“... indeed, and perhaps an excellent school for the inflexible later canons of neo-liberalism. Robert Lowell once said that he was glad not to have been a revolutionary when young, because it prevented him from becoming a reactionary bore in his old age. I see the point: the fact remains that in midlife and in 1968 he acted eloquently and well, as a ...”

“... in almost as many words, when I got into the fight myself. Another feature of the Congress was [Robert] Oppenheimer, who took me out to dinner and is, I discovered, completely and perhaps even dangerously mad. Paranoid megalomania and sense of divine mission ... [Oppenheimer] turned to Nicholas Nabokoff [sic]... and said the Congress was being run ...”

“... repressed pain, I think, behind a sentence quoted approvingly by Bayley in his essay here on Robert Lowell. It is Lowell on Stevens, but it could be Bayley on Bayley: ‘There seems to be something in the poet that protects itself by asserting that it is not making too much of an ...”

“... writers are in the exhibition: William Empson, Seamus Heaney, Charles Tomlinson, Salman Rushdie, Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill. The only other bare feet besides Walcott’s belong to a corpse on a dissecting table in front of Keith Simpson, the forensic pathologist. An illegible name-tag is attached to a big toe. St Lucia may not be the Isle of Man, but ...”

“... Berlin, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Harry Levin, W.H. Auden, Malraux, James Baldwin, Stravinsky, Robert Lowell etc. None of these people, however, furnishes Wilson with anything like a satisfying number of thoughtful passages in the journals. This is partly a result of misleading editing by Lewis Dabney, who divides the book into 19 sections and dozens ...”

“... writers and critics came and went. Literature was a vocation in those days, not a profession. For Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz and Randall Jarrell, disciples of those exemplary teacher-critics John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, criticism was an essential component of a literary career. And for the critics, the obverse was true: Lionel ...”

“... for once. Scale is uncertain. ‘This might be nature – twenty stories high,’ to borrow from Robert Lowell: We two, one cell here, lie gazing into the ether’s crystal ball, sky and a sky, and sky, and sky, till death – Well – death and the void may be part of it. City parks by night do have something sepulchral about them. The little white ...”

“... So irregular, appealing and – if one may say – so pitiable a figure is the Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) that he comfortably resists summary description. Even his biographer, Robert Mächler, begins by warning himself, via a feisty sentence of his subject’s: ‘No one is entitled to behave towards me as if they knew me ...”

“... ears, bit her, punched her in the face, and almost broke her legs by kicking her furiously.’Even Robert Lowell got carried away. In his long sonnet sequence ‘History’, he imagines one of Mary’s famous flights by night across Scotland on horseback as happening by car:We roared off hell-wheel and scattered the soft mob;happily only one man splashed ...”

“... is the second part of a two-part interview. Part 1: ‘You Muddy Fools’ I want to ask you about Robert Lowell: as an influence on your work, that is, and only then as what he later became – a ‘Life’, the subject of your first full-length biography. You did and do admire him greatly as a poet, yet in his poetic practice didn’t he trample all ...”

“... could have changed his sensibility, but, despite contact and correspondence with the likes of Robert Lowell, he remained a visitor, too busy to look beyond the clichés. Writing to David Hammond from Salt Lake City airport in 1987, he notes the snowcapped Rockies and the big open sky of the West but says that this ‘domain of magnificent ...”

“... It would be hard,’ Robert Frost wrote, ‘to gather biography from poems of mine except as they were all written by the same person, out of the same general region north of Boston, and out of the same books.’ Frost’s biographers, who began their collective labours well before he died, were not to be put off by such a statement, and the early collections of memoirs and reminiscences culminated in Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume biography published between 1966 and 1976 ...”

“... for their continued authority of speech we must come closer to our own time – to the poetry of Robert Lowell or of Sylvia Plath. There the language of poetry has the same kind of mesmeric power and the same air of constant danger. But it is, of course, danger of a different kind – the danger that boils up from within and makes living for a poet a ...”

“... James is joking. Somewhere along the line, though, the comparisons become routine. James mentions Robert Lowell accusing himself, when mad, of being Hitler, and launches into a riff on the fact that few people accuse themselves of being anonymous small-time Nazis. His own idea of self-deprecation involves measuring himself against Hitler ...”

“... of The Magic Flute (all of this under the auspices of the American director Peter Sellars). Robert Lowell meant to write a libretto and duly boned up with intensive attendance at the New York Met, but never delivered. John Ashbery has not, so far as I know, produced a libretto – only the poem, ‘Syringa’, specially composed for a setting by ...”