Book description
Born in 1917 into an aristocratic Boston family Robert Lowell was
not yet thirty when his first major collection of poems, Lord Weary's
Castle, won the Pulitzer Prize. With Life Studies, his third book, he
found the intense, highly personal voice that made him the foremost
American poet of his generation. He held strong, complex and very
public political views. His private life was turbulent, marred by
manic depression and troubled marriages. But in this superb biography
(first published in 1982) the poet Ian Hamilton illuminates both the
life and the work of Lowell with sympathetic understanding and
consummate narrative skill. 'Our one consolation for Ian Hamilton's
early death is that his work seems to have lived on with undiminished
force... The critical prose, in particular, still sets a standard that
nobody else comes near.' Clive James
Ian Hamilton was born in 1938, in King's Lynn, Norfolk, and educated
at Darlington Grammar School and Keble College, Oxford. In 1962, he
founded the influential poetry magazine, the Review, and he was later
editor of the New Review. He also wrote biographies and journalism,
mainly about literature and football. He died in 2001.
