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Winner of Five Obies, now back in print after fifteen years, a stage adaptation of classic stories by Hawthorne and Melville

In the three plays in The Old Glory--Endecott and the Red Cross; My Kinsman, Major Molineux; and Benito Cereno--the most powerful figure in postwar American poetry confronts the most haunting American fiction writers of the nineteenth century. The result is a mythical, nightmare history of three centuries in America. In Endecott and the Red Cross, Hawthorne's Puritan governor, horrified by his colony's high living, declares, "Everything in America will be Bible, blood and iron. / England will no longer exist." The other two plays, based on Hawthorne's My Kinsman, Major Molineux and Melville's Benito Cereno, take up the themes of parricide and independence: one in Boston on the eve of the Revolutionary War, the other on a merchant ship in the Caribbean in the early nineteenth century.

The plays were first performed in 1964, when the poet Randall Jarrell wrote: "I have never seen a better American play than Benito Cereno, the major play in Robert Lowell's The Old Glory . . . The play is a masterpiece of imaginative knowledge."
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A combined edition of the poet's early work, including Lord Weary's Castle, a collection of forty-two short poems, which won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize, and The Mills of the Kavanaughs, a narrative poem of six hundred lines, and five other long poems.
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Customer Reviews (3)

A Bit Clunky by Today's standards
but what does today really know?Robert Lowell's first book of poems, Lord Weary's Castel, is dense with allusion and firmly situated in time, place, and even space.The collection is full of references to the American New England tradition, especially in its Puritan and Maritime manifestations.As such many of the poems have an arcane, lurching sensibility, perhaps an attempt on Lowell's behalf to recreate the laconic moral world view of Old New England.This is a challenging set of poems to read.They are not sparkling or new in there use of language and/or of aesthetic viewpoint;readers should approach these poems with sleeves rolled up and get ready to work at giving them meaning.

Lord Weary's Castle: Challenging and obscure. The Mills of the Kavanaughs: Less complex.
Lord Weary's Castle (awarded Pulitzer Prize of Poetry in 1947) and The Mills of the Kavanaughs established Robert Lowell's early fame. Literary critics widely praised Lowell for his technical brilliance, metrical complexity, and verbal ambiguity - perhaps explaining why Lowell's work is so often challenging, even obscure. I found reading Lord Weary's Castle is not unalike from studying mathematics, slightly too advanced mathematics. Sometimes I would see my way forward after returning again and again to a difficult point, but not infrequently Lowell's meaning remained elusive, just out of reach.

Disaffection, mistrust, anger, and savage criticism (one critic calls it apocalyptic rage) are often tightly linked to personal elements.For example, Lowell, in opposition to his family's New England Protestantism tradition, converted to Catholicism in 1940, and his deep religiosity - combined with his disillusion with mankind - dominate much of this poetry.He specifically targets modern civilization, materialism, and US war policy, particularly the bombing of German cities. (During World War II Lowell served a jail sentence as a conscientious objector.)

Lord Weary's Castle consists of 42 shorter poems. As a tentative guide, I mention that At the Indian Killer's Grave and Christmas Eve Under Hooker's Statue are examples of his disaffected critique of American history;The Exile's Return, War, and The Dead in Europe illustrate Lowell's anti-war sentiments; and The Holy Innocents, Christmas in Black Rock, and Mr. Edwards and the Spider combine moral passion with disillusion.

The second collection The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951), is comprised of six longer poems, dramatic monologues that are structurally less complex, and more readily comprehended. This is mathematics that I have studied earlier and only need a review.

The title poem, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, is a New England widow's lament for her recently deceased husband. A short introductory paragraph clarifies the setting for this long poem. Falling Asleep over the Aeneid is an old man's dream that muddles his reading of Virgil with his childhood memories of the death of his uncle, a young officer in the Civil War. The third poem, Her Dead Brother, is an unsettling memory of incest.

Mother Marie Therese - death by drowning in 1912 is a poignant, mournful memory of a past now nearly forgotten. Thanksgiving's Over is another dream, this one recalling a wife that committed suicide while living in a sanatorium.The Fat Man in the Mirror is a short, sadly humorous questioning of just how a young, playful boy became the man in the mirror.

The poem David and Bathsheba in the Public Gardens somewhat obscurely contrasts the thoughts of two lovers.(Years later Lowell published a new version in his collection titled For The Union Dead. He wrote: "The Public Garden is a recasting and clarification of an old confusing poem of mine called David and Bathsheba in the Public Garden.")

