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“... letters written to Lowell by Elizabeth Hardwick, his wife of many years, after he left her for Caroline Blackwood, Bishop could not contain herself. In some of the sonnets, Hardwick’s letters were in quotation marks: ‘I love you, Darling, there’s a black black void, as black as night without you. I long to see your face or hear your voice, and ...”

“... from Lowell’s The Dolphin (1973), which uses her letters to him after he left her for Caroline Blackwood in 1970, and now from Ian Hamilton’s biography of Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick’s own experience of loving, living with, and being left by a great writer. But, as she says of Jane Carlyle, ‘the tone of her letters is guarded and her ...”

“... the fact that Lowell’s arms had to be broken in hospital to release the Freud painting of Caroline Blackwood (Calypso) he had been clutching when he died in a taxi between JFK and West 67th Street, where Elizabeth Hardwick (Penelope) was waiting for him. The myth that poets are aristocrats of the literary world, that their deaths are caviar for ...”

“... choice and handling of themes. Mrs Fitzgerald used to be published by Duckworth, as were or are Caroline Blackwood, Alice Thomas Ellis and Beryl Bainbridge: all practise surprise and cultivate oddly-angled observation. There remains a certain strained resemblance between Fitzgerald and Bainbridge, though the latter is less elegant and altogether more ...”

“... and friends, at least until the publication of The Dolphin in 1973. He was by this time married to Caroline Blackwood and living in England. The task of sorting out a large number of poems into appropriate volumes had been undertaken with the help of Frank Bidart, and those that went into The Dolphin were personal, including not only references to ...”

“... Fraser, aged 22, and his enchanting girlfriend, still at St Paul’s. She is the daughter of Caroline (née Blackwood) by her second husband, a Polish musician. Caroline was married earlier to Lucian [sic] Freud and by her third marriage to the illustrious American poet, the late ...”

“... was confident he would always find his way back home. This is why, when Lowell left her for Caroline Blackwood, her first reaction was laughter. ‘I knew Cal had a girl,’ she wrote to McCarthy, ‘but it was just this afternoon that I knew it was Caroline. I felt such relief and burst out laughing! … I ...”

“... was establishing a new tradition in fiction. Short, sharp and written by women. There was Caroline Blackwood, Helen Hodgman and Anna Haycraft, who wrote as Alice Thomas Ellis. Their work had little to do with the great social explorations of Doris Lessing or with the ludic excavations of Angela Carter. Or with Philip Roth, Gabriel García ...”

“... potential to sag and wither’. Some thought he’d been doing that all along. Caroline Blackwood, writing about Freud’s portraits in the New York Review of Books in 1993, described them as ‘prophecies’ rather than ‘snapshots of the sitter as physically captured in a precise historical moment’. She added that his paintings of ...”

“... his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Lowell had left her, and their daughter, Harriet, for England and Caroline Blackwood; The Dolphin tells, as he put it in a letter to Christopher Ricks, ‘the story of changing marriages, not a malice or sensation, far from it, but necessarily, according to my peculiar talent, very personal. Lizzie is naturally very much ...”

“... House was very keen that I should do it. But I had to get a letter from Lowell’s last wife, Caroline Blackwood, and then get a letter from Lizzie Hardwick, to whom he’d been married previously. She knew I had a letter from Caroline. There was a ‘which-side-is-he-on?’ anxiety right from the start.You’d ...”