The Collected Prose

By Robert Lowell

Book Overview

This vast collection of Robert Lowell's uniformly vigorous and well-written essays, which first appeared in 1987, was edited and introduced by Robert Giroux, his longtime editor and friend. Ranging chronologically from a student paper on the "Iliad" that Lowell composed in 1935 to the unfinished essay, "New England and Further," on which he was working when he died in 1977, "Collected" Prose is a telling and fascinating compendium of the ideas, arguments, and opinions of one of modernity's most important poets. With many critical writings and book reviews concerning all manner of poets old and new (from Vergil and Ovid to Frost and Stevens, from Hopkins and "Epics" to Bishop and Plath) as well as recently discovered autobiograpical writings, two extended interviews, and learned yet approachable musings on everything from the Gettyburg Address to the art and craft of translation, this prose ominbus is must-reading for all students and scholars of twentieth-century American literature.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374126259
• ISBN13: 9780374126254
• Release Date: April 1987
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
• Length: 350 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.4" x 1.5" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

an interesting selection

Giroux has selected an interesting group of work for Lowell's Collected Prose. There is writing on Frost, Bishop, Eliot, Berryman, among others. You get pieces of Lowell's 'autobiography' as well as some of his earliest writing (one of which was published in his school's paper). There are also two interviews and Lowell's letters to Presidents Roosevelt and Johnson. There is some really good stuff here, though I'll admit, unlike his classmate Jarrell, Lowell isn't always that great. Still, it wasn't a bad book.