"A substantial addition to our understanding of how American poets from Frost to Lowell achieved that remarkable range of voice that distinguishes modern poetry. It is a pleasure to read."--A. Walton Litz, Holmes Professor of Literature, Princeton University
"Sophistication, popular critical wisdom has it, is not American. But Doreski makes us see that very sophistication as part of a twentieth-century version of American literary self-assertion."--Times Literary Supplement

"Doreski persuasively demonstrates how much poetry has changed since Wordsworth and Browning both in...

"A substantial addition to our understanding of how American poets from Frost to Lowell achieved that remarkable range of voice that distinguishes modern poetry. It is a pleasure to read."--A. Walton Litz, Holmes Professor of Literature, Princeton University
"Sophistication, popular critical wisdom has it, is not American. But Doreski makes us see that very sophistication as part of a twentieth-century version of American literary self-assertion."--Times Literary Supplement
"Doreski persuasively demonstrates how much poetry has changed since Wordsworth and Browning both in...

In the two decades that have passed since Robert Lowell s death, "Robert Lowell s Shifting Colors" is the first critical survey of the poet's aesthetic efforts to make personal vision and public exhortation cohere and thus combine poetic genres that have been historically discrete.
Rather than consider Lowell primarily as either a religious, political, or autobiographical poet, William Doreski proposes that Lowell s primary poetic impulse was to shape differing voices into a single entity in which public and private concerns cohere.
This makes him an essential poet for our era, in...

Here is a book that shows how Lowell was both a charismatic figure and a trial to his friends. His relationships were tense, and although the friends he made in school remained consistently loyal through his bouts of madness, and although his wives repeatedly forgave seemingly unforgivable acts, not all, including Lowell himself, were aware that his behavior often bordered an outrage.

His forty-year friendship with Tate, perhaps more than any other, exemplifies the tension that was generated by a close friendship with Lowell. The varied strands of this relationship constitute the...