There is no shortage of work on the life and poems of Robert Lowell: Saskia Hamilton’s collected “The Letters of Robert Lowell,’’ Ian Hamilton’s “Robert Lowell: A Biography’’ being two of the largest and most famous. Memoirists from Norman Mailer to Eileen Simpson have offered their depictions.

The question remains: Who, in Boston literary circles, from the 1950s to the ’70s, didn’t know Robert Lowell?