My interpretation is: "Work out specifically the various problems involved with leaving college and working under me and then I'll consider letting you come." You may have meant: "You're not wholly damned before you start but I don't see much hope." I assume that you made your wording intentionally vague so that I would throw myself into the future and push troops into all possible conjectures. That's fine but your tone is hard to catch. Rightly or wrongly I look on your note as sober and kindly rather than contemptuous or insulted.

Of course I don't actually know you, but I have felt increasingly enthusiastic about you for some time. Thru the indirect medium of your writing I can tell pretty well what I am up against. The main outline is hardly doubtful. If the 20th century is to realize a great art comparable to that of Chaucer or Shakespeare, the foundation will have to be your poems. You have re-created quantity, music, directness, and realism; your craftsmanship, your blood, and your ideals must be continued, but [I] don't think in exactly the same form. Can the main current of English literature float such a vast quantity of spondies and compound nouns? After all-

Ear, ear for the sea-surge rattle of old men's voices

(Justified by success) is just as peculiar as-With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. Your Cantos practically ignore hard narrative and motion. They are like lily pads on a lake: a flat surface swaying with vigorous and beautiful images. "Near Perigord" and the narrative in the Cantos are more impressionistic than the paintings of Monet and Renoir. Cantos XIV, XV, are completely static when set against the conclusion of the Pardoner's Tale. I would like to push both action and image to the limits.-

nor can Her heart inform her tongue: the swan's down feather That stands up on the swell at full of tide And neither way inclines. (Antony and Cleopatra)

For the exact word and the fewest possible words you ought to substitute Reality [(]boredom, religion, anything[)] expressed with the utmost vitality. Eliot's "Ariel" poems are closely and skillfully expressed but lack vitality. I would like to bring back momentum and movement in poetry on a grand scale, to master your tremendous machinery and to carry your standard further into the century; and I think I have life enough to withstand the years of pounding and grinding before accomplishment. More specifically to work in Italy under your personal direction: plenty of work and plenty of leeway for initiative.

Please don't feel insulted, I have no delusions as to your bulk and my smallness, I am only trying to show you more clearly why I wish to become your disciple. Let me join you in September. You will have no cause to be ashamed...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: FARRAR STRAUSS & GIROUX
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0374530343
• ISBN 13: 9780374530341
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 852
• Herausgeber: Hamilton Saskia
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar