SOURCE: Pratt, William. Review of Robert Lowell: A Biography, by Ian Hamilton. World Literature Today 57, no. 3 (summer 1983): 463-64.

In the following review, Pratt discusses Hamilton's Robert Lowell: A Biography, and Robert Lowell: Nihilist as Hero, by Vereen M. Bell. Pratt asserts that Hamilton's biography is “the fullest presentation of Lowell's life so far.”

“I go over my life trying to understand it—I think in a way I never understood it,” Robert Lowell admitted to Peter Taylor, many years after they had begun their writing careers together at Kenyon College, and he agreed with George Santayana's saying that “I have enjoyed writing about my life more than living it.” Certainly Lowell's life was desperately unhappy much of the time, though it is not certain whether his catastrophic personal existence drove him to be a writer, or his writing drove him to destroy not only his own happiness but...