For the first time, the collected poems of America's preeminent postwar poet

Edmund Wilson wrote of Robert Lowell that he was the ""only recent American poet--if you don't count Eliot--who writes successfully in the language and cadence and rhyme of the resounding English tradition.""
Frank Bidart and David Gewanter have compiled a definitive edition of Lowell's poems, from the early triumph of Lord Weary's Castle, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, to the brilliant willfulness of his Imitations of Sappho, Baudelaire, Rilke, and other masters, to the late spontaneity of his History, winner of another Pulitzer, and of his last book of poems, Day by Day. The book will also include several poems never previously collected, as well as a selection of Lowell's intriguing drafts.

As poet and critic Randall Jarrell said, ""You feel before reading any new poem of his the uneasy expectation of perhaps encountering a masterpiece.""
Lowell's Collected Poems will offer the first opportunity to view the entire range of his astonishing verse.

""Lowell seems even larger now than he did when he was a living presence, our greatest poet. His work resonates with undiminished force."" --James Atlas, The New Criterion

""Robert Lowell . . . is an American manifestation. A Lowell of the Lowells from Boston, he embodies the American history that he endures and subjects to fierce analysis. He studies and re-creates in his poems the stories of imperial Rome, and he is himself a citizen caught up in the issues of world power. His poems become crystallizations of what is most central and troublesome in the conscience of his times."" --William Stafford, Chicago Tribune

""The singular strength of Robert Lowell's poetry has always been . . . to bring a sense of context to bear upon his poems, not just in local efforts but as a whole [and a] technical mastery that is inseparable from imaginative mastery."" --Christopher Ricks, The New Statesman