Collected Poems

For the first time, the collected poems of America's preeminent postwar poet

Edmund Wilson wrote of Robert Lowell that he was the "only recent American poet--if you don't count Eliot--who writes successfully in the language and cadence and rhyme of the resounding English tradition."

Frank Bidart and David Gewanter have compiled a definitive edition of Lowell's poems, from the early triumph of Lord Weary's Castle , winner of the Pulitzer Prize, to the brilliant willfulness of his Imitations of Sappho, Baudelaire, Rilke, and other masters, to the late spontaneity of his History , winner of another Pulitzer, and of his last book of poems, Day by Day . The book will also include several poems never previously collected, as well as a selection of Lowell's intriguing drafts.

As poet and critic Randall Jarrell said, "You feel before reading any new poem of his the uneasy expectation of perhaps encountering a masterpiece."

Lowell's Collected Poems will offer the first opportunity to view the entire range of his astonishing verse.