Robert Lowell and Ovid

About the Book

In 1951, Robert Lowell published a long poem, “The Mills of the Kavanaughs,” dealing obliquely with the collapse of his marriage to the novelist Jean Stafford.  In 1973, he published The Dolphin, dealing directly with the collapse of his second marriage.  In between his poetry underwent radical transformations in structure, style, diction, and purpose.  Robert Lowell and Ovid examines these transformations as they relate not only to the Roman poet, whose Metamorphoses Ezra Pound called “a sacred book” and “a safe guide in religion” but also to Dante and The Divine Comedy and Pound and his Cantos.  In addition to “The Mills of the Kavanaughs” and The Dolphin, the book looks at Imitations, Phaedra, Prometheus Bound, Notebook 1967-68, and its revisions into History and For Lizzie and Harriet.  The result for readers is a clearer understanding of the tensions that Lowell indicates tore apart his marriages and led to the creation of these works as well as his uses of “imitation,” “the mythic method,” and “classicism” and the tradition that he and they derive from and a generation of poets built upon.  Foremost among these uses is a confounding of the myth of self with a myth of art so that, in the opposition between writer and the State that he takes over from Ovid and Pound, he chooses the writer, indicating in The Dolphin that “writers write all possible wrong.”

About the Author

Jerome Mazzaro is an accomplished poet and critic. He was born in Detroit, Michigan and received degrees from the State University of Iowa (M.A. in Creative Writing) and Wayne State University (A.B. and Ph.D.) He has taught at the University of Detroit, the State University of New York, Bennington College, and San Diego State College. In 1964, he was awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and he has served as Editor and Contributing Editor for a number of journals. His books include a verse translation of Juvenal’s Satires, critical studies on Robert Lowell, the Renaissance English Lyric, William Carlos Williams, Luigi Pirandello, and Dante as well as four volumes of poetry. In 1996, he retired from the State University of New York at Buffalo and currently lives in Manhattan.