Robert Lowell, _The Dolphin_

READING A HANDFUL of reviews of The Dolphin Letters convinced me that I really do not want to read through The Dolphin Letters, but it did whet my curiosity sufficiently to look again at The Dolphin, which I had last read back in the 1980s, during a period when I was getting a lot of random reading done in an effort to avoid working on my dissertation.

The Dolphin--all sonnets, like Lowell's Notebook--reflects the period when Lowell abruptly left his long-suffering wife Elizabeth Hardwick and his young daughter Harriet for an Englishwoman, the 14-years-younger Lady Caroline Blackwood, formerly married to the painter Lucien Freud.

As all the reviews of The Dolphin Letters note, in many of these sonnets Lowell took the enormous liberty of quoting from Hardwick's letters to him--sometimes entire poems are quotations from the letters--and the even more enormous liberty of changing Hardwick's wording.

All the reviews often mention Elizabeth Bishop's advice to Lowell after she saw the manuscript, which was, essentially, don't publish: "Art just isn't worth that much." Not worth, that is, the pain publication would inevitably bring Hardwick and their daughter. Lowell went ahead. The book did not get great reviews, I gather, nor much subsequent acclaim, so far as I can tell.

I did not much care for it much myself, the first time I read it. This time, I'm not sure why, I found myself liking it. I'm not as bothered by Lowell's frequent obscurity as I used to be, I think. I think too that when I first read it, I was hoping to find some sense that he understood what he was up to, that there was some sort of justification or rationale in his own mind, at least. He does not have one, really. He does not understand his actions any better than anyone else does. But now, forty years on for me, I'm less puzzled over people not knowing what the sweet fuck they think they're doing.

Something that struck me as disturbing at the time, but now fascinates: all experience happens to Lowell as already a sonnet. Falling in love, guilt, joys of fatherhood, woes of fatherhood, remembering something, reading something--whatever it is, it immediately assembles itself, in Lowell, as fourteen blank verse lines. That seemed warped and weird to me in the 1980s, but now it strikes me as the hallmark of a lifelong craftsman.

The issue of cruelty to Hardwick lingers, true. But she could have trained the flamethrowers on him in Sleepless Nights and didn't, so I guess she forgave him in some way.