Lowell, inside out By William H. Pritchard  |  June 19, 2005 The Letters of Robert Lowell By Robert Lowell Edited by Saskia Hamilton Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 852 pp., illustrated, $40 ''Have you ever tried to stop writing? It's harder than alcohol, which I also foreswear as the very early sun crashes at about four through faults in the blinds." So Robert Lowell wrote to his old friend and Kenyon College classmate Peter Taylor, the year before Lowell died. He was talking about poems, but he ceaselessly wrote letters as well, and Saskia Hamilton, herself a poet, has undertaken the heroic task of editing a generous selection of them. These 711 examples of Lowell's epistolary art begin in 1936, when he was a freshman at Harvard, with a letter to Ezra Pound in which Lowell proposes to come to Italy if Pound will accept him as a student. They c

more...