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Life Studies
Life Studies is the fourth book of poems by Robert Lowell. Most critics (including Helen Vendler, Steven Gould Axelrod, Adam Kirsch, and others) consider it one of Lowell's most important books, and the Academy of American Poets named it one of their Groundbreaking Books. Helen Vendler called Life Studies Lowell's "most original book." It won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1960.
90 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1959
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About the author
Robert Lowell
182 books269 followersRobert Lowell, born Robert Traill Spence Lowell, IV, was an American poet whose works, confessional in nature, engaged with the questions of history and probed the dark recesses of the self. He is generally considered to be among the greatest American poets of the twentieth century.
His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, at the age of thirty), were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy.
Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he wrote rigorously formal poetry that drew praise for its exceptionally powerful handling of meter and rhyme. Lowell was politically involved—he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War and was imprisoned as a result, and actively protested against the war in Vietnam—and his personal life was full of marital and psychological turmoil. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized.
Partly in response to his frequent breakdowns, and partly due to the influence of such younger poets as W. D. Snodgrass and Allen Ginsberg, Lowell in the mid-fifties began to write more directly from personal experience, and loosened his adherence to traditional meter and form. The result was a watershed collection, Life Studies (1959), which forever changed the landscape of modern poetry, much as Eliot's The Waste Land had three decades before.
Considered by many to be the most important poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century, Lowell continued to develop his work with sometimes uneven results, all along defining the restless center of American poetry, until his sudden death from a heart attack at age 60. Robert Lowell served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1962 until his death in 1977.
His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, at the age of thirty), were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy.
Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he wrote rigorously formal poetry that drew praise for its exceptionally powerful handling of meter and rhyme. Lowell was politically involved—he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War and was imprisoned as a result, and actively protested against the war in Vietnam—and his personal life was full of marital and psychological turmoil. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized.
Partly in response to his frequent breakdowns, and partly due to the influence of such younger poets as W. D. Snodgrass and Allen Ginsberg, Lowell in the mid-fifties began to write more directly from personal experience, and loosened his adherence to traditional meter and form. The result was a watershed collection, Life Studies (1959), which forever changed the landscape of modern poetry, much as Eliot's The Waste Land had three decades before.
Considered by many to be the most important poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century, Lowell continued to develop his work with sometimes uneven results, all along defining the restless center of American poetry, until his sudden death from a heart attack at age 60. Robert Lowell served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1962 until his death in 1977.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 61 reviews
January 15, 2022
I was fortunate and grabbed a stack of Lowell from the shelves during my Saturday shopping sojourn. Santayana apparently regarded Lowell’s work as “a modernism that opposes modernity.” Much of the long prose section is recounted in the biography that I’ve sort of left to the side.
I keep no rank nor station.
Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.
I’m gathering the title refers to this procedure of self examination. I’m curious to see how the process is approached in the letters between he and Elizabeth Bishop. It’s all very odd as my recent endeavor with Lowell was from the end of his life and to borrow Heidegger’s term this creative un-concealment certainly gives pause.
April 25, 2013
Like the poetry and the genre he created, Robert Lowell’s Life Studies is torn by its polarities. Published in 1959, the book is considered to be the birth of confessional poetry, shocking readers with dishy personal observations and a language that could be traditional yet deliciously nervy. Today, Life Studies reads like a great writer struggling for his soul; an artist adept in language and rhetoric veering between impulses of humanism and self-destruction. Gradually, Lowell would lose this struggle (doing so in a spectacular enough way to get on the cover of Time), yet the book is worth reading; not for Lowell’s personal conflicts, but for a thorough examination of the history of the personal voice in modern poetry.
With his first three books, 1944’s Land Of Unlikenessness, 1946’s Lord Weary’s Castle, and 1951’s Mills of the Kavanaughs, Lowell established himself as a large presence in American poetry. Where the new formalists were working within the conventions of the sonnet, quatrain, and ballad, Lowell’s ambition was baroque, at times wildly so. Unlikeness, Castle and The Kavanaughs are filled with epics and mini epics, staggeringly ambitious attempts to incorporate neo-classical constructs and rhyme schemes into a modern language. When it worked, the results were as good as 20th century poetry has ever achieved. Too often, however, his ambitions resulted in poems that were magnificent in parts, yet suffered in the span of their whole.
In the best poems of Life Studies, the personal voice is a boon for Lowell. Upon first reading the book, I found it hard to stomach his impulse toward the diaristic, given the multitude of sins committed against poetry in the name of the vowel “I”. More often than not, however, Lowell ended up winning me over… and seldom more spectacularly than in “Beyond The Alps,” his travelogue through Italy in the ruin of Mussolini’s empire and the wake of Pious’ assumption. Here, Lowell is a participant observer, using the I to center the scene and context of the poem.
Reading how even the Swiss had thrown the sponge
in once again and Everest was still
unscaled, I watched our Paris Pullman lunge
mooning across the fallow alpine snow.
Oh Bella Roma! I saw our stewards go
Forward on tiptoe banging on their gongs.
Life changed to landscape. Much against my will
I left the City of God where it belongs.
There the skirt-mad Mussolini unfurled
the eagle of Caesar. He was one of us
only, pure prose. I envy the conspicuous
waste of our grandparents on their grand tours –
long-haired Victorian sages accepted the universe
while breezing on their trust funds through the world.
–from “Beyond the Alps”
Lowell tells of a Europe in collusion with money and fascism, and a nation coming to grips with the squalor of its recent past, and he couldn’t have done it without the first person voice. The poem has his near-trademark rhyme structure, complex and conversational yet less attentive to the music of a line than Yeats or Auden. Yet the declarative tone grounds his language, focusing it on the subject, not his need to be Byron; the results are dynamic. In “Alps,” Lowell finally gets the constructs of the epic right, doing so with an ordinary language with its roots in the tradition of English verse.
Italy provides the background of “Sailing Home From Rapallo,” Lowell’s finest poem, and in this writer’s opinion the best “confessional” poem ever written. “Rapallo” is an elegy for his mother, and the subject gives his language a tragic power. Lowell isn’t baroque here but somber: outside of the first lines her death isn’t even mentioned:
Your nurse could only speak Italian,
but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week,
and tears ran down my cheeks….
When I embarked from Italy with my Mother’s body,
the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova
was breaking into fiery flower.
The crazy yellow and azure sea-sleds
blasting like jack-hammers across
the spumante-bubbling wake of our liner,
recalled the clashing colors of my Ford.
Mother traveled first-class in the hold;
her Risorgimento black and gold casket
was like Napoleon’s at the Invalides….
–from “Sailing Home From Rapallo”
From a quick reading of the first lines, I got the idea that Lowell is looking at everything around his mother in order to forget her, but soon, I realized that might be the point of the poem:
A fence of iron spear-hafts
black-bordered its mostly Colonial grave-slates.
The only “unhistoric” soul to come here
was Father, now buried beneath his recent
unweathered pink-veined slice of marble.
Even the Latin of his Lowell motto:
Occasionem cognosce,
seemed too businesslike and pushing here,
where the burning cold illuminated
the hewn inscriptions of Mother’s relatives:
twenty or thirty Winslows and Starks.
Frost had given their names a diamond edge….
In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin,
Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL.
The corpse
was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.
