Gye-Yu Kang, "Robert Lowell's Life-Writing and Memory"

In his thesis, Gye-Yu Kang introduces the reader with the reconstructive aspect of memory
(which inherently operates in the present state of mind and invokes not only objective
emotions of past but also interprets and reshapes the facts), and undertakes to reveal the
ways in which Robert Lowell, aware of this effect of anamnesis, used memory to discover
his young and grown selves in his Life Studies and Day by Day. Chapter one starts with
definitions of Rousseauan concept of memory which claims to reveal the objective truth of
one's past and Augustinian present of things past which, Kang decides, is closer to the
rocklike objectification of past represented in Lowell's Life Studies, which is examined
through modern views on memory, depicted as an active justification of present disposition
through reproduced past experiences, contrary to Augustinian view of memory as an
archive within the chambers of the mind. The thesis states that the attitude towards
autobiographical narrative in the 20th century (including that of Lowell) changed in
accordance with neuropsychological discoveries, before commencing a deep analysis of the
section 91 Reverse Street, which is filled with minute details of what struck Lowell as a kid
(e.g., personification of inherited objects now worn out and seeming out of place, his
mother's materialistic tastes, his father's lack of interest in beauty); that Lowell, looking
from an adult perspective, strives to work out why he, as a kid, resembled (in regards to
proception with social acceptance and material obsession) the very parents to whom he
never admired, thesis argues, shows that Lowell's initial claim to recall rocklike memories is
steered towards his quest for understanding a present self, and claims further that Lowell's
preference for prose over verse is the consequence of this inquiry. The second chapter
opens with a sketch of the historical conditions under which Lowell wrote his Life Studies:
as a patient stunned by the mechanisms of psychoanalysis, his present, observing self not
only attempts to delve into the unconscious of the experiencing self (which is produced by
language) but also examines the depth of American socio-consciousness, which now
demands public conformity, making Lowell's private quest even more revolutionary. Having
thus discussing the concepts of constructed persona and split ego in Lacanian terms, the
chapter draws numerous details from myriad of verse sections in the Life Studies (unus ad
unum restatement of which would make this summary gratutiously lengthy); all the poems
ranging from Lowell's earlier painful memories to his imprisonment as a conscious objector,
from his present state of mind to the current state of the USA add up to a comprehensive
quest for self, produced and dominated by the culture which is merged with personal
memories, which in turn is merged with Lowell's the present consciousness and his mental
decline. Chapter three directs the attention to Lowell's another book, Day by Day,
resembling the Life Studies in terms of structure and subject matter, but differing from it
regarding the way in which memory is conceived. Lowell in his Day by Day, the thesis
states, admitting the fact that he'd rather create through his imagination and not solely
through his memory which makes his snapshot-like recollections unsatisfactory, recognizes

the inability of memory in recalling the truth and makes the distinction between the
realistic memory and the dexterity of rendering memories significant, dissuading him from
treating past as a fixed object to find his lost self: memory then becomes the changing
experience for Lowell who, now stuck in his mental condition, sees the same events
differently every time he invokes them. At a double loss, he returns to oedipal structures in
order to evade suicidal thoughts and establish himself as an autonomous individual,
attempting to sympathize with parental figures to whom he had hitherto looked down
upon, getting himself involved in a process which, as another shot at comprehending
himself and others through a different approach to past, requires him to write and
comment on situations he himself has not been in or emotions he himself has not felt. The
thesis concludes with a summary of all sections underlining the inherently fictive nature of
memory which was such a creative force for Lowell.

Laurence Guillois-Bcel, "Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton: Facing Immoderation"

According to Laurence Guillois-Bcel, Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, two acquainted
confessional poets of the 20th century, both had, as the title suggests, their peculiar course
of expression to challenge madness and immoderate experience which inherently bears
guilt due to illicit subversion of norms, a Foucauldian concept (about segregation of the
mad both out of the social and discursive field, rendering their self-acceptance and selfexpression impossible), implied in the essay. In order to illustrate the distinction, the essay
starts with excerpts from Sexton's drafts and diaries, which demonstrate her inability to
express herself in prose and her experiments with form in verse; using Freudian concepts
laden with her personal ascriptions, Sexton considers the writing process as a liberating
therapy. In contrast, the essay shifts to Lowell's relationship to form through Sexton's own
words stating that Lowell, unlike Sexton, feels in comfort zone while executing free verse.
Lowell's early rich religious imagery and excessive vocabulary serves to depict his
psychological conflicts, as the poet later realizes and confesses; a breaking point and a
stirred moment of nausea against metric verse (to which he'd still hold on after the
epiphany) appealing to formalist tastes then develops at the clinic, forcing him to include
prosaic entries in his oeuvre, as he starts to favor a lighter stock of imagery and a moderate
matrix of lexicon, possibly compensating for the structural contrast between Lowell and
Sexton. Having thus elucidated the ways in which two poets attempted to deal with their
madness, the essay goes on to show how they actually represented madness in their
works, after a brief return to Freudian perspective of excess and Foucaldian take on guilt,
the latter of which particularly sheds light upon the commentaries of the essay on
metapoetical elements, religious symbols and autobiographical sketches in works of both
poets, who both depicted their guilty feelings towards family members and inner struggles
in a fatalistic tone while questioning the position of writing as a means of departure,

sometimes consummating each other, thematically speaking; in other words, Lowell's

ambiguous stance is preoccupied on the level of question which is more positively and
clearly answered in Sexton's works, boldly written despite the negative reader reaction.
This point manifests itself as a twist at the end of the second section of the essay, which
mostly highlights the parallel relationship between poets, in order to delienate the peculiar
ways in which each poet, after having figured out the correct forms to confront and express
their excesses guilty as yet, actuated themselves to foment immoderation in their late
career, elaborated in the third section. Lowell succeeds in this cultivation, the essay states,
by writing every minute details of his private life (going so far as to publish private letters of
his ex-wife in verse, igniting great speculations) and over-writing to the extend that his
one-year project of a notebook is completed in six years and ends up expanding to three
books, after which he can't write, whereas Sexton adopts historical, mythological and
liturgical themes and tacks herself in the center of such settings; while this period of their
career, due to their poetic revolt against normative reactions, is imbued with hubris
(punished in Greek mythology by the spirit called Nemesis), the essay claims that Sexton's
approach was more positive, even though she ironically used the theme of death more and
more frequently, as if she was aware of the retribution she was led to, though not by
Nemesis but her own hands, but that was not a defeat, the essay concludes, because she
had already established herself a dominion beyond death through boundless poetic
writing.

Jyoti Sharma, Robert Lowells Life Studies as a Modern Miniature Epic: The
Synthesis of the Confessional and the Epic Genre
This paper consists of a brief analysis of the first part (or the first movement, as called by
Jyoti Sharma) of Lowell's Life Studies, which takes social themes upon itself, before the
book moves toward personal themes in the following sections and reveals a link between
the two; the social aspect of the book is important to consider it as a modern miniature
epic, which the writer does not explicitly define, forcing the reader to look into other
modern epics to which the Life Studies is compared: what these works have in common, in
the broadest sense, is their exhaustive historical and cultural scope through modern eye,
even though what the writer actually means by miniature remains ambiguous, just as he
calls each canto in Ezra Pound's voluminous Cantos a short epic in and of itself. The essay
defines Beyond the Alps as a symbolic and satiric journey of the poet, with contemptuous
thoughts against religious dogma and disillusionment towards science in his backpack,
from the city of God to the city of Art in futile search of a balance between destruction and
creation, while The Banker's Daughter employs a historical subject matter, through which
he conveys the mechanical, detached and greed-based relationships between married
couples. In the Inauguration Day: January 1953, the reader is informed, Lowell indicates his

apprehension filled by Dwight Eisenhower's accession, returning to the historical figures

whose lifeless statues are in a harmony with ice covering Washington of a militaristic
present linked to its militaristic past, and finally, A Mad Negro Soldier Confined in Munich
pictures a dearranged world through the lens of a mad black soldier, a character who
brings the reader closer to the Lowell's persona through whom, the essay concludes, the
book as a whole turns into epic, going from America's history and civilization to the
particulars of Lowell's family and insanity, simultaneously stumbling with rare exceptions of
hopeful glimmer.

