Lowell broke open his own life in these poems: his madness, his family, his marriages, his imprisonments. Confessional poetry began here, though Lowell disliked the term. The poems move from formal early work to the looser, devastating autobiographical pieces that made his reputation. His father's death, his mother's pretensions, his own failures: nothing is protected. The prose memoir at the center grounds the poetry in specific, painful detail. Lowell rewrote American poetry by refusing the impersonality that Eliot had made orthodoxy. The self, exposed, became the subject. Other poets followed. None surpassed him.