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Life Studies and for the Union Dead (FSG Classics) by Robert Lowell
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Reconsiderations: "Life Studies"
A Review by Adam Kirsh

Even before Robert Lowell published Life Studies, his masterpiece, in 1959, he was widely regarded as the best American poet of his generation. But for most of the 1950s he was also completely blocked, managing to write, as he later recalled, just "five messy poems in five years." The problem was not that Lowell had failed to master his chosen style -- the symbol-studded, ambiguity-laden, highly artificial style of American modernism, as he had learned it from poets such as Allen Tate, his first literary mentor. On the contrary, Lowell had mastered that style so completely that he had exhausted its possibilities. In his debut volume, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lord Weary's Castle (1946), his combination of relentless rhythmic force and apocalyptic moral vision had issued in poems worthy of comparison with Milton, such as "The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket":

When the whale's viscera go and the rollLord Weary's Castle, Lowell found himself increasingly unsatisfied with...
 
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