Not a book to be read quickly
Even for a book of poetry, this one is very dense and requires a lot of mental activity.Lowell was a very cerebral, academic poet, and it's hard to find two lines in a row in this book that don't contain some allusion toclassical mythology, religion, or European culture.Nevertheless, Lowell'swork somehow manages to avoid conventionality.Just be prepared to do somethinking when reading this book. ... Read more

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A collection of conversations with Lowell and of critical reflections on his work
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The art of being truly funny is an undervalued one in these angst-ridden times, but it is an ability that acclaimed novelist Sarah Payne Stuart has in abundance. Her talents have never been on more glorious display than in My First Cousin Once Removed, a memoir--at once hilarious, personal and sad--of her extraordinary Boston Brahmin family, whose most famous member is the legendary poet Robert Lowell, the author's first cousin (once removed). Amazon.com Review
The "first cousin" of this compelling, disconcertingly funnymemoir is Robert Lowell--scion of two old New England families (theWinslows, his mother's side, go back even further than the Lowells),widely considered America's greatest poet during the 1960s,anti-Vietnam war activist, and incurable manic depressive. Lowell hasbeen biographied before, notably by Ian Hamilton and Paul Mariani, butno other "life study" contains a particle of the intimacy, fondness,dismay, and above all humor that Sarah Payne Stuart brings to thesubject. Stuart places "Bobby" in a loose-knit Winslow familytapestry, and reveals the back of the tapestry: the droll storiesabout Lowell's icy, chic mother and eccentric, rich Aunt Sarah, whodisinherited him when he fathered a child out of wedlock; theexcruciating holidays and bizarre Brahmin rituals; the family's mix ofprovincial pride and bruising disdain for their famous relation, "theking of conflicts."

As fresh and smart as the Lowell material is, the book really catchesfire when Stuart tells her own immediate family's story: the two-yearbreakdown her beautiful mother suffered after giving birth to adaughter; the manic depression that nearly destroyed her brilliantbrother, Johnny; the bad luck, blindness, and sheer selfishness thatkept her branch perpetually strapped. Stuart has a satirist's eye, astandup comic's sense of timing, and fabulous material. And in MyFirst Cousin Once Removed she makes the most of all ofthem. --David Laskin ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Never quite satisfying
I took this book up as a lover of biography rather than of poetry; I'll have to take the other reviewer's word for it that it isn't satisfying to poetry lovers, but it certainly didn't satisfy me.In some ways Stuart is a clumsy, or at least not fluid, writer.More to the point, I felt a little misled, as the book is only nominally about Robert Lowell, and the rest of the family, while interesting Victorian characters, don't merit a book's exploration.

Stale and small
This is not a book for anyone interested in Robert Lowell or his poetry. This is a maudlin account of one woman's inability to recognize or empathize with the inner life of her famous relative, and her valiant attempts to profit by her own shortcomings. In short, mere gossip. Eileen Simpson's "poets in Their Youth" is much more interesting, and Richard Tillinghast's "Robert Lowell's Life and Work" is far more insightful, for those who care about Lowell's poetry. But as for those who don't care about Lowell's poetry, well, all I can say is, why bother to read a book by someone whose only claim on your attention is that she's Lowell's distant cousin?

Fascinating Memoir on Many Levels
With fresh black humor and a no nonsense style, Sarah Payne Stuart has written a book of family suffering that gives a vivid understanding of the terrors and fall out of mental illness. She also describes with deftstrokes what monsters people are, who lack imagination, and arrange to beinsulated from pain by self-regard and a great deal of money.

Made me chuckle and cry
Perhaps the most entertaining book that I have ever read. Sarah Payne Stuart makes me howl and a second later makes me thank God that I've got both oars in the water. God Bless You SPS.

BOSTON REDUX
Reading "My Cousin Once Removed" was like going home.Do other people besides my family name their cottages after their children?Ourswas Tomberher, and it still embarrasses me to say it.

I perceivedbackbone and stoicism in the author.She will become a fine, undomnibleBoston matron herself someday.These are people that know how toPull-Up-Your-Socks. No one ever seems to give up.I amend that, the familywill not *allow* anyone to give up.Poor Robert Lowell.His poetry musthave kept him alive such as it was.The author makes an excellent pointwhen she expresses amazement that he "lasted until he was 60." He seemed so gentle to be so mad.I couldn't resist smiling when I notedthat only the Lowells would unfailingly be "God" in their deludedor "manic" states; other manic depressives might be Sam Spade,Peter Pan, or Theodore Roosevelt; but the Lowells went for the wholeenchillada. My only complaint is the author neatly sidesteps giving thereader anything but broad outlines of what she was up to when the maelstormwhirled about her.Most younger writers cannot get out of the way; you areburied under their angst, but Ms. Stuart quotes her brothers to give us anidea what is going on in her generation.She's oddly elusive.I think sheuses her fine sense of humor to deflect us from coming to close.