–from “Sailing Home From Rapallo”
Lowell buries himself in the scenery to forget the gravity of his loss but the gravity never leaves. He is heartbreakingly personal in his distance, letting the images describe his feelings in a devastating manner. “Rapallo” is one of the most anthologized poems of all time, and deserves to be.
Reading the book’s sublime exercises in the personal, one would like to think Life Studies is a sum of its high points, of Lowell reaching for the sublime in his environment and his soul. To do that, however, would to completely ignore the dark, gossipy and controversial poems that made him a star. For if the Lowell of “Alps” and “Rapallo” is the craftsman that needs to be recognized; it is the Lowell of “Waking In The Blue” and “To Speak Of Woe That Is Marriage” that is still with us, a tormented man too eager to hawk what was tormenting him. Take the first lines of “Blue,” his poem about going insane.
The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head
propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My hearts grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)
–from “Waking in the Blue”
The language here is crisp and cleaner that his earlier, more placid poetry. The problem with it is that the only thing he’s selling in the poem is his madness, a cardboard romantic image of the mentally ill poet suffering for his craft. That persona made him a quasi-pop culture figure, but beneath it is a deficiency of literary imagination, most obvious in the final lines:
After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred pounds
this morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.
–from “Waking in the Blue”
Evocative images, but compare them with the examples above. In “Alps” and “Rapallo,” you see whole landscapes within the context of history, all in the span of a few bars. The only thing you see in “Blue” is a charming, troubled rich man eating breakfast. “Blue”’s sense of the troubling and diaristic pales in comparison to “Marriage,” his account of beating up his ex-wife, told from her perspective (here in its entirety):
To Speak Of Woe That Is In Marriage
“It is the future generation that presses into being by means of
these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours.”
- Schopenhauer
“The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.
Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen.
My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor’s edge.
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.
Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .
It’s the injustice . . . he is so unjust–
whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.
My only thought is how to keep alive.
What makes him tick? Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant.”
“Marriage”’s aesthetic implication that a feeling, no matter how reprehensible that feeling may be to many, is art simply because the artist puts it to paper is one of the foundations of confessional poetry. There are people who think that this poem, as jarring as it seems, absolves him of the act, that we should look at it favorably because he is speaking from his wife’s point of view, and in doing so, confessing his sin in meter and verse. The problem with that theory lies in the poem’s point of view. In “Marriage,” Lowell’s wife remains in his grasp; she excoriates his sin, but he doesn’t, and the result is that she exists only as a prop for him to tell the reader “I beat my wife, see how sensitive I am in acknowledging it.”
Lowell’s impulse to make his cruelty toward women the center of his art would become more prevalent in 1969’s Notebooks, and 1972’s For Lizzie And Harriet, and as a result he lost a sizeable share of his audience. The best poems of Life Studies make enough of a case for him to be reread, if only with a warier eye. In context, they show him not as an American Byron, but a figure all his own, uniquely gifted, uniquely self-absorbed, self-mythologizing and self-destructive. In the end, the Lowell of Life Studies is a poet of fragments, bad and good, noble and cowardly, empathetic and cruel. They cannot congeal, and contrary to the opinions of his detractors and fans, cannot be congealed; they just exist.
With his first three books, 1944’s Land Of Unlikenessness, 1946’s Lord Weary’s Castle, and 1951’s Mills of the Kavanaughs, Lowell established himself as a large presence in American poetry. Where the new formalists were working within the conventions of the sonnet, quatrain, and ballad, Lowell’s ambition was baroque, at times wildly so. Unlikeness, Castle and The Kavanaughs are filled with epics and mini epics, staggeringly ambitious attempts to incorporate neo-classical constructs and rhyme schemes into a modern language. When it worked, the results were as good as 20th century poetry has ever achieved. Too often, however, his ambitions resulted in poems that were magnificent in parts, yet suffered in the span of their whole.
In the best poems of Life Studies, the personal voice is a boon for Lowell. Upon first reading the book, I found it hard to stomach his impulse toward the diaristic, given the multitude of sins committed against poetry in the name of the vowel “I”. More often than not, however, Lowell ended up winning me over… and seldom more spectacularly than in “Beyond The Alps,” his travelogue through Italy in the ruin of Mussolini’s empire and the wake of Pious’ assumption. Here, Lowell is a participant observer, using the I to center the scene and context of the poem.
Reading how even the Swiss had thrown the sponge
in once again and Everest was still
unscaled, I watched our Paris Pullman lunge
mooning across the fallow alpine snow.
Oh Bella Roma! I saw our stewards go
Forward on tiptoe banging on their gongs.
Life changed to landscape. Much against my will
I left the City of God where it belongs.
There the skirt-mad Mussolini unfurled
the eagle of Caesar. He was one of us
only, pure prose. I envy the conspicuous
waste of our grandparents on their grand tours –
long-haired Victorian sages accepted the universe
while breezing on their trust funds through the world.
–from “Beyond the Alps”
Lowell tells of a Europe in collusion with money and fascism, and a nation coming to grips with the squalor of its recent past, and he couldn’t have done it without the first person voice. The poem has his near-trademark rhyme structure, complex and conversational yet less attentive to the music of a line than Yeats or Auden. Yet the declarative tone grounds his language, focusing it on the subject, not his need to be Byron; the results are dynamic. In “Alps,” Lowell finally gets the constructs of the epic right, doing so with an ordinary language with its roots in the tradition of English verse.
Italy provides the background of “Sailing Home From Rapallo,” Lowell’s finest poem, and in this writer’s opinion the best “confessional” poem ever written. “Rapallo” is an elegy for his mother, and the subject gives his language a tragic power. Lowell isn’t baroque here but somber: outside of the first lines her death isn’t even mentioned:
Your nurse could only speak Italian,
but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week,
and tears ran down my cheeks….
When I embarked from Italy with my Mother’s body,
the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova
was breaking into fiery flower.
The crazy yellow and azure sea-sleds
blasting like jack-hammers across
the spumante-bubbling wake of our liner,
recalled the clashing colors of my Ford.
Mother traveled first-class in the hold;
her Risorgimento black and gold casket
was like Napoleon’s at the Invalides….
–from “Sailing Home From Rapallo”
From a quick reading of the first lines, I got the idea that Lowell is looking at everything around his mother in order to forget her, but soon, I realized that might be the point of the poem:
A fence of iron spear-hafts
black-bordered its mostly Colonial grave-slates.
The only “unhistoric” soul to come here
was Father, now buried beneath his recent
unweathered pink-veined slice of marble.
Even the Latin of his Lowell motto:
Occasionem cognosce,
seemed too businesslike and pushing here,
where the burning cold illuminated
the hewn inscriptions of Mother’s relatives:
twenty or thirty Winslows and Starks.
Frost had given their names a diamond edge….
In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin,
Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL.
The corpse
was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.
–from “Sailing Home From Rapallo”
Lowell buries himself in the scenery to forget the gravity of his loss but the gravity never leaves. He is heartbreakingly personal in his distance, letting the images describe his feelings in a devastating manner. “Rapallo” is one of the most anthologized poems of all time, and deserves to be.
