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Robert Lowell anthology seeks to resurrect fallen giant
New York, Ayg 05: Elizabeth Hardwick, a birdlike woman who is an esteemed literary critic and novelist, is surrounded by walls of books as she sits in the cavernous Upper West Side apartment she once shared with her late ex-husband, poet Robert Lowell.
New York, Ayg 05: Elizabeth Hardwick, a birdlike woman who is an esteemed literary critic and novelist, is surrounded by walls of books as she sits in the cavernous Upper West Side apartment she once shared with her late ex-husband, poet Robert Lowell.
She is draped in black and wears bright red flats. Her silver hair is perfectly curled around her face, and she laughs frequently as she remembers the man who died on his way back to her. Lowell divorced Hardwick in 1972, ending one of the most publicly difficult relationships in literary history. Five years later, the 60-year-old Lowell left England and his third wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood, to return to New York and Hardwick. Anticipating his arrival, Hardwick was leaning out the window when a taxi pulled up in front of the apartment building. The building's elevator man opened the taxi door, peered inside, and yelled up to Hardwick, "Mr. Lowell is inside but he's not moving." Hardwick said she ran to the taxi and raced to a hospital, where Lowell was pronounced dead of heart failure. Hardwick now describes the horrifying sequence with a small smile.
"So, that was sad," she finishes, calmly. At 87, Hardwick seems far removed from her turbulent relationship with Lowell which, due to his tendency to rewrite his life in his poetry, was presented for all the world to read. Many, including poet Adrienne Rich, condemned Lowell's use of such personal items as Hardwick's letters in his poems. But Hardwick maintains that it never bothered her, "because I got to read them first." Given the dominance Lowell achieved in his lifetime, it must have seemed as if the whole world was peering over her shoulder, as Lowell described his severe bouts with manic depression and his extramarital affairs.
Since his death, however, Lowell's reputation, once unparalleled in American poetry, has fallen on hard times.
She is draped in black and wears bright red flats. Her silver hair is perfectly curled around her face, and she laughs frequently as she remembers the man who died on his way back to her. Lowell divorced Hardwick in 1972, ending one of the most publicly difficult relationships in literary history. Five years later, the 60-year-old Lowell left England and his third wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood, to return to New York and Hardwick. Anticipating his arrival, Hardwick was leaning out the window when a taxi pulled up in front of the apartment building. The building's elevator man opened the taxi door, peered inside, and yelled up to Hardwick, "Mr. Lowell is inside but he's not moving." Hardwick said she ran to the taxi and raced to a hospital, where Lowell was pronounced dead of heart failure. Hardwick now describes the horrifying sequence with a small smile.
"So, that was sad," she finishes, calmly. At 87, Hardwick seems far removed from her turbulent relationship with Lowell which, due to his tendency to rewrite his life in his poetry, was presented for all the world to read. Many, including poet Adrienne Rich, condemned Lowell's use of such personal items as Hardwick's letters in his poems. But Hardwick maintains that it never bothered her, "because I got to read them first." Given the dominance Lowell achieved in his lifetime, it must have seemed as if the whole world was peering over her shoulder, as Lowell described his severe bouts with manic depression and his extramarital affairs.
Since his death, however, Lowell's reputation, once unparalleled in American poetry, has fallen on hard times.
Lowell's rise will be aided by the publication of the massive "Robert Lowell: Collected Poems." Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, the book is close to 1,200 pages long, including almost 200 pages of notes and 11 of Lowell's poetry volumes, plus "Land of Unlikeness," which Lowell refused to reprint after its 1944 publication.
More than 15 years in the making, the collection has been a Herculean task. A poet who says he is neither an editor nor a scholar, Bidart found the process exhausting. But he felt the collection was something he owed Lowell.
Bureau Report