Imitations

by Robert Lowell

Overview

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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374502607
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/01/1990
Edition description:	ENLARGED
Pages:	149
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.38(d)

About the Author

Robert Lowell (1917–1977) was the renowned and pathbreaking author of many leading works in American poetry, including Life Studies (FSG, 1959), For the Union Dead (FSG, 1964), and Day by Day (FSG, 1977).

Table of Contents

	Introduction	xi
	Acknowledgements	xv
	The Killing of Lykaon	1
	Three Letters to Anaktoria	3
	Children	6
	The Great Testament	8
	Ballad for the Dead Ladies	15
	The Old Lady's Lament for Her Youth	17
	Villon's Prayer for His Mother	21
	Villon's Epitaph	23
	The Infinite	25
	Saturday Night in the Village	26
	Sylvia	29
	Sic Transit	32
	Heine Dying in Paris	38
	Russia 1812	41
	At Gautier's Grave	44
	To the Reader	46
	My Beatrice	48
	Spleen	50
	Autumn	51
	The Ruined Garden	52
	The Flawed Bell	53
	Meditation	54
	The Injured Moon	55
	The Abyss	56
	The Swan	57
	Voyage to Cythera	60
	The Servant	63
	The Game	64
	The Voyage	66
	Nostalgia	74
	The Poet at Seven	77
	The Drunken Boat	81
	Eighteen-Seventy
	A Poster	84
	Napoleon after Sedan	85
	To the French of the Second Empire	86
	On the Road	86
	At the Green Cabaret	87
	A Malicious Girl	88
	The Sleeper in the Valley	89
	Evil	89
	The Lice-Hunters	91
	At Gautier's Grave	92
	Helen	95
	A Roman Sarcophagus	96
	The Cadet Picture of My Father	98
	Self-Portrait	99
	Orpheus, Eurydice and Hermes	100
	Pigeons	149
	Winter Noon	104
	You Knocked Yourself Out	105
	Dora Markus	107
	Day and Night	110
	The Magnolia's Shadow	111
	Hitlerian Spring	113
	The Coastguard House	115
	Arsenio	117
	The Chess Player	120
	News from Mount Amiata	122
	The Eel	125
	Little Testament	128
	Black Spring	130
	September	131
	For Anna Akmatova	133
	Mephistopheles	135
	The Seasons	137
	Sparrow Hills	141
	Wild Vines	142
	In the Woods	143
	The Landlord	145
	Hamlet in Russia, A Soliloquy	147

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher