"The poet offers an account of his personal history as it has painstakingly ordered itself in images. It is the response of a racked but magnanimous mind, the response of a poet. . . . Many of the events [in Notebook] are drawn from our common history, our wars and demonstrations, our assassinations and riots. Throughout burns a passionate intelligence, a conscience, which the reader feels is trustworthy." --William Meredith, The New York Times Book Review

"What Lowell has done is to make poetry difficult again. This has nothing to do with intellectual puzzles: instead, it is the more strenuous creative difficulty of a poetry molded precisely to a powerful and mature talent. [Lowell] appears in Notebook as a very subtle man, unashamedly intelligent, well read and alert, whose poems are at once delicate and piercing." --A. Alvarez, The Observer (London)