ROBERT LOWELL (1917-1977)

One of 250 copies of the first edition of Lowell's first book, with a title-page woodcut by Gustav Wolf. The work was printed at the press of the Cummington School, where Harry Duncan printed first editions of works by many important twentieth-century poets. Lowell, whose New England ancestors included James Russell and Amy Lowell, was associated with nearly all the important American poets of the first half of this century. He was a student at St. Mark's School when Richard Eberhart was on the faculty, and he knew Frost early on. Through Ford Madox Ford, Lowell visited Allen Tate and his wife Caroline Gordon at their home in Tennessee, and soon after left Harvard to study with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College.

In his "Introduction" to Lowell's first book, his mentor Tate provided a brilliant summary of current themes and future directions in Lowell's work, pointing to tendencies toward intellectualized Christian symbolism and a more personal, historical vision. Lowell revised his work extensively over the course of his career, and most of the poems in Land of Unlikeness have never been reprinted in their original form.