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The Letters of Robert Lowell
註釋One of the most influential American poets of the twentieth century, Lowell was also a prolific letter-writer who corresponded with some of the remarkable writers and thinkers of his day, including Elizabeth Bishop, Edmund Wilson, Robert Kennedy, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, William Empson, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Marianne Moore. These letters document the transformation of Lowell's work over the course of his career; the germination of his moral beliefs - he famously opposed the WW II draft in a personal letter to President Roosevelt and was jailed as a conscientious objector; the development of his work; his reading habits; the relationship between poetry and prose that so fascinated him. 'How different prose is,' he remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop. 'Sometimes the two mediums refuse to say the same things...Without verse, without philosophy, I found it hard, I was naked without my line-ends.' The letters illuminate another side of the intimate life that was the subject of so many of his poems: his deep friendships with other writers; the manic-depressive illness he struggled to endure and understand; his marriages to three prose writers, Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Caroline Blackwood; his engagement with politics and the anti-war movement of the 1960s. 'By far the most famous poet of his era . . . Lowell transformed American poetry.' - Charles McGrath, THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE 'In his poems and prose . . . Lowell got more out of the midcentury American scene - literary, cultural, political - than anyone else.' - William H. Pritchard, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 'Robert Lowell was one of the three or four greatest American poets of the twentieth century . . . his real peers are the classics of American literature: Melville and Whitman, Eliot and Frost . . . Lowell's torrential eloquence, his historical consciousness, his moral and political seriousness are a standing challenge.' - Adam Kirsch, THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT