... expertly edited and with wonderfully informative footnotes by the poet and scholar Saskia Hamilton, who also provides an alert and balanced introduction ... The Dolphin letters illuminate Lowell’s life and aesthetic perplexities in his later years, but they are equally useful in unveiling Elizabeth Hardwick’s unforgettable role during that era ... For me, the 'lost' letters testify to Hardwick’s extraordinary depth of character and faithfulness to the past years of love between herself and Lowell ... One cannot but admire Hardwick’s insight into her daughter’s sensibility and gifts ... These letters don’t match the inventiveness of those exchanged by Lowell and Bishop, when each had only to entertain the other and sympathize with troubles from afar. And, at first glance, the voyeuristic interest offered by the living drama of the messages between Lowell and Hardwick almost outweighs their nature as letters. But neither can put a foot wrong in writing a sentence; each has the instinctive cadence of a born writer, the sophistication of an adult who has seen and felt almost too much, the directness and candor of an intimate acquaintance, and the steady capacity for irony even in sadness.
The letters are worth reading not merely for what they tell us about Hardwick and Lowell but also because they are the direct source of many of the poems in Lowell’s book The Dolphin ... Lowell emerges from his poems and letters as both thoughtless and tortured, entitled and damaged. Hardwick’s letters are more direct, her rage—and her interest in protecting her daughter—coming to the fore. But she is also formidable and smart, and there are moments when her daunting presence makes itself impressively felt ... When you reread Sleepless Nights straight after The Dolphin Letters you see how artful Hardwick’s novel is.
... brings to life one of literary history’s most famous scandals ... [an] unusual book ... What makes the letters so darkly compelling, and such uneasy, thrilling company, is a different concern — the very one, in fact, that Hardwick pursued in all her writing, whether on Ibsen’s heroines or on the civil rights movement. It is the elemental question of motive. Why do people do what they do? How much do they understand their own impulses and responsibilities?
... in this curious way brought together again two people who were never fully separated and never fully reunited. Fittingly, their communication is faltering and out of sync. Letters cross and leave unanswered questions. But the distance between them is less of a force than their continuing need to write to each other ... The Hardwick-Lowell correspondence on its own would make a fat book, but a less absorbing and significant one than Hamilton has created by including letters to and from the writers who constituted 'their circle.' Hardwick and Lowell couldn’t help but write sharp-edged, moving letters, often. But not always; and to follow every annotated step on their path to that ordinary calamity—divorce—can feel like watching a slow-motion train wreck. Being understandably preoccupied with themselves, each other, their daughter, and their taxes, they fall into the clichés proper to their stock roles (the abandoned wife, the feckless, wandering husband). The other voices Hamilton introduces counter that effect and enlarge the picture ... Some of it is familiar ... [Blackwood] is an indistinct presence in this book, represented by only a few letters and what others say about her.
Hardwick...emerging belatedly as the heroine of her own, takes over The Dolphin Letters...It seems increasingly that since his death, Lowell has lost and lost and gone on losing. Yes, others have come up, but it is strange how quickly he seems to have gone backwards as well. He suffers here not merely because as the deserting husband he is the villain of the piece, but also because he is less in evidence; either he is absent (silent, often, or in arrears), or sheepishly asserting a presence that often seemed, even to him, misplaced and hard to credit ... Hardwick emerges as a superior person altogether, so much more diligent, more intense, more compassionate, more aware, more committed than anyone else around. This is the unsurprising revelation of the book. Her white pieces overwhelm his black. Sometimes, reading her, you think she is even better at being Lowell than he is, the more literary, the more acute, the more inspired, the better phrasemaker ... The Dolphin Letters reads not like soap opera or life (thank God), but maybe an epistolary novel among high-strung, intelligent, well-intentioned characters; it is an agreeable and surprising aspect of the book that it doesn’t show us people at their worst. Mercifully, we do not have the squalid feeling that we are reading something we shouldn’t be ... Through all these years Hardwick and Lowell somehow carried on talking to each other.
... the essential volume for any understanding of what actually went on ... With 'Lizzie' as its principal author, The Dolphin Letters turns out to be a better and a more important book than The Dolphin ... Hardwick’s alternations of mood, between forbearance and anger, are not the manic kind that Lowell suffered. They reflect a fluctuating, improvised rebuilding, more suited to prose than to self-mythologizing poetry ... Lowell’s conduct in every part of the story, not just his eventual abuse of Hardwick’s letters, seems worse in this Rashomon-like volume than it has in previous tellings ... Hamilton approaches the particulars here with deep knowledge and occasionally overexcited exegesis.
The pair filled their letters with literary references and Hamilton traces every allusion. The same commitment was palpable when Hamilton co-edited Words In Air (2008) — four decades’ worth of letters between Lowell and the poet Elizabeth Bishop, which I didn’t so much read as feel I was living in for 800 pages, so rich was it in artistic insight and social history. ... Reading their letters today, I feel some of the awe Hardwick expressed when the philosopher Hannah Arendt was ill in 1974: 'That whole generation and its learning, the kind of thinking it did, the greatness of the lives and the persons.'
In Saskia Hamilton’s extraordinary edition, The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979, Hardwick is unmistakably the heroine. Her voice is stronger, more sympathetic, and, finally, more interesting than Lowell’s ... The letters reveal—as if there were any doubt—how much Hardwick kept Lowell’s life ticking, even after he had left her for Blackwood. She has a hard time condemning him: she excoriates him for his ruthlessness in one letter, only to apologize for her bad humor in the next. Sometimes these vacillations take place within the same letter ... Loving and losing Lowell was something Hardwick had to bear many times. The Dolphin Letters reveals how very difficult it always was.
Replete with editor Hamilton's masterly and well-researched footnotes, this will be an indispensable gloss to the reading and interpretation of The Dolphin.
Hardwick is elegantly exacting even as the situation worsens and she pounds out letters of fury and resolve. Lowell’s responses are apologetic and dogged ... With graceful authority, poet and editor Saskia Hamilton defines the emotional and literary issues raised by this controversial Pulitzer Prize-winning book, reissued to reveal Lowell’s revisions as The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972–1973 in conjunction with these ensnaring and affecting transatlantic letters between two poets who, in spite of epic hurt, never ceased loving each other.
The push and pull of love and anger course through this riveting collection of correspondence between onetime literary power couple Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick ... Though Lowell is perhaps better known, Hardwick emerges as the collection’s central figure. Her voice resonates more deeply, with frustrated but loving concern for Lowell—who struggled with manic-depressive disorder—and with protectiveness toward their daughter, Harriet ... Bolstered by a helpful introduction and timeline by poet and Barnard professor Hamilton, this compulsively readable collection illuminates a tumultuous time in two celebrated writers’ lives.
A peculiarly fascinating volume ... This is a long, lush, and impeccably footnoted volume, and yet some of the most intriguing action happens between the lines. Poet Hamilton, who also edited The Letters of Robert Lowell (2005), sets up the book with a well-informed section of biographical context and a chronology covering both the two writers and the broader political arena. As a result, before the exchange of letters begins, readers knows what Hardwick doesn't: that Lowell, playfully depicting his time in England and dithering about when he will return to the States, is already deep in a relationship with Blackwood. This quality gives the letters the sometimes-voyeuristic thrill of watching a slow motion train wreck ... A devastating examination of the limits of the written word.
