Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell

By Paul L. Mariani

Book Overview

Robert Lowell's poetry radically altered the American literary landscape, combining as it did family drama and an apocalyptic view of the history of our times. He won three Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards for poetry. Married three times, always to writers, he had his dark side, suffering from crippling bouts of manic depression and alcoholism.

Using hundreds of Lowell's unpublished manuscripts and letters, and dozens of interviews, Paul Mariani has given us a balanced, passionate, and readable life, capturing the man, his age, and his place in literary history.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393313743
• ISBN13: 9780393313741
• Release Date: July 1996
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 552 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A poetic biography

This is truly a wonderful biography of a poet written by a poet. I found that MANY passages flow like poetry. If you are interested in Lowell and his times, you will not be able to put this book down. My favorite period is the mid-to late fifties in and around the New England area. It was an extremely fertile time: Richard Wilbur, Ann Sexton, Sylvia Plath and on and on. The country was coming out of the deadening 50's and moving on to the New Frontier 60's with all it's social and cultural upheavals. If you're a teacher of any grade, tell your students this book has somewhere in the neighborhood of 1400 footnotes. That might stop their complaints when they have to make ONLY 2 citations. More than 'just' a biographer, Mariani is himself, a writer and a poet, and he uses his skills deftly to bring Lowell to life. An excellent read!!!!!!!!

Excellent biography

Robert Lowell is condidered one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century; some rank him second only to Frost. His poetry, always extremely personal and frank, and displaying great technical skill (he wrote in strict classical forms; only late in life did he write in free verse), was highly praised and prized: he won three Pulitzers. A Catholic convert, later an agnostic, he wrestled mightily with the Creator in his work. He suffered 8 nervous breakdowns during his life and was married three times. During the 1960s, he was a visible participant in the anti-war movement. Mariani is an excellent writer himself and tells Lowell's life story, from the successes to the heartbreaks, interestingly and well.

Robert Lowell - Poet, Puritan, Prophet

Robert Lowell has always seemed to me to be just out of reach. I was too young to witness his poetry readings to the Washington crowds protesting the war in Vietnam. By the time I was set "Skunk Hour" in my final year of secondary schooling, Lowell had been dead for a half dozen years. Based on Lowell's letters, poetry and critism and of those who knew him; this work is an exhaustive and comprehensive account of the poet's priveliged and frequently turbulent life. His three marriages are discussed, as are his spell in jail,( as a Conscientious Objector)and his numerous admissions to psychiatric hospital due to manic depression. From his aristocratic but dysfunctional childhood to his last years, the reader is made aware of Lowell's progression and prowess as a poet. Of fascination too is his interactions with other great poets, most notably Frost, Pound and Eliot; the latter described as 'The Master', a mantle passed to Lowell on Eliot's death. "Lost Puritan" is illuminating and revealing, it will bring Lowell into reach for anyone who is an afficianado of his poetry. A scholarly salute to the greatest poet of the second half of the twentieth century.