SOURCE: "Perfection of the Work," in The Nation, April 11, 1987, pp. 475-6, 478.

In the following review, Bogen offers positive evaluation of Lowell's Collected Prose.

Robert Lowell was probably the last American poet who might be described as formidable. His stylistic transformations—from dense formal elegies to free verse confessions, blank sonnets and diary-like musings—were news in a way that no poet's are today. Immersed in aesthetic debates and the controversies of public life, he held a commanding place in American culture even after his move to Britain in the late 1960s. That prominence has declined in the decade since his death. Lowell's choice of subject may be partly to blame here. A poet who writes a lot about his life is at the mercy of his biographer after his death, and Lowell was not served well by his. Ian Hamilton's Robert Lowell: A Biography is an exhausting compendium...