Elegy

Heaney pens his farewell to American poet Robert Lowell. He had become familiar with Robert Lowell’s poetry as early as the Group led by Philip Hobsbaum in the poet’s undergraduate period at QUB around 1963, via meetings in which Heaney was able to share his rookie poems with like-minded fledgling poets. Heaney acknowledged that Lowell’s poetry (‘all through the sixties I was reading him, constantly’) was to his liking as he was searching for his own poetic voice. Heaney first met Lowell in 1972 at a party thrown for the American poet and his second wife Elizabeth Hardwick in London: he sums up their first conversation (DOD217) ‘he was well clued into the Northern Ireland situation. It was a genuine […]