"In 1969, Allen Ginsberg wrote to his friend, fellow poet, and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "Alas, telephone destroys letters!" Fortunately, however, by then the two had already exchanged a treasure trove of personal correspondence, and more than any other documents, their letters-intimate, opinionated, and action-packed-reveal the true nature of their lifelong friendship and creative relationship. Collected here for the first time, they offer an intimate view into the range of artistic vision and complementary sensibilities that fueled the genius of their literary collaborations.Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg were two of the twentieth century's most influential literary rebels, and their correspondence documents a time when both were rising to the peak of their notoriety and international fame, traveling, writing, publishing, and performing their poetry during times of unprecedented social and cultural experimentation and upheaval. Ferlinghetti was Ginsberg's publisher and editor, and the correspondence begins with a telegram from Lawrence after hearing Allen's legendary reading of "Howl" at the Six Gallery: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?"The majority of the letters collected here have never before been published, and they span the period from 1955 until Ginsberg's death in 1997. Facsimiles and photographs enhance the collection, an evocative portrait of an inspiring and enduring relationship.Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an internationally renowned poet, painter, publisher, and founder of City Lights Books.Allen Ginsberg was a leading member of the Beat Generation and an award-winning poet best known as the author of Howl & Other Poems, among many other works"--

The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams is the most engaging and lively of literary correspondences - at once a portrait of two geniuses the testimony of their remarkable friendship, and a seedbed of ideas about American poetry. With a 1951 fan letter, the young British poet introduced herself to Williams, and by 1959, Williams is congratulating Levertov on her growth: "this book challenge[s] me so that I am glad I am not younger.... You have not always written so excellently.... I am going to read these first half-dozen poems - maybe more - until as an old man I have penetrated to where your secret is hid." The letters also chronicle their search (individually and together) for a set of formal poetic principles, a search which culminated for Levertov in 1965, when she coined the term "organic form." The warmth, the directness, the flavorsome individuality of the letters - 34 from Levertov and 42 from Williams - increased with their growing intimacy and mutual regard. Always intriguing, their independent-minded letters, which end with the elder poet's death in 1962, have great piquancy and charm. Denise Levertov herself initiated this project, and was then, in the year before her death, "fascinated to read the exchange." This edition also includes the correspondence between Levertov and Williams's widow Florence. Professor Christopher MacGowan, the noted Williams scholar, contributes a superb introduction and informative annotations throughout.

One of the most influential American poets of the twentieth century, Lowell was also a prolific letter-writer who corresponded with some of the remarkable writers and thinkers of his day, including Elizabeth Bishop, Edmund Wilson, Robert Kennedy, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, William Empson, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Marianne Moore. These letters document the transformation of Lowell's work over the course of his career; the germination of his moral beliefs - he famously opposed the WW II draft in a personal letter to President Roosevelt and was jailed as a conscientious objector; the development of his work; his reading habits; the relationship between poetry and prose that so fascinated him. 'How different prose is,' he remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop. 'Sometimes the two mediums refuse to say the same things...Without verse, without philosophy, I found it hard, I was naked without my line-ends.' The letters illuminate another side of the intimate life that was the subject of so many of his poems: his deep friendships with other writers; the manic-depressive illness he struggled to endure and understand; his marriages to three prose writers, Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Caroline Blackwood; his engagement with politics and the anti-war movement of the 1960s. 'By far the most famous poet of his era . . . Lowell transformed American poetry.' - Charles McGrath, THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE 'In his poems and prose . . . Lowell got more out of the midcentury American scene - literary, cultural, political - than anyone else.' - William H. Pritchard, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 'Robert Lowell was one of the three or four greatest American poets of the twentieth century . . . his real peers are the classics of American literature: Melville and Whitman, Eliot and Frost . . . Lowell's torrential eloquence, his historical consciousness, his moral and political seriousness are a standing challenge.' - Adam Kirsch, THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

German-Jewish poet Karl Wolfskehl spent the last years of his life, from 1938 to 1948, in Auckland, New Zealand, 'on the globe's last island reef', as a refugee from Nazi Germany. The conditions of his life forced him to consider the very nature of human existence, and his letters from New Zealand, many to friends and associates exiled around the globe, amount to an intellectual autobiography.

Begun in 1944 when Allen was a precocious, rebellious college student, the book charts his ascension as a revolutionary icon in poetry and ends with his father's death in 1976. Allen and Louis' letters are filled with affection, respect, and a healthy dose of argumentative zeal - they debate every major political and artistic issue that faced America in over three decades of extraordinary change, from Korea, the Beat generation and Cuba through Civil Rights and the counterculture to Vietnam and Watergate.

Leyland, Winston (ed) Love Poems and Selected Letters

Objectivist poet George Oppen (1908–1984), along with his contemporaries Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff, and Carl Rakoski, provide an important bridge between the vanguard modernist American poets and the later works of poets such as Robert Creeley. In work often compounded by the populist urbanity of city lives, the Objectivists explored the social statements poetry can make. Because Oppen wrote only one essay and one essay-review, his correspondence, in effect, constitutes his essays. Oppen is emerging as one of the major poets of the postwar era; he was the recipient of an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the PEN/West Rediscovery Award, and a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His collection Of Being Numerous received the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. These working papers include a rich correspondence, letters which provide access to the sustained, perceptive body of critical and aesthetic thinking of Oppen’s poetic career. Provocative and witty comments on poetry and poetics, especially interesting for the development of an Objectivist aesthetics, and shrewd, deeply felt assessments about the politics of the twentieth century and its moral dilemmas are some of the issues attended to. This edition offers primary documentation about an influential poetics, a little-known movement, and its active figures. Given the aggressive studies of the politics of canon-formation, the interest in describing a historical context for individual literary achievement, and current debates about mainstream poetry, the rethinking of the Objectivist movement, and the collection of documents contributing to its poetics, is an important achievement in literary scholarship.