My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise, a captive as Racine, the man of craft, drawn through his maze of iron composition by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre. When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines, the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . . I have sat and listened to too many words of the collaborating muse, and plotted perhaps too freely with my life, not avoiding injury to others, not avoiding injury to myself-- to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction, an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting my eyes have seen what my hand did.

In a letter to Jarrell from 1957 Lowell wrote "I suppose we shouldn't swap too many compliments but I am heavily in your debt. Later the press would characterize their marriage as "restless and emotionally harrowing. Life


Family history
Lowell was born to Commander Robert Traill Spencer Lowell III and Charlotte (née Winslow) in Boston Massachusetts.

He won the Pulitzer Prize in both 1947 and 1974 the National Book Award in 1960 and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977. Robert "Cal" Traill Spence Lowell IV (March 1 1917 – September 12 1977) was an American poet considered to be one of the founders of the confessional poetry movement.