I'mgoing back to reread Robert Lowell.That's my idea of a successful book,one that sends you on a quest for further knowledge. ... Read more

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"A beautiful and richly instructive book, a worthy and welcome sequel to Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth."

Louis S. Auchincloss

An intimately perceptive account, by a poet who knew them all, of the brilliant circle of poets who lived and worked in Boston through the half-decade beginning in 1955. That was the year Peter Davison, coming to Boston as a book editor. was swept up in a world -- in a tumult -- of poetry. He rediscovered his father's old friend Robert Frost. He briefly squired Sylvia Plath. He came to know Robert Lowell (whose poems and private disasters dominated the period) and Adrienne Rich, Stanley Kunitz, Richard Wilbur. Anne Sexton, W. S. Merwin, and others who, closely bound together in friendship or rivalry or both, defined the shape of American poetry at mid-century Through their eves as well as his own, and often in their words, Davison presents a sharply fresh vision of the shift from confidence to a troubled questioning that overtook America -- a transformation that was, in a sense, foreshadowed in the sensibilities, in the writings, sometimes in the lives, of some of our finest poets. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Boston through the lens of its poets
After my wife and I first went to Boston, and before our second trip, I acquired and read this book. On the first trip we found ourselves, one grey afternoon, in the bar at the Ritz Carlton opposite Boston Common, having drinks. It had the atmosphere of something... but what? Now we know that Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton used to also go here for drinks after Robert Lowell's poetry classes. Wouldn't you have loved to have been a fly on the wall for those times.

This book is a fascinating recounting of those times and the many poets in Boston and Cambridge and their various relationships by one who was of that circle. Not a "tell-all", just human. People on their life journey. Interesting formative people. It can guide you on an alternative tour of the city and with a little imagination you can 'see' and feel what went on behind those walls from the time and the people who led one writer, I forget which, to say 'America did not enter the twentieth century until the 1960s.' These are among the formative ones and this is one of the places that led that to happen. You will see Boston differently after. And isn't that what makes any read worthwhile. ... Read more

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In this series, a contemporary poet advocates a poet of the past or present whom they have particularly admired. By their selection of verses and by the personal and critical reactions they express, the selectors offer intriguing insight into their own work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Poems, Greatness, and the Abyss
When I was in college I read a collected edition of the poems of Robert Lowell and its pages amazed me. They were like nothing I'd ever read before. I was completely inspired, but knew that his genius was something one could not easily approach. It's actually a good feeling though because it's nice to be reminded of the heights to which we can aspire. That being said I knew very little about the specifics of his life apart from the fact that he had experienced several breakdowns and spent time in a mental hospital.

The brilliance of Lowell's poetry is what caused me to purchase Hamilton's biography. Mr. Hamilton is an outstanding writer in his own right and this is a finely crafted narrative. Some readers may not appreciate this author's extensive use of primary source materials, but I think it's a strength overall. Allowing those who knew the man to give their accounting--via private letters and published works--provides readers with the most telling portrait of a subject's life and times. Length wise this volume was perfect.

As far as Lowell goes, this narrative (which is the truth) thoroughly knocks him off the pedestal. He spent a good bit of his life paralyzed by mental illness and was a burden to both friends and family. His is an ugly tale. His relationships were a horror show and Lowell was very lucky that he kept the associations he did given his bizarre and occasionally malicious behavior. Hamilton's biography also has value as a testament to the growth of modern psychiatry. How easy it is to forget that only a few decades ago bipolar disorder was a thoroughly debilitating illness one often leading to imprisonment, confinement in an institution, and an early death. Thank God for lithium along with all the drugs that have evolved in the time since.

Poetry and Manic Depression
This book, in addition to being a well written and entertaining biography, can give insight into the complexities of having a family member with Manic Depression. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A few strong poems, but overall a weak collection
THE DOLPHIN is a collection of 14-line "love poems" by Robert Lowell published in 1973. At the time Lowell was writing these poems, a great storm was going on in his personal life, as he had left his wife Elizabeth Hardwick and their teenager daughter Harriet behind in New York and gone to London to live with Lady Caroline Blackwood. His relationship with these three forms the subject matter of the poems in THE DOLPHIN.

