Robert Lowell in Love

Robert Lowell was known not only as a great poet but also as a writer whose devotion to his art came at a tremendous personal cost. In this work, his third on Robert Lowell, Jeffrey Meyers examines the poet’s impassioned, fraught relationships with the key women in his life, including his mother, Charlotte Winslow Lowell; his three wives – Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Caroline Blackwood; nine of his many lovers; his close women friends – Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich; and his most talented students, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.Lowell’s charismatic personality and compelling poetry attracted lovers and friends who were both frightened and excited by his aura of brilliance and danger. He loved the idea of falling in love, and in his recurring manic episodes he needed women at the center of his emotional and artistic life. While he idealized his loves and encouraged their talents, he never fully grasped his wives’ and lovers’ deepest needs and feelings, and his frenetic affairs and tortured marriages were always conducted entirely on his own terms. Robert Lowell in Love tells the story of the poet in the grip of love and gives voice to the women who loved him, inspired his poetry, and suffered along with him.