Reading the book’s sublime exercises in the personal, one would like to think Life Studies is a sum of its high points, of Lowell reaching for the sublime in his environment and his soul. To do that, however, would to completely ignore the dark, gossipy and controversial poems that made him a star. For if the Lowell of “Alps” and “Rapallo” is the craftsman that needs to be recognized; it is the Lowell of “Waking In The Blue” and “To Speak Of Woe That Is Marriage” that is still with us, a tormented man too eager to hawk what was tormenting him. Take the first lines of “Blue,” his poem about going insane.
The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head
propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My hearts grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)
–from “Waking in the Blue”
The language here is crisp and cleaner that his earlier, more placid poetry. The problem with it is that the only thing he’s selling in the poem is his madness, a cardboard romantic image of the mentally ill poet suffering for his craft. That persona made him a quasi-pop culture figure, but beneath it is a deficiency of literary imagination, most obvious in the final lines:
After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred pounds
this morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.
–from “Waking in the Blue”
Evocative images, but compare them with the examples above. In “Alps” and “Rapallo,” you see whole landscapes within the context of history, all in the span of a few bars. The only thing you see in “Blue” is a charming, troubled rich man eating breakfast. “Blue”’s sense of the troubling and diaristic pales in comparison to “Marriage,” his account of beating up his ex-wife, told from her perspective (here in its entirety):
To Speak Of Woe That Is In Marriage
“It is the future generation that presses into being by means of
these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours.”
- Schopenhauer
“The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.
Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen.
My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor’s edge.
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.
Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .
It’s the injustice . . . he is so unjust–
whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.
My only thought is how to keep alive.
What makes him tick? Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant.”
“Marriage”’s aesthetic implication that a feeling, no matter how reprehensible that feeling may be to many, is art simply because the artist puts it to paper is one of the foundations of confessional poetry. There are people who think that this poem, as jarring as it seems, absolves him of the act, that we should look at it favorably because he is speaking from his wife’s point of view, and in doing so, confessing his sin in meter and verse. The problem with that theory lies in the poem’s point of view. In “Marriage,” Lowell’s wife remains in his grasp; she excoriates his sin, but he doesn’t, and the result is that she exists only as a prop for him to tell the reader “I beat my wife, see how sensitive I am in acknowledging it.”
Lowell’s impulse to make his cruelty toward women the center of his art would become more prevalent in 1969’s Notebooks, and 1972’s For Lizzie And Harriet, and as a result he lost a sizeable share of his audience. The best poems of Life Studies make enough of a case for him to be reread, if only with a warier eye. In context, they show him not as an American Byron, but a figure all his own, uniquely gifted, uniquely self-absorbed, self-mythologizing and self-destructive. In the end, the Lowell of Life Studies is a poet of fragments, bad and good, noble and cowardly, empathetic and cruel. They cannot congeal, and contrary to the opinions of his detractors and fans, cannot be congealed; they just exist.
Read
February 28, 2025read for a paper.
not to be dramatic but lowell and his contemporaries fundamentally changed the way we think abt poetry forever.
i have known and loved “skunk hour” for the last few years, but i loved it even more in context. as the final poem in this collection, it calls back to everything lowell has been through over the course of the book, and it delivers such a striking final moment.
this is also just a wonderful collection. the vulnerability and humanness of lowell’s poetry are as admirable as his intricate uses of rhyme and metre. such an emotionally affecting read.
not to be dramatic but lowell and his contemporaries fundamentally changed the way we think abt poetry forever.
i have known and loved “skunk hour” for the last few years, but i loved it even more in context. as the final poem in this collection, it calls back to everything lowell has been through over the course of the book, and it delivers such a striking final moment.
this is also just a wonderful collection. the vulnerability and humanness of lowell’s poetry are as admirable as his intricate uses of rhyme and metre. such an emotionally affecting read.
April 6, 2009
Mad Boston Catholic sifts through impossibly detailed childhood memories and self-aggrandizing oral family histories to fashion a mirror to his own private pathos from a tender, damning portrait of his father as a dreamy misfit failure.
March 11, 2016
These are incredible. The best of the spring fruit.
October 20, 2017
It's an interesting collection due to its importance to the tradition of confessional poetry, but it's very significantly conveying a middle class white male experience, and phrases such as "brutal girlish mood-swings" when referring to someone who's just lost a loved one, can be slightly off putting.
May 18, 2024
Simply a brilliant, raw and unapologetic confession pouring from the heart. Poetry was forever changed!
My mind's not right.
A car radio bleats,
'Love, O careless Love...' I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat...
I myself am hell, nobody's here-
only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
My mind's not right.
A car radio bleats,
'Love, O careless Love...' I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat...
I myself am hell, nobody's here-
only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
December 10, 2010
Revisiting a revolutionary book which seems more eccentric and brilliant with time-
January 5, 2021
Dunbarton, For Delmore Schwartz, Sailing Home from Rapallo, Waking in the Blue
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March 23, 2025In this single book he begins Confessional poetry and so makes possible much of the following seventy years (and arguably the present) of American poems (Plath! Glück! Bidart! Howe!). The most enjoyable parts about reading it now, though, are not really the poems but the iconic turns of phrase and delicious arch roasts of his parents, WASP society, and himself in the prose autobiography he inserts among the poems:
(They wanted her furniture.)
The poems felt more anecdotal than monumental. Fun to read but most of them didn't crack my world open.
Cousin Cassie only became a close relation in 1922. In that year she died.
(They wanted her furniture.)
The poems felt more anecdotal than monumental. Fun to read but most of them didn't crack my world open.
June 5, 2025
Lacking the knowledge of Robert Lowell and his influence on poetry. I struggled to enjoy this and found it a bit of a trudge to make it through (despite its shortness). I have since read that he was a pioneer of confessional poetry and whilst this is very impressive it doesn’t change the fact that I never want to read another line about daddy being in the navy again. Skunk hour is very good however.
March 10, 2025
I was so excited to read this author's work, but struggled to connect with this collection. A huge chunk of the middle was not poetry, but a narrative on the author's ancestors. Looking forward to trying a different collection by this author.
November 12, 2018
That was offensively bad
October 12, 2025
3.8, I love how he structured this with the autobiography in the middle.
July 16, 2019
Robert Lowell’s book Life Study is a prime example of the confessional poetry style that emerged in the US during the 50s. While poets talking about their feelings and sentiments is nothing new, the deep focus on the inner, the inner psyche, as if it’s conversation between two intimate individuals, the poet and the reader, is what makes this style interesting. Lowell doesn’t shy away from any subject as he strips away every barrier as he talks to us through his texts. Emotions and sentiments face no taboo here, which is rare for a book published in the 50s, as Lowell always investigates the relationship between the “I” and the “others”, whether he is talking about himself or describing the different relationships in his book, mainly those of his family, his parents, and other family members. Though what personally struck me in Life Studies is Lowell’s candidness regarding his mental illness. Robert Lowell had be suffering and living through bipolar disorder, and his ups and downs are well known. “Home After Three Months Away” and “Waking in The Blue” are two of the main examples where we sit down with Robert as he describes to us his struggles. This struck a personal chord with me as I myself suffer from manic depression and could easily relate to many of his words. What I also loved about this book is that the individual poems are interesting in themselves, but once you read the full book, it almost comes up as a complete narrative piece. Switching between different styles, themes, from verse to prose to verse, to trying different rhyme structure and rhythms, this is truly a journey into Lowell’s mind and I recommend it to all poetry lovers.
