The Dolphin

The Dolphin is the last of three related books Robert Lowell published in 1973, and the only one made entirely of new poems rather than revised versions of earlier work: a sequence of loose, unrhymed fourteen line sonnets that tracks the end of his marriage to the writer Elizabeth Hardwick and the beginning of his relationship with Caroline Blackwood, whom he nicknamed Dolphin and who gives the book its title.

Lowell builds many of the sonnets directly out of Elizabeth Hardwick's own private letters to him, quoting and altering her actual words as material for the poems, a method that turns the breakup itself into the book's subject and its raw evidence at the same time. That choice caused real damage before the book even reached readers. Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Lowell in March 1972, before publication, praising the poems but objecting that he had altered Hardwick's actual letters, telling him plainly that "art just isn't worth that much." Adrienne Rich went further, publishing a review in American Poetry Review that called the poems "cruel and shallow," a rebuke that effectively ended her long friendship with Lowell. The controversy has never fully separated from the poems themselves, since the ethical question the book raises, whether a poet may turn a former partner's private words into public art without her consent, is also its explicit subject.

Reading The Dolphin means encountering an uncomfortably intimate sequence, formally loose sonnets that read closer to diary entries than to traditional love poetry, written by a poet fully aware of, and unwilling to resolve, the damage his own method was doing. It suits a reader interested in one of American poetry's clearest and most argued over cases of a book that a poet's own friends believed crossed a real line.