Muses, nurses and punch-bags

The conceit of this book — the author’s third on Robert Lowell — is strong, although its execution is less successful. Lowell made his love life central to his aesthetic project, especially in For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin, and so it makes sense to read his work through his major emotional attachments. Not all of these are romantic: as well as chapters on Lowell’s three wives, Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick and Caroline Blackwood, and a harrowing section on nine affairs, usually conducted at the start of a manic episode, Meyers devotes attention to Lowell’s mother, Charlotte, the Southern writers who mentored him, such as Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, and his female poetic colleagues and students, notably Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.
Meyers has done sterling work in tracking down Lowell’s mistresses and combing the creative output of his wives for variously refracted images of ‘Cal’; as such the book serves as an important supplement to the biographies by Ian Hamilton and Paul Mariani.