E-Mail This Article to a Friend Passionate aristocrat Robert Lowell’s unvarnished shop talk BY WILLIAM CORBETT
	The Letters of Robert Lowell Edited by Saskia Hamilton | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 888 pages | $40

On this book’s front flap, Christopher Benfey praises Lowell’s "refusal to be boring on paper." Nonsense. Read The Mills of the Kavanaughs and various editions of Notebook; you’ll find many boring pages. Lowell’s exalters always make too much of his work, and his detractors too little. But Benfey’s words do apply to this book, which is perhaps Lowell’s best. Not his highest art but his best book.

Lowell describes his letter-writing style as "slap-dash." His sentences, most written in pencil, dart here and there, often with little thought given to sequence. This is unrevised Lowell, spiky, provocative, with signature strings of adjectives that must have delighted his correspondents. As he wrote to Allen Ginsberg, "So let this be breezy, brief, incomplete, but spontaneous and not dishonestly holding back." In writing to his poet heroes and friends Pound, Eliot, Williams, and Frost (no other American poet of his generation was as intimate with these greats) and to Allen Tate, Lowell slows down and shows himself to be a world-class flatterer. Not to the point of insincerity, but he does lay it on thick.

This is a book of shop talk, lively, stinging, funny, shrewd, driven by Lowell’s great ambition. (The first letter, written when he was 19 and at Harvard, is to Ezra Pound.) He was obsessed with poetry. In a letter from 1957, he names Boston painter Hyman Bloom as perhaps America’s best. Or else the best — Lowell could not help ranking painters, poets, poems, novelists — is Ben Shahn or Morris Graves. That he held this opinion and claimed others did too when De Kooning, Guston, Kline, Rothko, etc. were at work shows his ignorance. But what it shows more emphatically is that there was one art for him — poetry. Prose, which he loved in many forms, was its sister.

Obsession is one way to be a poet; Lowell’s Napoleonic manner makes it seem the only way. He comes across in his letters as charming, befuddled by practical matters, cruel, oblivious, tender, manic — a man of outsize dimensions not bothering to suppress his immediate self. For me he is more alive in his letters than in all but a handful of his poems. In "North Haven," her elegy to Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop writes, "You can’t derange, or re-arrange,/your poems again." The absence of this iron-willed obsessiveness helps give these letters their fizz and zing.

The letters to Bishop, Lowell’s closest poet friend, make a book within this book. Read side by side with her letters to him that are collected in her One Art, this is a back-and-forth unlike any other in 20th-century American poetry save that of their poetry opposites Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. What sets Lowell’s letters to Bishop apart from those to his friends and contemporaries Randall Jarrell, Peter Taylor, and J.F. Powers is his near-worshipful regard for her and his desire to stand in her good graces. "You make most people, even the most charming, seem as if seen through a glaze, as if they lived in a glaze. And your poems and prose animals have the same freshness, the wood is exposed, clean and genuine."

When I arrived in Boston in 1964, Lowell was the literary eminence. Since his death in 1977, no poet or novelist has attained that stature, and perhaps none will, because literary eminence is now a thing of the past. He was an aristocrat with the sort of aura and easy confidence that draws and holds people. I found him approachable, witty, and, over a few dinners, utterly dominating. He held forth and I was 25 years younger, callow and eager to sop up what I could. But he dominated, in part, because he had the literary world ranked. He once named Ché Guevara’s Bolivian diaries as the third best work of literary journalism in the 20th century. I had no idea what the first two might be, or the fourth and fifth. What was intimidating now seems endearing, sad, and desperate, like the man revealed in these absorbing letters.