Poetry
Life Studies
Robert Lowell · 1959
Synopsis
The collection opens with four poems in regular form; in the middle comes a prose narrative in which the author recounts his childhood at 91 Revere Street, in Boston, and his father, who leaves the navy to join Lever Brothers, the soap manufacturer. There follow four tributes to writers, Ford Madox Ford, George Santayana, Delmore Schwartz and Hart Crane, then family portraits in free verse, and a sequence on the psychiatric hospital, the New York prison of West Street where he rubs shoulders with the gangster Lepke, and marriage. A man there watches from the top of a hill for the lovers' cars.
Context
The book appeared in 1959, eight years after his previous collection; Lowell abandons in it the strict metre that had made his reputation. A reading tour on the West Coast, in 1957, had brought him into contact with Allen Ginsberg, and he admired the poems of W. D. Snodgrass. The critic M. L. Rosenthal at once described this manner as confessional. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton were then sitting in on his Boston University seminar as auditors.
Who it is for
A collection mixing regular verse, free verse and a long prose narrative. No French translation in book form.
Prizes and reception
National Book Award for Poetry 1960; the collection that launched American so-called confessional poetry.
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