April 18, 2025
Robert Lowell’s Life Studies is a short book consisting of more than a dozen short poems and several essays – all having to do with some aspect of Lowell’s childhood, family, and upbringing. All of the poems and essays demonstrate the sharp and satirical wit of a keen observer of human nature. I chose to read Lowell’s collection at the recommendations of Oliver Sacks, MD neurologist and author (Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Gratitude, Everything In Its Place…) and Kay Redfield Jamison, psychologist of mood disorders and author of several noteworthy memoirs including An Unquiet Mind A Memoir of Moods and Madness, Night Falls Fast, and Nothing Was the Same…).
Each of Lowell’s poems is short, cryptic to the point that the reader’s imagination is required to ‘fill in’ missing information, and cynical. For example, from Beyond the Alps:
“… I envy the conspicuous waste of our grandparents on their grand tours –
long-haired Victorian sages accepted the Universe,
while breezing on their trust funds through the world…
The lights of science couldn’t hold a candle
To Mary risen – at one miraculous stroke,
Angel-winged, gorgeous as a jungle bird!
But who believed this? Who could understand? …”
I enjoyed the poems about Robert’s family life – such as the following examples:
• My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow – Lowell writes wistfully of trying to hold on to the memories of grandmother’s rose garden and Grandfather’s farm
“Like my Grandfather, the décor
Was manly, comfortable,
Overbearing, disproportioned.”
And Great Aunt Sarah “thundered on the keyboard of her dummy piano…” and Uncle Devereux Wilson was dying at age twenty-nine of incurable Hodgkin’s disease.
• Dunbarton – about the family graveyard
• Grandparents – recalling memories of Grandpa and Grandmother…
• Commander Lowell - poetic elaboration of the conflicts between Robert’s Mother and father – largely over their differing views of what made a man a Man, and a Father…
• Terminal Days at Beverly Farms – about the death of Robert’s father
“Father’s death was abrupt and unprotesting.
His vision was still twenty-twenty
After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling,
His last words to Mother were:
‘I feel awful’.”
• Father’s bedroom – describes memorabilia from his time in the navy in Japan…
• For Sale – Robert’s father’s cottage was put up for sale the month he died; the poet writes that his Mother was so afraid of living alone, “as if she had stayed on a train one stop past her destination”.
• Man and Wife –
“… Now twelve years later, you turn your back.
Sleepless, you hold
Your pillow to your hollows like a child,
Your old-fashioned tirade –
Loving, rapid, merciless –
Breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.”
• Speaking of the Woe that Is in Marriage –
“… My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
And hits the street to cruise for prostitutes,
Free-lancing out along the razor’s edge,
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.
Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust…
It’s the injustice… he is so unjust…”
My favorite part of Lowell’s book is the essay 91 Revere Street, in which Lowell paints a colorful portrait of the dynamic between his domineering mother, who wishes to cling to her Boston Brahmin roots, and her husband and his friends. This essay and the Life Studies poems neatly compliment each other.
Lowell begins 91 Revere Street by introducing his great grandfather on the Lowell side, Major Mordecai Myers, a War of 1812 dandy; it provides a perspective on the high expectations of rank and privilege coupled with absent fathering, through the generations of Lowell’s.
Robert Lowell’s father was a graduate of the Naval Academy at Annapolis and completed graduate studies at both MIT and Harvard; he found his personal identity and comfort level as a junior officer in the United States Navy. Robert’s mother disdained the Navy and all of her husband’s naval colleagues:
“… I used to look forward to the nights when my bedroom walls would vibrate to the rhythm of my parents arguing, arguing one another to exhaustion… One night she said with murderous coolness, ‘Bobby and I are leaving for Papa’s’…” Robert’s mother compelled his father to live at the naval yard in Charlestown, by himself, while she lived at the Revere Street address. Ultimately father resigned his commission but he retained friendships with naval men for whom the mother felt contempt.
Little Bobby “felt drenched in my parent’s passions”. Lowell describes two of my favorite growing up experiences: ‘putting the child in the middle’ or triangulation, and one parent’s repeated attacks on the other parent or parental alienation, in colorful terms: “She ran into my bedroom. She hugged me. She said, ‘Oh, Bobby it’s such a comfort to have a man in the house’… I said, ‘I’m not a man. I’m a boy’…”
Lowell finishes his essay with one of his father’s close friends, the Commander, providing comic relief: “The man who seems in my memory to sit under old Mordecai’s portrait is not my father, but Commander Billy – the Commander after father had thrown in his commission… It always vexed the Commander to think of the strings that had been pulled to have father transferred from Washington to Boston… I would squirm. I dared not look up because I knew the Commander abhorred Mother’s dominion over my father, thought my asthma, supposedly brought on by the miasmal damp of Washington, DC, a myth and considered our final flight to Boston a scandal…
‘Bobby me boy… henceforth I will that you sleep wifeless.’… Taking hold of the table with both hands, the Commander tilted his chair backwards and gaped down at me with Gargantuan wonder: ‘I know why young Bob is an only child’…”
Some authorities suggest that Robert Lowell’s Life Studies marked the beginning of a genre called confessional poetry – autobiographic, personal, and self-revealing to a fault. Dr. Jamison, (An Unquiet Mind A Memoir of Moods and Madness) an authority on manic-depression, a disease suffered both by herself and Lowell, has praised the lucid picture of their disease provided by Life Studies. I read it as an authority on neither poetry nor manic-depressive illness but with a great interest in memoirs and the mental health of doctors, patients, and creators. I read inspiring and depressing themes, all vividly displayed. I enjoyed it – but not overly.
Each of Lowell’s poems is short, cryptic to the point that the reader’s imagination is required to ‘fill in’ missing information, and cynical. For example, from Beyond the Alps:
“… I envy the conspicuous waste of our grandparents on their grand tours –
long-haired Victorian sages accepted the Universe,
while breezing on their trust funds through the world…
The lights of science couldn’t hold a candle
To Mary risen – at one miraculous stroke,
Angel-winged, gorgeous as a jungle bird!
But who believed this? Who could understand? …”
I enjoyed the poems about Robert’s family life – such as the following examples:
• My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow – Lowell writes wistfully of trying to hold on to the memories of grandmother’s rose garden and Grandfather’s farm
“Like my Grandfather, the décor
Was manly, comfortable,
Overbearing, disproportioned.”
And Great Aunt Sarah “thundered on the keyboard of her dummy piano…” and Uncle Devereux Wilson was dying at age twenty-nine of incurable Hodgkin’s disease.
• Dunbarton – about the family graveyard
• Grandparents – recalling memories of Grandpa and Grandmother…
• Commander Lowell - poetic elaboration of the conflicts between Robert’s Mother and father – largely over their differing views of what made a man a Man, and a Father…
• Terminal Days at Beverly Farms – about the death of Robert’s father
“Father’s death was abrupt and unprotesting.
His vision was still twenty-twenty
After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling,
His last words to Mother were:
‘I feel awful’.”
• Father’s bedroom – describes memorabilia from his time in the navy in Japan…
• For Sale – Robert’s father’s cottage was put up for sale the month he died; the poet writes that his Mother was so afraid of living alone, “as if she had stayed on a train one stop past her destination”.
• Man and Wife –
“… Now twelve years later, you turn your back.
Sleepless, you hold
Your pillow to your hollows like a child,
Your old-fashioned tirade –
Loving, rapid, merciless –
Breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.”
