ROBERT LOWELL

"Desde su nacimiento en el seno de una familia aristócrata en decadencia, hasta su muerte aferrado al retrato de su tercera esposa en un taxi que recorría las calles de Nueva York, Robert Lowell tuvo una vida intensa. Su trastorno maniaco-depresivo, las multiples visitas a hospitales psiquiatricos, su activismo politico, tres matrimonios y una amistad unica con Elizabeth Bishop, calarian en su poesia hasta el punto de dotarla de una identidad tan unica que harian de el el poeta estadounidense mas representativo de su tiempo. Tambien el mas popular, como demuestra el hecho de que fuera portada de la revista LIFE.En conmemoracion del centenario de su nacimiento, Vaso Roto publica su Poesia completa en edicion bilingue y con traduccion de Andres Catalan."

Of the twenty chapters that make up these Memoirs, seventeen appear here in print for the first time, unearthed by the editors from the Harvard Archive. They include intense depictions of Lowells mental illness and his efforts to recover, and conclude with reminiscences of other writers - T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Hannah Arendt, and Sylvia Plath. Memoirs demonstrates Lowells expansive gifts as a prose stylist and provide further evidence of the range and brilliance of his achievement.

The Dolphin Letters offers an unprecedented portrait of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick during the last seven years of Lowells 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. Lowells controversial sonnet-sequence The Dolphin (for which he used Hardwicks letters as a source) and his last book, Day by Day, were written during this period, as were Hardwicks 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 Lowells The Dolphin was profoundly affecting to everyone surrounding him, and Bishops warning to Lowell - art just isnt worth that much - haunts.

THE BEST AMERICAN POET OF HIS GENERATION. - TIME Gathered on the occasion of Robert Lowells one hundredth birthday, New Selected Poems offers a fresh and illuminating representation of one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry. The renowned and controversial author of many books of poems, plays, and translations, Lowell was one of the United States most honoured poets, winning the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1947 and 1974, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His ongoing interrogation of his family legacy, his personal struggle with manic depression, and his mastery of the tradition of poetry in English formed the groundbreaking autobiographical foundation of Life Studies (1959) and the books that followed it, including For the Union Dead (1964), Near the Ocean (1967), History (1973), and Day by Day (1977). Katie Petersons incisive selection of Lowells poems draws attention to the perishability of life, its twinned quality of fragility and repetition, as framed by the structured evanescence of daily consciousness. Lowells own intense dramas and struggles are the substrate he drew on in his restless search to make sense of, and fix, shape-shifting experience - not his, but ours. As Peterson says, Lowell was constitutionally immune to any stultifying permanence either of form or of spirit. Her brilliant new reading of Lowell shows us his work constantly breaking, renewing, transforming, as he strives restlessly, over and over, to find an elusive unity.

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.

Palabras en el aire

Robert Lowell, juntament amb Elizabeth Bishop, és considerat el millor poeta nord-americà de la segona meitat del segle XX, i aquestes obres són els seus volums més cèlebres. A "Apunts del natural" L

Diez años antes de Troya y diez antes de Circe/ suplantaron los nombres a las cosas, / los nombres que él, Ulises, les pusiera/ perdidos, por entonces, nombres suyos:/ mirmidones, espartanos, un sold

A través de los dos tomos en los que se ha dividido su obra, el lector podrá percibir la evolución de la poesía de Robert Lowell, siempre muy estudiada y cuidada, pero que con el paso del tiempo va adquiriendo un tono más íntimo y confesional. El poeta utiliza el verso para conocerse a sí mismo y analizar sus circunstancias y de este modo se convierte no sólo en el agente sino también en el objeto del hecho poético, a través de un lenguaje que fluye desde su vertiente más coloquial e incluso humorística a un hermetismo sorprendente, todo ello aderezado con referencias literarias que el autor presupone conocidas por el lector, y que son una muestra más de su ingente talento y acervo cultural.

Nacido en Boston en 1917, murió en New York a los sesenta años de edad, despúes de haber vivido los últimos años de su vida en Inglaterra. Robert Lowell es el renovador por antonomasia de la poesía norteamericana desde la muerte de W. Whitman. Su poesia constituye un valioso testimonio de la lucha diaria del intelectual leberal americano ante la caotica realidad diaria en que se sumerge el ser humano.