Imitations - by Robert Lowell (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Not quite translations--yet something much more, much richer, than mere tributes to their original versions--the poems in Imitations reflect Lowell's conceptual, historical, literary, and aesthetic engagements with a diverse range of voices from the Western canon. Moving chronologically from Homer to Pasternak--and including such master poets en route as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rilke, and Montale--the fascinating and hugely informed pieces in this book are themselves meant to be read as "a whole," according to Lowell's telling Introduction, "a single volume, a small anthology of European poetry."

Review Quotes

"Imitations is, so far as I know, the only book of its kind in literature . . . Lowell, who has used materials from other writers, all the way from Homer and Pasternak, has produced a volume of verse which consists of variations on themes provided by these other poets and which is really an original sequence by Robert Lowell of Boston." --Edmund Wilson

"The book has a twofold fascination: it gives access to the private realm of a major poet, showing us how he reads his masters and peers . . . At the same time it provides the reader with . . . creative echoes to a number of important poems." --George Steiner

About the Author

Robert Lowell, one of America's great men of letters, died in 1977.