SOURCE: "Robert Lowell's Day by Day: 'Until the Wristwatch is Taken From the Wrist,'" in New England Review, Vol. 16, No. 3, Summer, 1994, pp. 54-63.

In the following essay, Tillinghast discusses Lowell's death and offers critical evaluation of Day by Day.

To read Robert Lowell's last book, Day by Day, published shortly before his death in 1977, is to accompany the poet on a valedictory retrospective of his life and work. This is the most elegiac book of one of our great elegists. In poem after poem he says goodbye not only to old friends but to old ideas—the ruling ideas of the time in which he lived. He continues to feel ambivalent about the third of his troublesome marriages, wondering whether he had made a mistake in leaving his second wife Elizabeth Hardwick, to marry the Anglo-Irish novelist Lady Caroline Blackwood. Ambivalence was Lowell's characteristic stance—a stance...