• Speaking of the Woe that Is in Marriage –
“… My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
And hits the street to cruise for prostitutes,
Free-lancing out along the razor’s edge,
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.
Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust…
It’s the injustice… he is so unjust…”
My favorite part of Lowell’s book is the essay 91 Revere Street, in which Lowell paints a colorful portrait of the dynamic between his domineering mother, who wishes to cling to her Boston Brahmin roots, and her husband and his friends. This essay and the Life Studies poems neatly compliment each other.
Lowell begins 91 Revere Street by introducing his great grandfather on the Lowell side, Major Mordecai Myers, a War of 1812 dandy; it provides a perspective on the high expectations of rank and privilege coupled with absent fathering, through the generations of Lowell’s.
Robert Lowell’s father was a graduate of the Naval Academy at Annapolis and completed graduate studies at both MIT and Harvard; he found his personal identity and comfort level as a junior officer in the United States Navy. Robert’s mother disdained the Navy and all of her husband’s naval colleagues:
“… I used to look forward to the nights when my bedroom walls would vibrate to the rhythm of my parents arguing, arguing one another to exhaustion… One night she said with murderous coolness, ‘Bobby and I are leaving for Papa’s’…” Robert’s mother compelled his father to live at the naval yard in Charlestown, by himself, while she lived at the Revere Street address. Ultimately father resigned his commission but he retained friendships with naval men for whom the mother felt contempt.
Little Bobby “felt drenched in my parent’s passions”. Lowell describes two of my favorite growing up experiences: ‘putting the child in the middle’ or triangulation, and one parent’s repeated attacks on the other parent or parental alienation, in colorful terms: “She ran into my bedroom. She hugged me. She said, ‘Oh, Bobby it’s such a comfort to have a man in the house’… I said, ‘I’m not a man. I’m a boy’…”
Lowell finishes his essay with one of his father’s close friends, the Commander, providing comic relief: “The man who seems in my memory to sit under old Mordecai’s portrait is not my father, but Commander Billy – the Commander after father had thrown in his commission… It always vexed the Commander to think of the strings that had been pulled to have father transferred from Washington to Boston… I would squirm. I dared not look up because I knew the Commander abhorred Mother’s dominion over my father, thought my asthma, supposedly brought on by the miasmal damp of Washington, DC, a myth and considered our final flight to Boston a scandal…
‘Bobby me boy… henceforth I will that you sleep wifeless.’… Taking hold of the table with both hands, the Commander tilted his chair backwards and gaped down at me with Gargantuan wonder: ‘I know why young Bob is an only child’…”
Some authorities suggest that Robert Lowell’s Life Studies marked the beginning of a genre called confessional poetry – autobiographic, personal, and self-revealing to a fault. Dr. Jamison, (An Unquiet Mind A Memoir of Moods and Madness) an authority on manic-depression, a disease suffered both by herself and Lowell, has praised the lucid picture of their disease provided by Life Studies. I read it as an authority on neither poetry nor manic-depressive illness but with a great interest in memoirs and the mental health of doctors, patients, and creators. I read inspiring and depressing themes, all vividly displayed. I enjoyed it – but not overly.
May 28, 2018
I read somewhere that Life Studies by Robert Lowell, which was published in 1959, changed poetry as radically as T S Eliot’s The Wasteland had done three decades earlier. I felt than that I had to read it, and when I did I was somewhat mystified about why it was so radical; but I’ve now found out why.
It’s radical for two main reasons: its confessional nature and its loose style, breaking away from prescribed poetic forms. The poems relate much about Lowell’s family and their many failings and tell of his time in mental hospitals. The book paved the way for poets like Sylvia Plath. And the loose style seems to have adopted by many contemporary poets.
The book is in four parts, and the longest part is not poetry at all but prose. It’s rich prose that must be read slowly and comes close to poetry. Many of the poems have the clarity of prose, but none of them grabbed me to the point where I thought that I must share hem. Nor did I find any phrases that arrested me.
I enjoyed the collection, but for me it doesn’t have the power of The Wasteland or The Four Quartets.
It’s radical for two main reasons: its confessional nature and its loose style, breaking away from prescribed poetic forms. The poems relate much about Lowell’s family and their many failings and tell of his time in mental hospitals. The book paved the way for poets like Sylvia Plath. And the loose style seems to have adopted by many contemporary poets.
The book is in four parts, and the longest part is not poetry at all but prose. It’s rich prose that must be read slowly and comes close to poetry. Many of the poems have the clarity of prose, but none of them grabbed me to the point where I thought that I must share hem. Nor did I find any phrases that arrested me.
I enjoyed the collection, but for me it doesn’t have the power of The Wasteland or The Four Quartets.
Read
July 21, 2022It's iconic it's sometimes difficult to see precisely where this aims one looks at it like Holbein's skull & I respect the disrespect of plonking over 40 prose pages of autobiography down in here (If I recall I think Don says that's the reason this collection is remembered at all & whether you think that is true or not is your own estimation). My favourite poem in this may well be the opener Beyond the Alps but I also love the last poem, Skunk Hour so it would seem I'm a man of either extremities or breadcrusts.
Now far be it from me to have an issue with a legendary poet I just get this sense - directed by the acrobatics of the opening poem - of an immense linguistic imagination which is just not consistently delivered when we nestle into his autobiographical poems. I expect RL provides elsewhere
Now far be it from me to have an issue with a legendary poet I just get this sense - directed by the acrobatics of the opening poem - of an immense linguistic imagination which is just not consistently delivered when we nestle into his autobiographical poems. I expect RL provides elsewhere
August 30, 2018
I can see why this book was a smash in the time period it was released in: Robert Lowell abandons traditional roles of poetry (including his previous style) in favor of a more loose, confessional style. The confessional style was interesting to see as Lowell manages to talk about one's personal life and all the stigmas and all the subjects of one;s own privacy that is normally seen as taboo. This is the book that inspired the confessional school of poetry that included Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and I loved this book similar to theirs, I just believe that Lowell has less hard-hitting-lines.
February 1, 2022
"Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small" is one of the saddest lines I've ever read.
November 20, 2025
Oftentimes I fear I must be an awful reader of poetry, because poetry is one of the few kinds of writing that can so thoroughly convey nothing at all. There are of course different kinds of nothing, from the nothing of vapidity (Rupi Kaur), to the nothing of ultra-postmodernity (American Psycho 2), to the nothing of award-winning poetry. Lowell is solidly in the final camp with this text, tyrannized as it is by the long prose ramble in the middle: nothing of course having taken place but a litany of incidental nothings, as if the mere fact of writing it down should be viewed as revelatory. The Wikipedia page describes the reasoning which the National Book Award committee gave for choosing this text; in part, they claimed it "featured a new emphasis on intense, uninhibited discussion of personal, family, and psychological struggles."
I'm torn about this. I guess I'll grudgingly admit that he set the mold for many poets I vastly prefer to him, but I'm baffled that this was as well accepted as it was given that nothing really interesting happens to him or his middle-class family. Plath had incredible, depressing, viscera-tearing intensity and trauma to unpack, but Lowell feels almost smug to me in his autobiography. God, I really hope I don't come off like this in my own writing.
