The Dolphin Letters offers an unprecedented portrait of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick during the last seven years of Lowell's life (1970 to 1977), a time of personal crisis and creative innovation for both writers. Centred on the letters they exchanged with each other and with other members of their circle - writers, intellectuals, friends, and publishers, including Elizabeth Bishop, Caroline Blackwood, Mary McCarthy, and Adrienne Rich - the book has the narrative sweep of a novel, telling the story of the dramatic breakup of their twenty-one-year marriage and their extraordinary, but late, reconciliation. Lowell's controversial sonnet-sequence The Dolphin (for which he used Hardwick's letters as a source) and his last book, Day by Day, were written during this period, as were Hardwick's influential books Seduction and Betrayal: Essays on Women in Literature and Sleepless Nights: A Novel. Lowell and Hardwick are acutely intelligent observers of marriages, children, and friends, and of the feelings that their personal crises gave rise to. The Dolphin Letters, masterfully edited by Saskia Hamilton, is a debate about the limits of art - what occasions a work of art, what moral and artistic license artists have to make use of their lives as material, what formal innovations such debates give rise to. The crisis of Lowell's The Dolphin was profoundly affecting to everyone surrounding him, and Bishop's warning to Lowell - 'art just isn't worth that much' - haunts.

Robert Lowell once remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop that "you ha[ve] always been my favorite poet and favorite friend." The feeling was mutual. Bishop said that conversation with Lowell left her feeling "picked up again to the proper table-land of poetry," and she once begged him, "Please never stop writing me letters—they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I've been re-reading Emerson) for several days." Neither ever stopped writing letters, from their first meeting in 1947 when both were young, newly launched poets until Lowell's death in 1977. Presented in Words in Air is the complete correspondence between Bishop and Lowell. The substantial, revealing—and often very funny—interchange that they produced stands as a remarkable collective achievement, notable for its sustained conversational brilliance of style, its wealth of literary history, its incisive snapshots and portraits of people and places, and its delicious literary gossip, as well as for the window it opens into the unfolding human and artistic drama of two of America's most beloved and influential poets.

I have sat and listened to too many words of the collaborating muse, and plotted perhaps too freely with my life, not avoiding injury to others, not avoiding injury to myself— to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction, an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting my eyes have seen what my hand did. Winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, The Dolphin was controversial from the beginning: many of the poems include the letters that Robert Lowell’s wife, the celebrated writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick, wrote to him after he left her for the English socialite and writer Caroline Blackwood. He was warned by many, among them Elizabeth Bishop, that “art just isn’t worth that much.” Nevertheless, these poems are a powerful document of an impulsive love, and a moving record of Lowell’s change from one life and marriage in America to a new life on new terms with a new family in England, rendered with the stunning technical power and control for which he was so celebrated. This new edition, which follows the 1973 edition, includes scans of the pages of Lowell’s original manuscript, giving us a look into the brilliant and complicated mind of one of our most beloved and distinguished poets.

In Sleepless Nights a woman looks back on her life—the parade of people, the shifting background of place—and assembles a scrapbook of memories, reflections, portraits, letters, wishes, and dreams. An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick’s finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.

Robert Lowell, with Elizabeth Bishop, stands apart as the greatest American poet of the latter half of the twentieth century—and Life Studies and For the Union Dead stand as among his most important volumes. In Life Studies, which was first published in 1959, Lowell moved away from the formality of his earlier poems and started writing in a more confessional vein. The title poem of For the Union Dead concerns the death of the Civil War hero (and Lowell ancestor) Robert Gould Shaw, but it also largely centers on the contrast between Boston's idealistic past and its debased present at the time of its writing, in the early 1960's. Throughout, Lowell addresses contemporaneous subjects in a voice and style that themselves push beyond the accepted forms and constraints of the time.

"In his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry, Robert Lowell (1917-1977) put his manic-depressive illness into the public domain. Now Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison brings her expertise to bear on his story, illuminating the relationship between bipolar illness and creativity, and examining how Lowell's illness and the treatment he received came to bear on his work"--

The first biography of the extraordinary essayist, critic, and short story writer Elizabeth Hardwick, author of the semiautobiographical novel Sleepless Nights. Born in Kentucky, Elizabeth Hardwick left for New York City on a Greyhound bus in 1939 and quickly made a name for herself as a formidable member of the intellectual elite. Her eventful life included stretches of dire poverty, romantic escapades, and dustups with authors she eviscerated in The New York Review of Books, of which she was a cofounder. She formed lasting friendships with literary notables—including Mary McCarthy, Adrienne Rich, and Susan Sontag—who appreciated her sharp wit and relish for gossip, progressive politics, and great literature. Hardwick’s life and writing were shaped by a turbulent marriage to the poet Robert Lowell, whom she adored, standing by faithfully through his episodes of bipolar illness. Lowell’s decision to publish excerpts from her private letters in The Dolphin greatly distressed Hardwick and ignited a major literary controversy. Hardwick emerged from the scandal with the clarity and wisdom that illuminate her brilliant work—most notably Sleepless Nights, a daring, lyrical, and keenly perceptive collage of reflections and glimpses of people encountered as they stumble through lives of deprivation or privilege. A Splendid Intelligence finally gives Hardwick her due as one of the great postwar cultural critics. Ranging over a broad territory—from the depiction of women in classic novels to the civil rights movement, from theater in New York to life in Brazil, Kentucky, and Maine—Hardwick’s essays remain strikingly original, fiercely opinionated, and exquisitely wrought. In this lively and illuminating biography, Cathy Curtis offers an intimate portrait of an exceptional woman who vigorously forged her own identity on and off the page.