The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972–1973 by Robert Lowell, and: The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle ed. by Saskia Hamilton (review)

Robert Lowell left his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, in the spring of 1973 for Caroline Blackwood, whom he would marry and with whom he would have a child. Until Lowell's sudden death by a heart attack in 1977, when he was on the point of returning to Hardwick, their correspondence never lessened, and even as one of her letters would begin "Dearest Cal" it might also include the most forthright of adverse judgments on his behavior. As is well-known, Lowell made use of her letters to him in the last two books of unrhymed sonnets, For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin, which he published in 1973; what has not been generally known until this collection is that the hundred or so letters she wrote to him during these years of separation only "surfaced" (the editor's word for it) decades after both Lowell and Hardwick were dead. What happened to them was that Blackwood, some years after Lowell's death, put the items in a large envelope and mailed them for safekeeping to Lowell's good friend and editor, the poet Frank Bidart ("The flagrant Frank Bidart" Hardwick calls him). Why they didn't eventually wind up in Hardwick's hands is not at all clear. Now, 15 years after Hardwick's death in 2004, they have been most fully and patiently edited by Saskia Hamilton, who previously edited a large collection of Lowell's letters. "Edited" is perhaps an understatement for the fullness of annotation—including many parts of relevant letters to and from both Lowells by friends—that shed light on Lowell and Hardwick's situation over this crucial eight-year period. We will not need further epistolary accounts of these painful and productive years in their careers.

In her introduction to Lowell's collected letters in 2005, Hamilton speaks of how rich they were in the periods when Lowell was well—when his illness was abated by lithium: "full of affection and candor, funny, gregarious, hungry for fathers, hungry for conversation about writing." These qualities can perhaps be seen most brilliantly in his correspondence with Elizabeth Bishop, with whom he maintained the most vibrant of exchanges. Unfortunately his letters to Hardwick in the collection at hand do not on the whole show comparable life, which is not surprising, since his hunger for "fathers" and conversation had been largely gratified. In its place we have the guilty but unbowed lover of Caroline Blackwood, even as he wrote to the "Dearest Lizzie" and their daughter Harriet, both of whom he was abandoning.

As he prepared for his fall term's teaching at the University of Essex, the following sentences from letters to Hardwick in September and October of 1970 express his plight: "I too can't state my feelings even to myself. The past is almost more with me than today. I look on it with all pride and joy, but it is piercing to look back, especially when I have no reproaches." (Are the reproaches from others? From himself?) "Unease and distance and severance" are on his mind, he writes, as he has been reading Emerson's poems:

I don't think I can go back to you. Thought does no good. I cannot weigh the dear, troubled past, so many illnesses, which weren't due to you, in which you save everything our wondering, changing growing years with Harriet … I can't compare this memory with the future, unseen and beyond recollection with Caroline. I love her very much but I can't see that. … I don't think I can come back to you, but allow me this short space before I arrive in New York to wobble in my mind. I will be turning from the longest realest and...