In describing this book to a friend, I remarked how we could go from Joyce 30 some years earlier to this, and the more I'm skimming through, it feels more like a bad pastiche of Eliot, just enough randomness to imply intentionality, as per the modernist formulae, but no real attention. Or rather, he did pay attention, especially closely in the first section's poems, but they betray more a fear of expression than its flowering.
This book begs the ontological question: why does it even exist? Why is Lowell writing in the first place? There's no immediacy, only an attempt to impress the many pompous asses who still read poetry (which is why most poetry sucks eggs). By the end of the book, Lowell gets bored with his new poetic approach of alternating between namedropping and onomatopoeia, and it shows. At times he apes toward Whitman, listing objects and lineages, pretending to be America's poet, but it falls flat: he so obviously lacks the vigor needed to hold the attention of the 21st century spazz like me.
I'm not sure if I'm angry because it's bad, or if I'm merely choleric and it caught me in the wrong mood. I think the thing I want more than anything is poetry to be memorable, to have angles, to be jutty, to not be sanded down, not feel conformable to a typical style. Sure, maybe that complaint is in direct contradiction with my other writings complaining about the cult of originality, but maybe poetry doesn't have to necessarily be original, just notable.
In the poems near the end, Lowell finally dips into first person, and things feel much more alive; not alive enough to save the whole text, but enough for us to finally hear him through the fog of directionless-mimesis, producing a thing derivative, rhyming at the worst times, and ultimately crowning the forgettable. For, really, that's what Shakespeare writes most beautifully about: being remembered, which he always will be, but I personally don't care if Lowell is (at least save his acolytes!).
From Wikipedia, this time about this book specifically: "According to Ian Hamilton, one of Lowell's unofficial biographers, [the prose] section was begun as a potentially therapeutic assignment suggested by Lowell's therapist." This checks out, as it feels like something confessional in the most impotent way, not even approaching the violent energy of a Plath. It's important to the author but not to us; he forgets about us, and in return we want to forget about him. He's not so interesting a person as to command our attention; sure, he plays with sounds sometimes, but so do I, and I'm not winning any National Book Awards. That might be because I have no books out to be awarded, but I'm planning on rectifying that sometime, God-willing. In the meantime, I'll steer clear and prefer his literary inheritors to him.
I'm torn about this. I guess I'll grudgingly admit that he set the mold for many poets I vastly prefer to him, but I'm baffled that this was as well accepted as it was given that nothing really interesting happens to him or his middle-class family. Plath had incredible, depressing, viscera-tearing intensity and trauma to unpack, but Lowell feels almost smug to me in his autobiography. God, I really hope I don't come off like this in my own writing.
In describing this book to a friend, I remarked how we could go from Joyce 30 some years earlier to this, and the more I'm skimming through, it feels more like a bad pastiche of Eliot, just enough randomness to imply intentionality, as per the modernist formulae, but no real attention. Or rather, he did pay attention, especially closely in the first section's poems, but they betray more a fear of expression than its flowering.
This book begs the ontological question: why does it even exist? Why is Lowell writing in the first place? There's no immediacy, only an attempt to impress the many pompous asses who still read poetry (which is why most poetry sucks eggs). By the end of the book, Lowell gets bored with his new poetic approach of alternating between namedropping and onomatopoeia, and it shows. At times he apes toward Whitman, listing objects and lineages, pretending to be America's poet, but it falls flat: he so obviously lacks the vigor needed to hold the attention of the 21st century spazz like me.
I'm not sure if I'm angry because it's bad, or if I'm merely choleric and it caught me in the wrong mood. I think the thing I want more than anything is poetry to be memorable, to have angles, to be jutty, to not be sanded down, not feel conformable to a typical style. Sure, maybe that complaint is in direct contradiction with my other writings complaining about the cult of originality, but maybe poetry doesn't have to necessarily be original, just notable.
In the poems near the end, Lowell finally dips into first person, and things feel much more alive; not alive enough to save the whole text, but enough for us to finally hear him through the fog of directionless-mimesis, producing a thing derivative, rhyming at the worst times, and ultimately crowning the forgettable. For, really, that's what Shakespeare writes most beautifully about: being remembered, which he always will be, but I personally don't care if Lowell is (at least save his acolytes!).
From Wikipedia, this time about this book specifically: "According to Ian Hamilton, one of Lowell's unofficial biographers, [the prose] section was begun as a potentially therapeutic assignment suggested by Lowell's therapist." This checks out, as it feels like something confessional in the most impotent way, not even approaching the violent energy of a Plath. It's important to the author but not to us; he forgets about us, and in return we want to forget about him. He's not so interesting a person as to command our attention; sure, he plays with sounds sometimes, but so do I, and I'm not winning any National Book Awards. That might be because I have no books out to be awarded, but I'm planning on rectifying that sometime, God-willing. In the meantime, I'll steer clear and prefer his literary inheritors to him.
January 19, 2022
The snow had buried Stuyvesant.
The subways drummed the vaults. I heard
the El's green girders charge on Third,
Manhattan's truss of adament,
that groaned in ermine, slummed on want. . . .
Cyclonic zero of the word,
God of our armies, who interred
Cold Harbour's blue immortals, Grant!
Horseman, your sword is in the groove!
Ice, ice. Our wheels no longer move.
Look, the fixed stars, all just alike
as lack-land atoms, split apart,
and the Republic summons Ike,
the mausoleum in her heart.
* * *
"When the Pulitzers showered on some dope
on screw who flushed our dry mouths out with soap,
few people would consider why I took
to stalking sailors, and scattered Uncle Sam's
phoney gold-plated laurels to the birds.
Because I knew my Whitman like a book,
stranger in America, tell my country: I,
Catullus redivivus, once the rage
of the Village and Paris, used to play my role
of homosexual, wolfing the stray lambs
who hungered by the Place de la Concorde.
My profit was a pocket with a hole.
Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age,
must lay his heart out for my bed and board."
* * *
They're altogether otherworldly now,
those adults champing for their ritual Friday spin
to pharmacist and five-and-ten in Brockton.
Back in my throw-away and shaggy span
of adolescence, Grandpa still waves his stick
like a policeman;
Grandmother, like a Mohammedan, still wears her thick
lavender mourning and touring veil;
the Pierce Arrow clears its throat in a horse-stall.
Then the dry road dust rises to whiten
the fatigued elm leaves -
the nineteenth century, tired of children, is gone.
They're all gone into a world of light; the farm's my own.
The farm's my own!
Back there alone,
I keep indoors, and spoil another season.
I hear the rattley little country gramophone
racking its five foot horn:
"O Summer Time!"
Even at noon here the formidable
Ancien Régime still keeps nature at a distance. Five
green shaded light bulbs spider the billiards-table;
no field is greener than its cloth,
where Grandpa, dipping sugar for us both,
once spilled his demitasse.
His favourite ball, the number three,
still hides the coffee stain.
Never again
to walk there, chalk our cues,
insist on shooting for us both.
Grandpa! Have me, hold me, cherish me!
Tears smut my fingers. There
half my life-lease later,
I hold an Illustrated London News - ;
disloyal still,
I doodle handlebar
mustache on the last Russian Czar.
* * *
Poor sheepish plaything,
organized with prodigal animosity,
lived in just a year -
my Father's cottage at Beverly Farms
was on the market the month he died.
