Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton Page A

was already a sick man) must have eased any lingering fears that the Williams influence was unassimilated: 36
    Dear Cal,
    Floss has just finished reading me your terrible wonderful poems. You have lost nothing of your art, in fact you have piled accomplishment upon accomplishment until there is nothing to be said to you in rebuttle [ sic ] of your devastating statements or the way you have uttered them. I’m trying to be not rhetorical but to approach the man you are with all defenses down.
    Either this has to be a long letter hinging [ sic ] growth in your sheer mastery of your skill in English composition or a heartbreaking statement of the human situation which has posessed [ sic ] you for the last ten years. To be a successful artist means a victory in the first place and then over the world you inhabit. Poverty as in the case of the painters Cezanne and Van Gogh—It was a mistake to bring that in here but I am merely stalling for words. You have nothing to do with that. Your problem was the English language. Your use of the words is aristocratic—sometimes you use rhyme—but thank goodness less and less frequently and that is an improvement, you speak more to us, more directly when you do not have to descend to it, your language gains in seriousness and ability in your choice of words when you abandon rhyme completely. I’m just fumbling around knowing I have much to say to you but without release.
    The book must have caused you some difficulty to write. There is no lying permitted to a man who writes that way.
     
    (Next day)
     
    I couldn’t go on. The book took too much out of me which I don’t have any more to give. It’s very impressive but I couldn’t read it again. The one short lyric is really beautiful [probably “For Sale”], finished and beautiful.
    Do you want me to return the manuscript, otherwise I’ll keep it in my files—for some one of my literary executors to discover for himself and wonder at.
    Keep well, Dear Cal
    Bill
    Oddly enough, Life Studies , the most “American” of Lowell’s books, made its first appearance in Britain, in April 1959. Faber and Faber wanted to enter it for selection by the newly formed Poetry Book Society, and to qualify, the English edition had to be a “first edition.” Charles Monteith of Faber recalls:
    we went ahead as fast as we could, which is why “91 Revere Street” isn’t in it—we never even saw it until it appeared in the American edition—and I got page proofs ready in time and submitted them to the Poetry Book Society, and the upshot of all this was that it wasn’t even recommended. The choice that time was The Wreck of the Magyar ,by Patricia Beer. 37
    Apart from a review in the Observer by A. Alvarez which heralded “Something New in Verse,” 38 and more cautious tributes by G. S. Fraser in the New Statesman (“accomplished … interesting and touchingly ‘human’”) 39 and Roy Fuller in the London Maga zine , 40 the British reviews were fairly tepid. Frank Kermode’s piece in the Spectator spoke of “a poet so sure of his powers that he does not recognise the danger of lapsing into superior doggerel when he too luxuriously controls it,” 41 and someone called Peter Dickinson in Punch announced that “few of the poems are in themselves memorable .” 42 But perhaps the British review that would have mattered most to Lowell was by Philip Larkin in the Manchester Guardian. Larkin had already been in respectful correspondence with Lowell, and “respectful” is perhaps the best word to apply to his verdict on Life Studies; the family poems he describes as “curious, hurried, off-hand vignettes, seeming too personal to be practised, yet none the less accurate and original,” and of the whole book he writes:
    In spite of their tension, these poems have a lightness and almost flippant humour not common in Mr Lowell’s previous work, matched with a quicker attention to feeling which personally I welcome. If these qualities are