The Dolphin was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1973 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1974 — an award that intensified rather than resolved the firestorm surrounding the book. The collection is a sequence of unrhymed sonnets chronicling Lowell’s departure from his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, for the Anglo-Irish writer Caroline Blackwood, and the birth of their son Sheridan. Its technical achievement is extraordinary. Its ethical status remains contested fifty years later.
The Controversy
The scandal centers on Lowell’s use of Hardwick’s private letters — her anguished, eloquent communications written during their separation — reworked into verse and incorporated into the sonnet sequence. Elizabeth Bishop, Lowell’s closest literary friend, wrote him a letter of agonized protest: “art just isn’t worth that much.” Adrienne Rich called the book “one of the most vindictive and mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry.”
The objections were not merely personal. They raised fundamental questions about the ethics of confessional poetry: If the poet’s life is his material, what are the limits? When does artistic freedom become exploitation? Can you make art from someone else’s pain without their consent?
Lowell acknowledged the problem — one sonnet addresses it directly: “I have sat and listened to too many / words of the collaborating muse, / and plotted perhaps too freely with my life” — but he published the book anyway. The Pulitzer committee’s decision to award it validated his artistic choice while resolving nothing about the ethical question.
The Poems
Setting aside the controversy, The Dolphin is a technically brilliant work. The 103 sonnets (Lowell’s characteristically loose, fourteen-line units, unrhymed but retaining the sonnet’s argumentative structure) trace the arc of a love affair from first attraction through commitment, the birth of a child, and the accommodation of guilt.
The “dolphin” of the title is Caroline Blackwood — playful, mysterious, surfacing and submerging. The sequence captures the exhilaration of late love (Lowell was in his mid-fifties) alongside the wreckage it causes: Hardwick’s fury, their daughter Harriet’s confusion, Lowell’s own guilt and manic instability.
The poems about Lowell’s manic episodes — his hospitalizations in England, his behavior when unmedicated — are among the most unflinching in the confessional tradition. He does not spare himself: the sonnets document a man who is simultaneously creating great art and destroying the people closest to him.
Publication History
The first edition was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, in 1973. First printings are identified by:
- FSG imprint on title page
- “First printing, 1973” on copyright page
- Cloth binding with dust jacket
The book was published as part of a trilogy with History and For Lizzie and Harriet (poems to/about Hardwick and their daughter), all appearing simultaneously.
Collecting The Dolphin
First edition (FSG, 1973): Fine copies in dust jacket bring $150–$400. The Pulitzer Prize ensures steady collector interest.
Signed copies bring $500–$1,500. Lowell died in 1977, limiting the supply.
The complete 1973 trilogy (History, For Lizzie and Harriet, The Dolphin) in first editions is sought as a set by Lowell collectors.
The ethical controversy has, if anything, increased the book’s collectibility — it is a famous literary scandal as well as a Pulitzer Prize-winner, and both categories attract collector attention.