Simon van Schalkwyk shows convincingly that Lowell, in his entire oeuvre from the 1940s to the 1960s, was propelled by his translations and imitations considerably beyond the measure we have accepted to date. Lowell is not just a supremely intertextual poet, but one who is peculiarly responsive to the voices and verses of those he has read. Van Schalkwyk's deeply-researched and innovative approach will re-direct how we think of Lowell and how we situate post-WWII American poetry within the political posture of the United States across three decades.

Thomas Austenfeld, Professor of American Literature, University of Fribourg, Switzerland

This highly original and even revolutionary reconception of Lowell's art of imitation overturns several generations of conventional wisdom. It is the first advance in providing insight into the poet's 'imitational adaptions' since Donald Carne Ross's critique of 1968. Sweeping away the literalist obsession with apparent mistranslations (irrelevant in a genre that calls itself 'imitation'), van Schalkwyk recasts 'the area of greatest divergence' as precisely the domain of 'compelling uniqueness.' He also refigures imitational adaption as Lowell's go-to device and analyzes it with great sophistication, while convincingly embedding his reframing within a new theorization of containment culture. Van Schalkwyk uncovers Lowell's 'covert redeployment of the foreign at the heart of the American home.' This is the Lowell book we have long needed without quite realizing it. It changes everything.

Steven Gould Axelrod, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Riverside, USA

This is a revelatory study of the central and multilayered role translation plays in Lowell's work in the context of Cold War politics and poetics. Apart from offering fresh insight into one of the most important American poets of the second half of the 20th century, the book is also an important contribution to the more general questions of the complex relationship between translation and original creation, and between translation and the world we live in.

Mariana Machová, Associate Professor of American Literature, University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic