Full name: Robert Lowell: a biography

Author: Ian Hamilton Year: 1982 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Memoirs, Biographies, Poetry Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780394509655 039450965X

Born in 1917 into an aristocratic Boston family Robert Lowell was not yet thirty when his first major collection of poems, Lord Weary's Castle, won the Pulitzer Prize. With Life Studies, his third book, he found the intense, highly personal voice that made him the foremost American poet of his generation. He held strong, complex and very public political views. His private life was turbulent, marred by manic depression and troubled marriages. But in this superb biography (first published in 1982) the poet Ian Hamilton illuminates both the life and the work of Lowell with sympathetic understanding and consummate narrative skill. 'Our one consolation for Ian Hamilton's early death is that his work seems to have lived on with undiminished force... The critical prose, in particular, still sets a standard that nobody else comes near.' Clive James Similar books: Anne Sexton by Diane Middlebrook Byron by Benita Eisler Philip Larkin by James Booth Keats by Andrew Motion Updike by Adam Begley Savage Beauty by Nancy Milford Empire of Self by Jay Parini Philip Larkin by Andrew Motion Arthur Rimbaud by Enid Starkie City Poet by Brad Gooch Bitter Fame by Anne Stevenson Walt Whitman by Justin Kaplan Lives Like Loaded Guns by Lyndall Gordon Sylvia Plath by Linda Wagner-Martin Byron by Fiona MacCarthy Life Is Not a Fairy Tale by Fantasia Upfront and Personal by Coleen Nolan Mustn't Grumble by Terry Wogan Smiling in Slow Motion by Derek Jarman Undisputed by Chris Jericho