A new miscellany that includes depictions of his mental illness, reminiscences of peers including Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, Allen Tate and Hannah Arendt, and other twigs and seeds, many seeing print for the first time ... Does the world need Memoirs? ... The argument I will make for Memoirs is this: It’s densely yet nimbly written, and you sense Lowell’s judgment and discrimination in every paragraph. As with nearly everything he wrote, there’s a sense of wheels within wheels ... Memoirs is evocative, and sly, in its assessment of Lowell’s Boston Brahmin family ... This book’s editors, Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, silently and deftly amend, in their footnotes, Lowell’s many small errors of fact, and point out where he seems to have invented characters. There’s a whole other book going on down there in the footnotes ... Reading Memoirs is like finding a roll of undeveloped film from 1954. Lowell rode these sentences into new ways of thinking and writing. There were riddles of existence that, clearly, he was only beginning to shake down.

Something of a grab bag ... The new volume includes a large gathering of literary portraits, as in the earlier book, and a previously unpublished gathering of odds and ends, mostly memoir material from manuscripts ... Memoirs is anchored by 'My Autobiography,' which takes the reader to Lowell’s early adulthood ... It makes for excellent reading, whatever your feelings (or lack of feelings) about the poet or the man ... 'My Autobiography' makes up about 40 percent of Memoirs and is easily the best writing in the book. Lowell was always a capable prose writer, but the language on display in this childhood memoir is a good deal more than that. Lowell could be a superb portraitist when he chose to be, and the parade of characters passing through his household (several of whom appear separately in his poems) is memorable and delightful ... Were Lowell nearly as cruel in his rather anodyne and flattering portraits of his literary mentors, friends and epigones, the 'Life Among Writers' section of Memoirs would be immeasurably more interesting ... 'My Autobiography' sat in Lowell’s desk drawer for decades, unpublished and unread until Giroux plucked two more of its chapters and combined them for an essay in Collected Prose. It deserves a wider audience. Taken as a whole, 'My Autobiography' is nothing less than a treasure in the literary memoir genre.

Much of what appears in Memoirs is a result of being encouraged, while at the clinic, to write autobiographically — evocative descriptions of his childhood that have remained cloistered in archives until now ... Along with these recollections of his past are striking portraits of the effects of his bipolar disorder ... In the book’s final section are found eloquent portraits of his contemporaries ... Aside from the sheer beauty of the writing — the poet’s naked confrontation of his own pain, the honesty with which he portrays a family dynamic, should strike any reader to the heart ... Memoirs is also proof that Lowell remains an artist for the present moment ... Robert Lowell’s wisdom, his close observation, is as vital now as it was in his lifetime.

The family portraits, rich in stabbing detail, deepen our understanding of Lowell’s childhood and his attempts at recovery in the 'balanced aquarium' of the hospital. His reminiscences fill out figures known to readers of his work ... Writing was a life raft. Through it he found a way to lower his poems’ temperature and fix, in lasting images, what his biographer Ian Hamilton called 'the moderate emotions', fashioning memory into art.

Lowell’s memories are at once vivid and listless. Sentences are tinged with the desperation of a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, holding on to flashbacks of more placid days ... The book is rounded out by a dozen or so vignettes of fellow poets and friends. Lowell seems buoyant and chattier in these pieces, unburdened by the weight of being custodian of his family’s secrets. At the same time, each essay becomes an occasion for a new self-portrait.

Fans of the poet and completists of his works will zero in on this book fairly automatically...Casual or more generalist readers might encounter some rougher sledding, since the only two people who seem to care more about the minutiae of Lowell’s distant ancestors twice removed than Lowell himself are his two editors this time around, Steve Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc ... Fortunately, no matter how many Noah’s Arks of Starks we get taxonomized in such clarifications, and no matter how often Lowell himself makes the same mistake all memoirists do — presuming their life is interesting — virtually every page of this fascinating book has the same saving grace: Lowell’s brilliance as a writer. Long-time readers of his poetry will already be familiar with the sometimes oddly shuffling prose-like tempo that infuses so much of it. Now those readers and everybody else can read 400 pages that prove what they must already have suspected, that the same is true in reverse: even at a young age, Lowell could put the sheen of poetry’s incipience on even the most humdrum prose patches ... everything here is worth revisiting, in large part for the superb blending of insight and cattiness ... what a pretty, endlessly interesting set all these volumes make: the collected letters, the collected prose, the collected autobiographical writings, and of course the only thing that really matters, the collected poems. And if the bored, bit-drill eyes of the little twerp on the cover promise trouble, well, that, too is a professional requirement, if the poet’s any good.

This one is edited to the teeth by two Lowell scholars and more than once overwhelms us with information that obscures rather than illuminates its subject ... I’m grateful for this edition of Memoirs not for providing new information about Lowell, his misfortunes, his glories, but for the way it took me back 63 years (can it be?) to Life Studies, a book he never surpassed.

The best approach to My Autobiography, The Balanced Aquarium and the other pieces here is perhaps to view them as dry runs for something far greater and enduring yet to come. These writings give us added glimpses into the life of a poet who made a new art form out of baring the soul, even while expertly keeping his words measured and precise ... Memoirs should not serve as an introduction to Lowell and his work as much as a supplement, inviting us to discover or revisit his peerless poems.

Highly detailed, lucid, and precise, Lowell’s writing is witty, sarcastic, and revealing about himself, his parents, his beloved grandfather, and others in his orbit ... A rich book for scholars and fans of Lowell’s poetry.

Scintillating ... Throughout, his writing is full of subtle, witty, and slightly off-kilter evocations of people...psychotic breaks...and poetry ... Lowell’s rich language and startling perceptiveness are nothing short of captivating.