Introduction
1. Mermaid 1:1–2. Cf. Milton: “Th’ old Dragon under ground, […] Swindges the scaly Horrour of his foulded tail” (“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” 168, 172; the poem echoes elsewhere in The Dolphin, too). Cf. also T. S. Eliot: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each” (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 124).
2. “The Poet Robert Lowell—Seen by Christopher Ricks,” The Listener, June 21, 1973, p. 831.
3. “On the End of the Phone” 5.
4. “Nine Months” 2 [Burden 8], “The Dolphin” manuscript.
5. Robert Lowell, “After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays on Me,” Salmagundi (Spring 1977), p. 113; reprinted in Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 991.
6. Lowell, “After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays on Me,” p. 112; reprinted in Lowell, Collected Poems, p. 991.
7. Cf. Coleridge’s notebooks, ca. November 1803, Borrowdale: “the choice of sensations, I in much pain leaning on my Staff, and viewing the clouds and hearing the Church Bell from Crosthwaite Church”; quoted in Alethea Hayter, A Voyage in Vain: Coleridge’s Journey to Malta in 1804 (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), p. 35. See also Lowell’s Coleridge sonnets in History, and Helen Vendler’s recollection of Lowell’s conversation about Coleridge in “Robert Lowell’s Last Days and Last Poems,” Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), p. 310.
8. Robert Lowell to Marianne Moore, January 18, 1970, Marianne Moore Collection, The Rosenbach.
9. Published in 1959.
10. Michael Hofmann, Where Have You Been? Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), p. 72.
11. Ian Hamilton, “A Conversation with Robert Lowell,” the Review, No. 26 (Summer 1971): 13–14.
12. Lowell, “Epilogue” 16, Day by Day (1977).
13. Robert Lowell, review of The Testing-Tree, by Stanley Kunitz, The New York Times Book Review, March 21, 1971, p. 1.
14. Milton wrote that in contrast to logic, “Poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less suttle and fine, but more simple, sensuous and passionate” (Of Education [1644]). Lowell first contended with the turbulence in Milton’s definition (“less suttle and fine, but more simple, sensuous and passionate”) in a 1940 letter: “I must keep spiritually alive and brilliantly alive, for poetry is, as the moral Milton conceded in practice and precept, a sensuous, passionate, brutal thing” (Robert Lowell to A. Lawrence Lowell, [February 1940], in Robert Lowell, The Letters of Robert Lowell, ed. Saskia Hamilton [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005], p. 25).
15. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Adrienne Conrad [Rich], March 29, 1971, in Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979, ed. Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), p. 163.
16. Lowell, review of The Testing-Tree, p. 1.
17. Ian Hamilton, “A Conversation with Robert Lowell,” p. 16. He used the same metaphor when talking about borrowing from the novel form (for Notebook), “because I think poetry must escape from its glass” (p. 17).
18. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop [October 5, 1970] in The Dolphin Letters, p. 110.
19. “On the End of the Phone” 1. Cf. “Israel” 1 [Lines from Israel 3], Notebook (1970).
20. Blair Clark’s notes of conversations with Elizabeth Hardwick, Blair Clark’s Robert Lowell Collection 1938–1983, Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin; see The Dolphin Letters, p. xlii.
21. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Hardwick, November 28, 1970, in The Dolphin Letters, p. 135.
22. “Fishnet” and “Dolphin.”
23. Lowell: “Most artistic transformations are symbols […] The anguish of the most original is its tension and ungainliness in descending to the actual, the riches of days” (review of The Testing-Tree, p. 1).
24. Robert Lowell to Stanley Kunitz, April 25, 1971, in The Dolphin Letters, p. 173.
25. When Lowell further revised The Dolphin in the spring and summer of 1972, he added new poems.
26. Robert Lowell to Frank Bidart, [December 6 or 8? 1971], in The Dolphin Letters, p. 225.
27. Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell, March 21, 1972, in The Dolphin Letters, p. 259.
28. Indicated in “Knowing,” the first sonnet in the subsequent Burden sequence in “The Dolphin” manuscript. Cf. OED: “That which is borne in the womb, a child” (“Burden” 4, Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. I [1933]).
29. “Christmas 1970” 14 [Flight to New York 8 10], “The Dolphin” manuscript.
30. “Knowing” 6 [Burden 1], “The Dolphin” manuscript.
31. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, Easter Sunday [April 4], 1972, in The Dolphin Letters, p. 264.
32. Robert Lowell to Frank Bidart, May 15, 1972, in The Dolphin Letters, p. 282.
33. Robert Lowell to Mr. Frank Bidart, April 10, [1972], in The Dolphin Letters, p. 272.
34. Robert Lowell to Stanley Kunitz, April 24, 1972, in The Dolphin Letters, p. 276.
35. Compare the final Notebook poem, “Obit,” a love poem to Hardwick, with the version in For Lizzie and Harriet, a new first line underscoring what he had come to feel by 1972: “Our love will not come back on fortune’s wheel—”
36. Robert Lowell to Frank Bidart, May 15, 1972, in The Dolphin Letters, p. 282.
37. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell [Elizabeth Hardwick], November 16, 1970, in The Dolphin Letters, p. 132.
38. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell [Elizabeth Hardwick], November 30, 1970, in The Dolphin Letters, p. 136.
39. Robert Lowell to Stanley Kunitz, December 12, 1970, box 63, folder 6, Stanley Kunitz Papers, 1900–2014 (mostly 1960–2005), Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
40. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, [December 1970], in The Dolphin Letters, p. 139.
41. Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell, March 21, 1972, in The Dolphin Letters, pp. 258–59.
42. Cf. William Empson’s two senses of flight (taking wing, fleeing) in his poem “Aubade.”
43. Notebook 1967–68 (1969) was published twice in a first and a revised printing. Notebook (1970) was a substantial revision of Notebook 1967–68. The poems in Notebook were further revised and rearranged, then published in two separate volumes, For Lizzie and Harriet (1973) and History (1973). The Dolphin (1973) was a new book of poems.
44. See Lowell, Collected Poems, pp. 1074, 1127, and 1131.
45. Robert Lowell, “A Note to the New Edition,” Notebook (1970), p. 264.
46. As Frank Bidart reports Lowell did with History; Lowell, Collected Poems, p. 1074.
47. Christopher Ricks, True Friendship (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 189.
48. A chance they were willing to take out of respect for Lowell, but also presumably because his books sold prolifically, and provided Lowell with a substantial income. Copies of his royalty statements from 1966 to 1970 can be found in Blair Clark’s Robert Lowell Collection 1938–1983.
49. Erasmus to John Botzheim, 1523. Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterdami, ed. P. S. Allen, vol. I, p. 27; quoted in Margaret Mann Phillips, Erasmus on His Times: A Shortened Version of the Adages of Erasmus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. xvii.
50. Lowell, “After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays on Me,” p. 115; reprinted in Lowell, Collected Poems, p. 993.
51. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell [Elizabeth Hardwick], June 14, 1970, in The Dolphin Letters, p. 56.
52. Lowell, “A Note to the New Edition,” Notebook (1970), p. 264.
53. Thus, for “keep.”
54. “Morning Blue” 3–4 [Marriage? Caroline 4], “The Dolphin” manuscript.
55. Cf. “You are making Boston in the sulfury a.m.” (“Old Snapshop from Venice 1952” 12 [Hospital II 3]).
56. “Morning Blue” 3–4 [Caroline 5].
57. Robert Lowell to Allen Tate, May 13, 1974, in The Letters of Robert Lowell, p. 629.
58. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, July 12, 1973, in The Dolphin Letters, p. 360.
59. R. H. Hutton, “Mr. George Meredith’s ‘Modern Love,’” The Spectator, May 24, 1862, reprinted in George Meredith, Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads, ed. Rebecca N. Mitchell and Criscillia Benford (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 182–83.
60. J. W. Marston, review in Athenaeum, May 31, 1862, reprinted in Mitchell and Benford, pp. 185–86.
61. Algernon C. Swinburne, letter to the editor, The Spectator (June 7, 1862), reprinted in Mitchell and Benford, p. 191.
62. Helen Vendler, “The Difficult Grandeur of Robert Lowell,” The Atlantic Monthly (January 1975), reprinted in Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 136.
63. Ericka J. Fischer, Chronicle of the Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry: Discussions, Decisions and Documents (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2010), pp. 320–21. Accessed July 3, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central.
64. Michael Hofmann, “His Own Prophet,” review of Collected Poems by Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, London Review of Books 25, no. 17, September 11, 2003, p. 3.
65. See Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 230.
66. Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, July 8, 1972, in The Dolphin Letters, p. 286.
The Dolphin Manuscript (1972)
1. The 1973 first edition text of The Dolphin was superseded by the second printing and the 1974 paperback edition, and has long been unavailable. Lowell made more than a dozen changes to individual poems in the second printing. He made further changes to the paperback and for selections of his poems (in three editions, published in 1974, 1976, and 1977). His post-publication revisions are recorded in full in the editorially composite version of The Dolphin in the Collected Poems. In the 1973 first edition, there are on six occasions spellings or marks of punctuation that may well be typos, yet we cannot be certain. Lowell’s subsequent changes to these may be his corrections or his revisions, so I thought it best to remain faithful throughout to the first edition without ruling on likelihoods.
2. The name given to the baby in The Dolphin, and also the true name of Robert Sheridan Lowell, Robert Lowell and Caroline Blackwood’s son.
3. Robert Lowell to Frank Bidart, May 15, 1972, in The Dolphin Letters, p. 282.
4. Interview with editor, January 29, 2017.
5. The versos of six manuscript pages contain writing—in one instance, notes toward a poem not part of The Dolphin; in four others, mistyped titles. They are not reproduced in this edition. Bidart’s corrections to section 2 of Artist’s Model, on page 38, run to the verso, and are here included.