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Robert Lowell
© Gerard Malanga
 ROBERT LOWELL
The Art of Poetry No. 3
Interviewed by Frederick Seidel
Issue 25, Winter-Spring 1961
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From the Interview
INTERVIEWER
You said that most of the writers you’ve known have been against the grain. What did you mean?

LOWELL
When I began writing most of the great writers were quite unpopular. They hadn’t reached the universities yet, and their circulation was small. Even Eliot wasn’t very popular then. But life seemed to be there. It seemed to be one of those periods when the lid was still being blown. The great period of blowing the lid was the time of Schöenberg and Picasso and Joyce and the early Eliot, where a power came into the arts which we perhaps haven’t bad since. These people were all rather traditional, yet they were stifled by what was being done, and they almost wrecked things to do their great works—even rather minor but very good writers such as Williams or Marianne Moore. Their kind of protest and queerness has hardly been repeated. They’re wonderful writers. You wouldn’t see anyone as strange as Marianne Moore again, not for a long while.

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Authors Mentioned
Charles Baudelaire, Saul Bellow, Elizabeth Bishop, Anton Chekhov, Richard Eberhart, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Robert Graves, Stanley Kunitz, Marianne Moore, Boris Pasternak, Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, Delmore Schwartz, William Carlos Williams, Aeschylus, Richard Palmer Blackmur, Robert Browning, Catullus, Hart Crane, Michael Drayton, William Empson, Ford Madox Ford, Homer, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Randall Jarrell, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, John Keats, Jules Laforgue, Amy Lowell, James Russell Lowell, Andrew Marvell, Flannery O'Connor, J. F. Powers, Propertius, John Crowe Ransom, Theodore Roethke, J. D. Salinger, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, W. D. Snodgrass, Sophocles, Allen Tate, Leo Tolstoy, Walt Whitman, Yvor Winters
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