Empty, open, intimate,
its town-house furniture
had an on tiptoe air
of waiting for the mover
on the heels of the undertaker.
Ready, afraid
of living alone till eighty,
Mother mooned in a window,
as if she had stayed on a train
one stop past her destination.
The subways drummed the vaults. I heard
the El's green girders charge on Third,
Manhattan's truss of adament,
that groaned in ermine, slummed on want. . . .
Cyclonic zero of the word,
God of our armies, who interred
Cold Harbour's blue immortals, Grant!
Horseman, your sword is in the groove!
Ice, ice. Our wheels no longer move.
Look, the fixed stars, all just alike
as lack-land atoms, split apart,
and the Republic summons Ike,
the mausoleum in her heart.
- Inauguration Day: January 1953, pg. 7
* * *
"When the Pulitzers showered on some dope
on screw who flushed our dry mouths out with soap,
few people would consider why I took
to stalking sailors, and scattered Uncle Sam's
phoney gold-plated laurels to the birds.
Because I knew my Whitman like a book,
stranger in America, tell my country: I,
Catullus redivivus, once the rage
of the Village and Paris, used to play my role
of homosexual, wolfing the stray lambs
who hungered by the Place de la Concorde.
My profit was a pocket with a hole.
Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age,
must lay his heart out for my bed and board."
- Words for Hart Crane, pg. 55
* * *
They're altogether otherworldly now,
those adults champing for their ritual Friday spin
to pharmacist and five-and-ten in Brockton.
Back in my throw-away and shaggy span
of adolescence, Grandpa still waves his stick
like a policeman;
Grandmother, like a Mohammedan, still wears her thick
lavender mourning and touring veil;
the Pierce Arrow clears its throat in a horse-stall.
Then the dry road dust rises to whiten
the fatigued elm leaves -
the nineteenth century, tired of children, is gone.
They're all gone into a world of light; the farm's my own.
The farm's my own!
Back there alone,
I keep indoors, and spoil another season.
I hear the rattley little country gramophone
racking its five foot horn:
"O Summer Time!"
Even at noon here the formidable
Ancien Régime still keeps nature at a distance. Five
green shaded light bulbs spider the billiards-table;
no field is greener than its cloth,
where Grandpa, dipping sugar for us both,
once spilled his demitasse.
His favourite ball, the number three,
still hides the coffee stain.
Never again
to walk there, chalk our cues,
insist on shooting for us both.
Grandpa! Have me, hold me, cherish me!
Tears smut my fingers. There
half my life-lease later,
I hold an Illustrated London News - ;
disloyal still,
I doodle handlebar
mustache on the last Russian Czar.
- Grandparents, pg. 68-69
* * *
Poor sheepish plaything,
organized with prodigal animosity,
lived in just a year -
my Father's cottage at Beverly Farms
was on the market the month he died.
Empty, open, intimate,
its town-house furniture
had an on tiptoe air
of waiting for the mover
on the heels of the undertaker.
Ready, afraid
of living alone till eighty,
Mother mooned in a window,
as if she had stayed on a train
one stop past her destination.
- For Sale, pg. 76
June 1, 2022
4.5 stars... I was so conflicted on what to rate this book and almost did 5 stars, which is a massive testament to how incredible the poems were given the fact that I found around half of the book (the prose section, part ii - 91 revere st) absolutely unbearably painful to read.
However, the exquisitely beautiful language and masterfully poignant exploration of themes of grief, war, and religion (to name just a few) throughout the poetic portion of this book made it so that I honestly cannot bring myself to rate it less than 4 stars.
Now, for the prose. There were certainly interesting parts of it, but I found around 60% to be absolutely dreadfully boring and it took me four separate sittings to get through about 4o pages (which really does not reflect well on my enjoyment). It did provide context that was important for section iv, and I am glad that I read it as I think I couldn't have appreciated some of the absolute best moments of undeniably excellent poetry, but I think it would be a more enjoyable experience if one was to read a quick biography on Lowell that gives context on his origin, education, and family and then read parts i, ii, and iii - you simply do not need so much superfluous mindnumbing detail, I couldn't even keep most of it straight or remember the names of half his relatives and friend-of-my-dad's to be dead honest.
That being said, suffer through or skip the prose, I promise it's worth it. Genuinely, I was counting pages to get to the end of the prose section and could not stop my mind from wandering from boredom as I read it, but pretty much as soon as I got to part iii, I was transfixed by the pure lyricism... That being said, part iv (Life Studies) was definitely the high point, it was absolutely magnificent. The incredible vivid imagery and intensely personal and intimate style, form, and content of the first poem was honestly stunning, and while there were obviously marked and notable high points throughout the rest of the section, there weren't any low points I can call to mind, it was just a beautiful, tragic, lovely, and starkly honest depiction of life. Read it. That's all.
Confessionalism is my single favourite literary genre ever, so I may be a bit biased, but I found this overall a magnificent collection of poetry. Throughout the whole text, intensely beautiful religious, mythological, historical, political, natural, and clinical themes blended together so well.
Here are the ones I found to be the absolute best (in order of appearance, not ranked because that is Too Much Pressure):
- Beyond the Alps (specifically stanza 3-4)
- For George Santayna
- My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow
- Sailing Home for Rapallo (probably my favourite of all, absolutely breathtaking)
- Walking in the Blue
- Home After Three Months Away
However, the exquisitely beautiful language and masterfully poignant exploration of themes of grief, war, and religion (to name just a few) throughout the poetic portion of this book made it so that I honestly cannot bring myself to rate it less than 4 stars.
Now, for the prose. There were certainly interesting parts of it, but I found around 60% to be absolutely dreadfully boring and it took me four separate sittings to get through about 4o pages (which really does not reflect well on my enjoyment). It did provide context that was important for section iv, and I am glad that I read it as I think I couldn't have appreciated some of the absolute best moments of undeniably excellent poetry, but I think it would be a more enjoyable experience if one was to read a quick biography on Lowell that gives context on his origin, education, and family and then read parts i, ii, and iii - you simply do not need so much superfluous mindnumbing detail, I couldn't even keep most of it straight or remember the names of half his relatives and friend-of-my-dad's to be dead honest.
That being said, suffer through or skip the prose, I promise it's worth it. Genuinely, I was counting pages to get to the end of the prose section and could not stop my mind from wandering from boredom as I read it, but pretty much as soon as I got to part iii, I was transfixed by the pure lyricism... That being said, part iv (Life Studies) was definitely the high point, it was absolutely magnificent. The incredible vivid imagery and intensely personal and intimate style, form, and content of the first poem was honestly stunning, and while there were obviously marked and notable high points throughout the rest of the section, there weren't any low points I can call to mind, it was just a beautiful, tragic, lovely, and starkly honest depiction of life. Read it. That's all.
Confessionalism is my single favourite literary genre ever, so I may be a bit biased, but I found this overall a magnificent collection of poetry. Throughout the whole text, intensely beautiful religious, mythological, historical, political, natural, and clinical themes blended together so well.
Here are the ones I found to be the absolute best (in order of appearance, not ranked because that is Too Much Pressure):
- Beyond the Alps (specifically stanza 3-4)
- For George Santayna
- My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow
- Sailing Home for Rapallo (probably my favourite of all, absolutely breathtaking)
- Walking in the Blue
- Home After Three Months Away
November 23, 2024
Once this volume got down to the business of poetry, I liked it just fine. (Lowell's essayed accounts of his childhood and his life in Boston bored me.)
