Robert Giroux and the Editing of Lowell’s “The Balanced Aquarium”

After Robert Lowell died, his editor, Robert Giroux, heavily pruned the poet’s prose memoir of 1954–1956, “The Balanced Aquarium,” for Lowell’s posthumous Collected Prose of 1987. This essay considers Giroux’s changes and shows his version, titled “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium,” to be a dialogical and interactional collaborative auto|biography.