Letters to the Editor
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
‘Lowell Studies’
Writing on the anniversary of the death of the poet Robert Lowell in today’s New York Sun, Adam Kirsch errs in declaring Elizabeth Bishop “the only great poet of Lowell’s generation to outlive him” [Arts & Letters, “Lowell Studies,” August 15, 2007].
Why omit mention of Allen Ginsberg, the most widely acclaimed and popular poet of that generation? Only because he was not intimate of a circle limited, according to Mr. Kirsch, to Lowell’s roommates and literary sparring mates, each of whom, Mr. Kirsch suggests, fell prey to mental illness?
Ginsberg’s contemporaneous creation of a confessional poetry was an achievement which Lowell, in later days lauded, as he joined Ginsberg in conversation and in joint readings in the year of his death.
It is astonishing that Ginsberg, whose poem “Kaddish” is witness to the madness of his mother and muse, never succumbs but becomes progressively “well-adjusted,” unlike the poets of Lowell’s circle, all of whom died appalling deaths.
Ginsberg died in 1997, 20 years after the death of the only other poet of comparable distinction within his generation.
Allen Tobias
Brooklyn, N.Y.
