Life Studies
Robert Lowell(1959)
Extract
I myself am hell; nobody's here.
A family's silver, a grandfather's summer house on the New England shore, the slow decline of a father who never managed to live up to the name he inherited: Robert Lowell's 1959 collection cracked open the decorum of mid-century American verse and let the private life pour through. The early poems are formal, controlled, taut with inherited skill. Then the book pivots, and the autobiographical poems arrive with a candour that shocked readers accustomed to the impersonal. Lowell writes about his parents, his breakdowns, his time in a psychiatric ward, with a precision that refuses both self-pity and sensationalism. The confessional mode begins here, but what endures is not the confession. It is the craft that makes it bearable.
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