Intro to Confessional Poets - Robert Lowell

A Lesson by Judy

Robert Lowell who was born in 1917, and tragically passed in 1977, is one of my favorite poets. As we move forward, we will discuss why. I have posted a brief bio of him, which I found on Poetry Foundation's website. We will go into more detail about his life in future lessons, as well as discussing some of his works, and his impact on Confessional Poetry in general. If you are overeager, I encourage you to surf the net, and read more about him and the whole movement.

Robert Lowell is best known for his volume Life Studies,but his true greatness as an American poet lies in the astonishing variety of his work. In the 1940s he wrote intricate and tightly patterned poems that incorporated traditional meter and rhyme; in the late 1950s when he published Life Studies, he began to write startlingly original personal or "confessional" poetry in much looser forms and meters; in the 1960s he wrote increasingly public poetry; and finally in the 1970s he created poems that incorporated and extended elements of all the earlier poetry. Meanwhile he also produced a volume of translations he called "imitations" and wrote or translated several plays. Lowell had a profound interest in history and politics; in his poetry he juxtaposed self and history in ways that illuminated both. His art and his life were inseparably intertwined, and he believed firmly in the identity of self and language.