Since I'm reading biographies and complete poems of Sylvia Plath and Ann Sexton, it only made sense to pick this little book up. Both women studied under and with Lowell, and I was interested to watch for similarities in their work while adding fresh tones of their female voices. And sure enough, I can see it, especially with Sexton.
Lyrical and embedded with story, Lowell's poems don't worry about rhythm (which is why Frost didn't like anything he did) or rhyme. Some have deliberate rhymes that catch the eye, but most just put a memory to the page in poetic form.
Here's my favorite:
Poor sheepish plaything,
organized with prodigal animosity,
lived in just a year––
my Father's cottage at Beverly Farms
was on the market the month he died,
Empty, open, intimate,
its town-house furniture
had an on tiptoe air
of waiting for the mover
on the heels of the undertaker.
Ready, afraid
of living alone till eighty,
Mother mooned in a window,
as if she had stayed on a train
one stop past her destination.
Since I'm reading biographies and complete poems of Sylvia Plath and Ann Sexton, it only made sense to pick this little book up. Both women studied under and with Lowell, and I was interested to watch for similarities in their work while adding fresh tones of their female voices. And sure enough, I can see it, especially with Sexton.
Lyrical and embedded with story, Lowell's poems don't worry about rhythm (which is why Frost didn't like anything he did) or rhyme. Some have deliberate rhymes that catch the eye, but most just put a memory to the page in poetic form.
Here's my favorite:
Poor sheepish plaything,
organized with prodigal animosity,
lived in just a year––
my Father's cottage at Beverly Farms
was on the market the month he died,
Empty, open, intimate,
its town-house furniture
had an on tiptoe air
of waiting for the mover
on the heels of the undertaker.
Ready, afraid
of living alone till eighty,
Mother mooned in a window,
as if she had stayed on a train
one stop past her destination.
May 16, 2022
I really enjoyed the format of this book - poems, a chunk of autobiography, more poems. The autobio section really informed my reading of the second part of the book. I feel like Lowell is sometimes hard to get into because he uses so many historical references, latin vocabulary and such in his work. Clearly he knew a lot of stuff about history and politics which I dabble in but can't follow the particulars of Catholicism, etc that come up. That said, once I got past the name dropping, I found his poetry had this unique knack for surprising me - his poems shoot off in directions I wouldn't have thought of or anticipated. Also the wordplay and mixture of images is overwhelming and perfection at the same time - open any page, and you see a kind of poetic genius at work - his descriptions are succinct and penetrating. I found the poems based on his own life material the most appealing.
Star poems -
My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow
Dunbarton
Grandparents
For Sale
Sailing Home from Rapallo
Star poems -
My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow
Dunbarton
Grandparents
For Sale
Sailing Home from Rapallo
July 13, 2023
More than sixty years since publication, it is hard now to see why this book was groundbreaking. It contains many poems and an autobiographical piece of prose. Strangely, the autobiographical piece is what was groundbreaking formally and a few of the poems in the last section of the book are confessional which made the book groundbreaking as to content.
Groundbreaking is of interest at the time something is written. Novelty is always highly praised no matter when it happens. If all a book has is a novelty, then its impact will fade. This happens here with ‘Life Studies’ because now we are much less enamored of ancestral stories about WASPs and tepidly confessional poems concerning mental health are also much less impressive.
Lowell was a good writer and maybe sometimes a great writer but mostly here I see the good writer not a great one.
Groundbreaking is of interest at the time something is written. Novelty is always highly praised no matter when it happens. If all a book has is a novelty, then its impact will fade. This happens here with ‘Life Studies’ because now we are much less enamored of ancestral stories about WASPs and tepidly confessional poems concerning mental health are also much less impressive.
Lowell was a good writer and maybe sometimes a great writer but mostly here I see the good writer not a great one.
March 2, 2025
I don't really know what to say about Life Studies -- it's an interesting book of poetry, and I can see how it would have been revolutionary at the time, but almost nothing here really resonated with me. Maybe 'Father's Bedroom' or 'For Sale', in a very small way, or a couple of the poems dedicated to other writers (although those were pretty inscrutable to me, so I'm not at all sure I understood them).
Overall I'm not really interested in the personal aspect of these poems, or the idea of poetry as a processing of thinking through things (or at least not when it's done like this). I think the idea of this sort of 'confessional poetry' as a whole doesn't really work for me; I see it as part of the same thing as the move towards memoir and autofiction, things that have made much of contemporary literary fiction colourless and boring to me. I do think it made sense at the time Lowell was writing this as a necessary reaction against what poetry was becoming, these sort of excessively formalist constructions detached from anything tangible -- but this feels like the opposite end of the scale, and I would probably prefer more of a synthesis.
Overall I'm not really interested in the personal aspect of these poems, or the idea of poetry as a processing of thinking through things (or at least not when it's done like this). I think the idea of this sort of 'confessional poetry' as a whole doesn't really work for me; I see it as part of the same thing as the move towards memoir and autofiction, things that have made much of contemporary literary fiction colourless and boring to me. I do think it made sense at the time Lowell was writing this as a necessary reaction against what poetry was becoming, these sort of excessively formalist constructions detached from anything tangible -- but this feels like the opposite end of the scale, and I would probably prefer more of a synthesis.
September 30, 2018
If you like self-indulgent, self-relishing bourgeois sketches of New England dinner parties, descriptions of wardrobes and china and draperies and assorted materials, with a cursory glance towards the traditional laundry list of cultural references expected of an upper crust east-coast American in the first half of the 20th century, then this is the book for you. For those that find such frivolities insufferable or anger-inducing, skip backwards or forwards in time to something with more substance. Lowell certainly did not knock T.S. Eliot off his perch, and for all his supposedly confessional poetry, has here probed for nothing beyond the low-hanging fruit of psychological analysis.
July 17, 2025
This book has the accolades but “For the Union Dead” is the stronger book. Too many personal “life studies” weigh this down—it begins to feel like make-work. Casual placement of rhyme adds music, but too irregularly—poems often feel like Lowell just got tired of trying to follow a pattern. And who did the layout? The prose memoir is in a font at least 2 points smaller than the poems, and thus is ungainly, and the poems begin in different places on the page, depending upon (stanza) length. In order to avoid breaking stanzas from one page to the next, poems seem to end partway down a page, only to continue on the next page.
October 25, 2025
This is the poetry book that started the confessional poetry bonanza some of which failed to keep the standard that Lowell set. Some of these followers are not attuned to what standards are.
Two poems stand out for me.
'Beyond the Alps' striking in its outrage and disbelief at the action of Pope Pius on the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. It is much more than that and Rome in 1950 is illuminated as is its classical past.
The second poem I rate highly is 'Waking in the Blue' about his time in a mental facility. It is open and funny but has the despair of bewildered intelligence.
A book of poetry that is well worth reading and pondering.
Two poems stand out for me.
'Beyond the Alps' striking in its outrage and disbelief at the action of Pope Pius on the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. It is much more than that and Rome in 1950 is illuminated as is its classical past.
The second poem I rate highly is 'Waking in the Blue' about his time in a mental facility. It is open and funny but has the despair of bewildered intelligence.
A book of poetry that is well worth reading and pondering.
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