Robert Lowell and the Confessional Voice

Book excerpt: Robert Lowell and the Confessional Voice returns to the poet's early works, such as Land of Unlikeness and Lord Weary's Castle, in search of a relationship between Lowell's early poetry and his turn to a confessional style of writing in the 1950s. Lowell's early poetry is often overshadowed by the emergence of his confessional poetry (that develops in Life Studies; however, instead of Lowell's early poetry being eclipsed by Life Studies, a remembrance of his early poetry is necessary as a way of understanding Lowell's evolution as a poet. The early poetry provides readers and scholars of Lowell with a Puritan paradigm and the ethos of an American narrative that Lowell never fully abandons but only perpetually deconstructs.