I don't particularly like Robert Lowell's poetry in general here. The man was a neurotic, and this is reflected in his poetry, which rarely seems to wield that neuroticism into something more. Still, there are a few good poems here. Lowell returns a few times to the subject of dreams, including the thought-provoking meditation "Is there an ur-dream better than words, an almost / work of art I commonplace in retelling / through the fearfulness of memory?". The final "Dolphin" addresses Caroline Blackwood to seek a way out of the pain that has produced the earlier poems to no relief: "When I was troubled in mind / you made for my body / caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines, / the glassy bowing and scraping of my will..."

But what particularly weakens this collection is that a great many of the poems are derived from letters from his ex-wife. Lowell has simply transformed into verse Elizabeth Hardwick's prose, but left it blatantly obvious what the source is. It's a cheap shot to publicize your ex-wife's perfectly valid concerns, and none of these make for good poetry. Take, for example, the poem "Records" which begins "'...I was playing records on Sunday, / arranging all my records, and I came on some of your voice, and started to suggest / that Harriet listen: then immediately / we both shook our heads."

A few strong poems, but overall a weak collection
THE DOLPHIN is a collection of 14-line "love poems" by Robert Lowell published in 1973. At the time Lowell was writing these poems, a great storm was going on in his personal life, as he had left his wife Elizabeth Hardwick and their teenager daughter Harriet behind in New York and gone to London to live with Lady Caroline Blackwood. His relationship with these three forms the subject matter of the poems in THE DOLPHIN.

I don't particularly like Robert Lowell's poetry in general here. The man was a neurotic, and this is reflected in his poetry, which rarely seems to wield that neuroticism into something more. Still, there are a few good poems here. Lowell returns a few times to the subject of dreams, including the thought-provoking meditation "Is there an ur-dream better than words, an almost / work of art I commonplace in retelling / through the fearfulness of memory?". The final "Dolphin" addresses Caroline Blackwood to seek a way out of the pain that has produced the earlier poems to no relief: "When I was troubled in mind / you made for my body / caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines, / the glassy bowing and scraping of my will..."

But what particularly weakens this collection is that a great many of the poems are derived from letters from his ex-wife. Lowell has simply transformed into verse Elizabeth Hardwick's prose, but left it blatantly obvious what the source is. It's a cheap shot to publicize your ex-wife's perfectly valid concerns, and none of these make for good poetry. Take, for example, the poem "Records" which begins "'...I was playing records on Sunday, / arranging all my records, and I came on some of your voice, and started to suggest / that Harriet listen: then immediately / we both shook our heads." ... Read more

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This major interpretation of the life and art of Robert Lowell exposes the full relationship between the poetry and the personal and national experience to which it is so remarkably connected. Steven Axelrod proposes that the key to our understanding of Lowell's poetic achievement lies precisely in this interpretation of his life and his art. He describes Lowell's poems as the poet's attempt to create a language in which he could more fully realize himself as a human being. It is a detailed analysis of all aspects of Lowell's career and publications, showing the major shifts in Lowell's development as man and as poet. The biography is interwoven with the career and with the poetry to give us a three dimensional portrait of the artist at work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great
This one is great. I bought it for the Nora Roberts, but ended up tracking down the sequels for Heather Graham's Dark Stranger as well.They are all complete novels not short stories.If you are a Nora Roberts fan, this isthe same story that came out in paperback a while back.It was firstpublished here (McGreggor story of Ian). I started reading Elizabeth Lowelafter reading this as well. I normally don't go for historical, but thesewere nice. ... Read more

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General Books publication date: 2009Original publication date: 1864Original Publisher: E.P. Dutton and CompanySubjects: American poetryHistory / United States / GeneralHistory / United States / State ... Read more

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Edmund Wilson wrote of Robert Lowell that he was the "only recent American poet - if you don't count Eliot - who writes successfully in the language and cadence and rhyme of the resounding English tradition". Frank Bidart and David Gewanter have compiled a comprehensive edition of Lowell's poems, from the early triumph of "Lord Weary's Castle", winner of the Pulitzer Prize, through the brilliant willfulness of his "Imitations" of Sappho, Baudelaire, Rilke and other masters, to the late spontaneity of his "History", winner of another Pulitzer, and of his last book of poems, "Day by Day". This volume includes several poems never previously connected, as well as a selection of Lowell's intriguing drafts. As Randall Jarrell said, "You feel before reading any new poem of his the uneasy expectation of perhaps encountering a masterpiece". Lowell's "Collected Poems" offers the first opportunity to view the entire range of his astonishing verse. ... Read more