The ten years that Robert Lowell lived in New York City – roughly, the 1960s – were among the happiest of his life as well as some of his most fertile artistically. The city promised a more energetic and engaged life than that he and Elizabeth Hardwick had had in Boston. Lowell’s celebrity was peaking, as he was courted by the most famous political and intellectual figures of the time. Later in the decade, the influence of lithium carbonate promised at last to alleviate the emotional torment that had plagued him and his loved ones. Finally, he began to discover a new kind of writing, one that announced a style and a subject matter beyond those of his “breakthrough” book Life Studies in 1959. But from the mid-1960s onward, Lowell’s view of New York City darkens. Many of his poems and letters indicate sadness and disappointment in New York’s and the nation’s situation.