Peter McDonald
The Heart or the Head?
The Letters of Robert Lowell
By Saskia Hamilton (ed)
Faber & Faber 852pp £30
‘If there’s an afterlife,’ Robert Lowell wrote in 1975 (within two years of finding out), ‘I think I’d spend it living and rereading everything written to me.’ The claim is sincere, and it is in keeping with the doggedly retentive attitude to friendship everywhere evident in his own correspondence. Even so, a reader of this large volume of Lowell’s letters might well see a telling inaccuracy in the phrase ‘everything written to me’: ‘about me’ comes much closer to Lowell’s true passion. If there is an afterlife for poets, and it is somehow continuous with this one, then we can be sure that Lowell is spending a good deal of it keeping up with his reviews.
Lowell’s critical fortunes have fluctuated in the years since his death; in fact, the fluctuation was in evidence while Lowell was alive, and the splurge of his later poetry in the 1970s marked the beginning of an especially unstable period for his reputation. When Lowell revised and expanded his already
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
It is a triumph @arthistorynews and my review @Lit_Review is here!
In just thirteen years, George Villiers rose from plain squire to become the only duke in England and the most powerful politician in the land. Does a new biography finally unravel the secrets of his success?
John Adamson investigates.
John Adamson - Love Island with Ruffs
John Adamson: Love Island with Ruffs - The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
literaryreview.co.uk
During the 1930s, Winston Churchill retired to Chartwell, his Tudor-style country house in Kent, where he plotted a return to power.
Richard Vinen asks whether it’s time to rename the decade long regarded as Churchill’s ‘wilderness years’.
Richard Vinen - Croquet & Conspiracy
Richard Vinen: Croquet & Conspiracy - Churchill’s Citadel: Chartwell and the Gatherings Before the Storm by Katherine Carter
literaryreview.co.uk