SOURCE: “Two Poets Named Robert,” in Ohio Review, Vol. 18, No. 3, Fall, 1977, pp. 110-25.

In the following excerpt, Hall compares the praise and recognition heaped upon the poet Robert Lowell with the undeserved neglect of Francis by literary critics. Hall offers a favorable assessment of Francis's Collected Poems.

In 1976 Robert Lowell published his Selected Poems, two hundred and thirty-eight pages taken from Lord Weary's Castle, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Life Studies, For the Union Dead, Near the Ocean, Notebooks, Notebook, History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin. Four of the last five volumes involve duplication, because Lowell kept revising the fourteen-line poems first collected in the plural Notebooks of 1966. Selected Poems includes nothing from Imitations or the plays. I believe that a few of the early poems first appeared in different form in Land of Unlikeness (1944) but I have been unable to check that volume. Lowell was...