Memoirs

A complete collection of Robert Lowell’s autobiographical prose, from unpublished writings about his youth to reflections on the triumphs and confusions of his adult life.

Robert Lowell’s Memoirs is the renowned poet's most personal writing. Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc have unearthed the manuscript of Lowell’s autobiographical study of his childhood that he wrote in the 1950s. Unpublished until now, it is a precursor to his groundbreaking book of poems Life Studies, which signaled a radically new, prose-inflected direction in his work and indeed in American poetry.

Memoirs also includes intense depictions of Lowell’s mental illness and his efforts to recover. It concludes with reminiscences of other writers, such as T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Hannah Arendt, and Sylvia Plath. Memoirs demonstrates Lowell’s expansive gifts as a prose stylist and his powers of introspection and observation. It provides more evidence of the range and brilliance of Lowell’s achievement.