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“... Slugging it out with Diana Trilling in the pages of Commentary, Robert Lowell remarked: ‘Controversy is bad for the mind and worse for the heart.’ Mrs Trilling, for all the world like Dorothea Brooke or some other 19th-century heroine of the strenuously examined life, replied: ‘I have never thought controversy bad for either the mind or the heart ...”

“... not come back. In the first poem in My Alexandria, ‘Demolition’, Doty invokes the ghost of Robert Lowell: many of the poems take their bearings from Lowell’s clotted diction, from what Doty calls his ‘ruthless energy’, from Lowell’s interest in burning the poem onto ...”

“... the pulse of continuity in European literatures from Caxton and Boccaccio to Rilke, Valéry and Robert Lowell. For Carne-Ross, the continuities and echo-densities which relate Pindar to Ezra Pound, which make Leopardi stylise a scene in the exact light of Horace, which provide Ariosto and Gongora with stylistically diverse but equally dynamic relations ...”

“... as a brilliant writer faded with the years; sadly, she is now remembered as much for having been Robert Lowell’s first wife as for her novels and short stories. It is testimony to Capote’s uncanny knack for self-promotion that at the time of the Life feature, he had produced only a handful of short stories: his first novel, Other Voices, Other ...”

“... North & South (1946), and a Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for her second, A Cold Spring. Writing to Robert Lowell in 1958, she confesses to feeling ‘green with envy’ over Lowell’s ‘kind of assurance’ in the poems of Life Studies, and adds that ‘it is hell to realise one has wasted half one’s talent through ...”

“... to think of it, British recognition of Bishop herself was belated; for decades she was upstaged by Robert Lowell, probably because he lived in England and behaved in a way that seemed more certifiably poetic. Now Merrill is available to the English in a slim volume of his best work, selected by him shortly before his death in 1995. Merrill was far from ...”

“... the poem shows Sexton’s craft, honed with advice from John Holmes, W.D. Snodgrass and Robert Lowell. Retrieved at the last moment from her ‘bone pile’ of discards to fill out the book, it had gone through 19 drafts before Sexton achieved what Middlebrook calls the ‘double “I” ’ of the stanza and refrain. It was not ...”

“... Barzun, R.P. Blackmur, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, Kenneth Burke, Robert Fitzgerald, Leslie Fiedler and John Crowe Ransom – this last its founder as a school of literary criticism ‘to teach those who teach it’. Marianne Moore, in Brooklyn, had a quieter time, but was just as much in touch with them all through friends and ...”

“... Ian Hamilton came to biography late and triumphantly with his life of the dead but still warm Robert Lowell. Riding high, he went on to attempt an unauthorised life of the aged but very much alive J.D. Salinger and was comprehensively outfoxed by the second most reclusive man in American letters. Hamilton wrote up his experience as a rueful ...”

“... see that they would work as poetry in the Italian. Others again – such as Montale translated by Robert Lowell – achieve their vigour by departing from the source: the danger of these looser versions is that the original will seem scanted or imposed on, a stooge. The most rewarding translations in the anthology stretch English towards Italian while ...”

“... shining, uncomplicated, confident, bossy creatures, ‘free to play or free to slack’, as Robert Lowell put it, the ‘or’ multiplying their already monstrous freedom. They are always to hand with a nicely turned ‘filthy joke’ or two, the correct plural of ‘crocus’ (I always thought it was ‘crocuses’ myself, but then I’m not like ...”

“... the ones everybody was reading, all published by Faber: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell and, of course, Heaney. It seems extraordinary, now, that my father had known several of them. Larkin had been his friend in Belfast (and my mother’s boss in the library at Queen’s), and, later, at the University of Essex in the ...”

“... W.1, and others. The translations were just as elastic as these cartoon-rubber composites. In the Robert Lowell version actually used by the Sunday Times, ‘Spleen’ opens: I’m like the king of a rain-country, rich but sterile, young but with an old wolf’s itchSteiner’s green-inked envelopes, on the other hand, contained openings like: I am like ...”

“... around. They are, no doubt, in their cars, and another poet of weirdness, New England weirdness, Robert Lowell, knew also about cars: ‘A savage servility slides by on grease.’ There are antique shops in Stockbridge, where antique seems to mean the day before yesterday. And grand white wooden houses, behind evergreen trees, houses which turn out to ...”

“... in which he argued – largely on the evidence of directions taken by several serious poets (Robert Lowell and Robert Bly, Elizabeth Bishop and Ed Dorn are those who come to mind) – that the North American imagination is beginning to define its identity no longer on a West-East axis, across the Atlantic to ...”