SOURCE: "Art, Evil, and the Poet," in New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1987, pp. 22-3.

In the following review, Davie offers favorable assessment of Lowell's Collected Prose.

This may be Robert Lowell's most winning book. But Collected Prose should not be read straight through, nor taken in big gulps. Robert Giroux, faced with more than 40 pieces, nearly all short and scrappy, some incomplete, has sorted them by subject matter into three sections and an appendix. On balance this arrangement is probably the best possible. But it has disadvantages. If we want to know what Lowell thought of William Carlos Williams, we find him taking three bites at the cherry—in 1947, 1948, 1962; and whereas we are enlightened about how he changed his mind (the two bites at John Berryman, eight years apart, are very illuminating in this way), we are confused about how far his second thoughts canceled out his...