Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979
WINNER OF THE PEGASUS AWARD FOR POETRY CRITICISM
The Dolphin Letters offers an unprecedented portrait of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick during the last seven years of Lowell's life (1970 to 1977), a time of personal crisis and creative innovation for both writers. Centred on the letters they exchanged with each other and with other members of their circle - writers, intellectuals, friends and publishers, including Elizabeth Bishop, Caroline Blackwood, Mary McCarthy and Adrienne Rich - this book has the narrative sweep of a novel, telling the story of the dramatic breakup of Lowell and Hardwick's twenty-one-year marriage and their extraordinary, but late, reconciliation.
Lowell's sonnet sequence The Dolphin (for which he controversially adapted Hardwick's letters as a source) and his last book, Day by Day, were written during this period, as were Hardwick's influential books Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature and Sleepless Nights. Lowell and Hardwick are acutely intelligent observers of marriage, children, friends and the feelings that their personal tribulations gave rise to.
The Dolphin Letters, edited by Saskia Hamilton, is a debate about the limits of art - what occasions a work of art, and what moral and artistic licence artists have to make use of their lives and the lives of others as material. The crisis of Lowell's The Dolphin was profoundly affecting to everyone around him, and Bishop's warning that 'art just isn't worth that much' haunts us today.
Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) was a literary critic, a novelist and one of the founders of the New York Review of Books. She was the author of Sleepless Nights (1979) and two other novels; a biography of Herman Melville; and four collections of essays, including Seduction and Betrayal (1974), a study of women and literature.
Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was the renowned and controversial author of many books of poetry, including Life Studies (1959), For the Union Dead (1964) and Day by Day (1977).
Saskia Hamilton is the author of three books of poetry, including Corridor (2014). She is the editor of The Letters of Robert Lowell (2005) and The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972-1973 (2019), and co-editor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (2008). She teaches at Barnard College.