THE DOLPHIN

First UK edition, first printing. Publisher's original black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dustwrapper illustrated by Sidney Nolan. A fine copy, the binding square and firm,the cloth and gilt sharp, the contents bright and clean throughout. In the bright, very near fine dustwrapper, showing just the merest surface wear and rubbing to extremities. Not price-clipped (£1.75 net to the front flap). An uncommonly bright, clean copy.

Winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 'The Dolphin' (the third of three volumes Lowell published in 1973), may be better known for the fuss it caused before and after publication than its poetry. A sequence of sonnets charting the breakdown of Lowell's marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick and extra-marital affair with Lady Caroline Blackwood, the controversy related to Lowell's use (often verbatim) of Hardwick's private letters to him, a decision resulting in a spate of pre-publication letters from friends and fellow writers urging him to reconsider. "I should be less than honest", Stanley Kunitz wrote to him, "if I didn't tell you it both fascinates and repels me. [P]arts of it are marvellous — wild, erotic, shattering. […] But some passages I can scarcely bear to read: they are too ugly, for being too cruel, too intimately cruel." In a similar vein, Elizabeth Bishop wrote "It's hell to write this, so please first do believe I think dolphin is magnificent poetry. It is also honest poetry — almost. […] One can use one's life a[s] material — one does, anyway — but these letters — aren't you violating a trust? if you were given permission — if you hadn't changed them. But art just isn't worth that much." Reviewing the book (The Listener, 21 June 1973), Christopher Ricks compared Lowell's poems to the monologues of Browning and Tennyson. "[T]he recreation of Lizzie's letters", he wrote, "which could be the most monstrous and is likely to be the most disliked part of Lowell's undertaking [,] is unsentimental and movingly just. [L]ucid and poignant, [they] show her as not reducible to the wronged woman or a martyr [...] [H]e is enabled, by speaking so of remorse, to break its addictive elation and to achieve instead some lovingkindness". In a letter to his publisher, Robert Giroux (July 18, 1973), Lowell described Ricks' review as "[a] kind of lawyers summation of the defense in a difficult but just case." (Saskia Hamilton, Ed., 'The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979' [New York: 2019]; Ian Hamilton, 'Robert Lowell: A Biography' [London: 1983]).