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This article discusses the literary career of poet Robert Lowell and his works. Near the middle of Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead, a new trope appears, one that will continue in several successive books, particularly those whose poems are often presented as daily notes--Notebook 1967-68, Notebook, History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin. Following the poems of optical, epidermal, and neural sensitivity--Night Sweat, The Lesson, The Neo-Classical Urn, and Eye and Tooth--come poems of travel in which journeys appear as new contexts for that sensitization: Going To and Fro, Returning, Buenos Aires, and Dropping South: Brazil, present the strained, introspective speaker of Lowell's breakthrough phase, introduced in Life Studies, as increasingly vulnerable to and destabilized by the duress of travel. The rhetoric becomes murkier, the speaker more disoriented, as he moves from his center of gravity in New England. In Lowell, the disorientation of travel became a metaphor for, if not often a cause of, the disorientation of psychological illness. From this phase until the end of Lowell's life, travel was a texture used to generate fractured narratives of the troubled traveler's ego.

Reviews the book 'Joyce's Book of the Dark,' by John Bishop.

Reviews the book 'William Styron,' by Judith Ruderman.

Reviews the book 'The Spatiality of the Novel,' by Joseph Kestner.

Reviews the book 'New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Renaissance Drama,' by Richard Levin.

The article offers criticism on the Old English poem "Wið Faerstice" by an anonymous author. The author looks at the poetic structure of the poem, the use of charm and incantation in the poetry, and the themes of the poetry. The article also presents information on various arguments on the structural unity of texts.

Reviews the book 'The Literature of Fact. Selected Papers From the English Institute,' edited by Angus Fletcher.

Reviews the book 'Facts and Fiction The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel,' by John Hollowell.

Reviews the book 'Faerie, Fantasy and Pseudo-Mediaevalia in Twentieth Century Literature,' by edited by John Wortley.

Reviews the book 'Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse,' by Mary Louise Pratt.

Reviews the book 'Structuralist Poetics,' by Jonathan Culler.

Reviews the book 'Defamiliarization in Language and Literature,' by R.H. Stacy.

Reviews the book 'On the Rise of the Vernacular Literatures in the Middle Ages,' edited by R.G. Collins and John Wortley.

Reviews the book 'New Literary History,' vol. 1, edited by Ralph Cohen.