Kahter Mahdi Al-Zwelef, "Marital Metaphors in Robert Lowell's Life Studies"

Having referred to marital metaphors as the most curious aspect of Lowell's poetry and
asserted that the main focus of the paper is to be his Life Studies (which was written after
Lowell's self-awakening), Kahter Mahdi Al-Zwelef concisely introduces the reader to the
poet's biography, before a brief clarification about atypical meanings the poet ascribes to
the aforementioned metaphors and his twofold role as a confessional poet who, alienated
as he is, parallels his decay with that of sociopolitical structures. The paper then advances
to illustrate contexts the metaphor is employed in through several subcategories, first of
which demonstrates the poet's divorce from God/Art analogy in Beyond the Alps, social
degradation surrounding the matrimonial degredation of Marie de Medici and Henry IV of
France in The Banker's Daughter, the relationship between the decline of the poet's family
(with a past Lowell always despised) and that of American history in A Mad Negro Confined
At Munich, the artist as a rejected suitor of public in Ford Madox Ford, separation from
national and religious assent in For George Santayana, in short, cultural and political
reasons alluded by marital metaphors. The paper then proceeds on a more personal level,
not altogether overlooking the sociohistorical realm in which the poet places himself, by
disclosing the poet's divorce from the purity of his childhood and his progenitors' divorce
from life in two poems, called My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow and
Commander Lowell; while the former limns the poet's disillusionment with his innocent
faith in tradition and the grandfather figure, the latter reveals his complex feelings towards
the father figure through a personal account interwoven with social affairs. The paper in
the last major section extends the pursuit of the personal substances for which the marital
metaphor is utilized, discussing the poet's quest for lost identity and conservation thereof.
In Waking in the Blue, Lowell depicts the mental decline of intellectual class, while he
speaks of an actual separation in Man and Wife, which, the paper lets the reader know,
indicates the poet's mental separation on the same bed he himself and his parents lost the
romantic attachment, a derogatory subject more explicitly handled in To Speak of Woe
That is in Marriage. The paper pays a great deal of attention to Skunk Hour, which takes
upon all the major themes scrutinized in the paper: failure and detachment through

economical, sexual, sterile excesses in the first part, and in the second part his inner
struggles, existential rupture between self and the other, dedomilication of psyche from
body, reversal of symbols (e.g., celebration of foul odor as prana). After a brief observation
on the dichotomy between the passive-fragmented past and the active-critical present of
the poet's ego, the reader is invited to question the credibility of Lowell's poems, before
rushing into literal takes on them, even though they do provide sufficient amount of
genuine facts to give him the benefit of doubt; quoting from critics, Sexton's and Lowell's
own confessions about the confessional poetry, the paper not only shows that the poems
inholds a considerable amount of fiction, but also states that the quality of Lowell's poems
has never been limited to genuine conveyance of autobiographical or historical facts, which
only make a great poem through Lowell's craft and artistic rendering along with rich
imagination. The paper concludes with an account of poetic, religious, ancestral, marital
and mental divorces through which the poet created his art.

Marjorie Perloff, "The Return of Robert Powell"

Marjorie Perloff opens the essay with lines from Lowell's Man and Wife and with a
personal anecdote which made her encounter with the poet in fifties (herself mother to
two babies and a graduate student then) so puissant. Astonished with self-demeaning
content of the Life Studies, she delves into the poet's earlier work called Lord Weary's
Castle which, though densely adorned with religious and sacramental references as it is,
was mainly evaluated for syntactic and aural structures in the late fifties; she then goes on
to show how the meticulous craft of alliteration, internal rhymes, guttural sound
repetitions and iambic pentameter can actually assist, shape or even exceed meaning and
context, which might be otherwise too ambiguous, too fallacious or too obvious. Such
rhetorical and structural devices, she claims, make Lowell one of the most memorable
poets of his era, even after he switched to irregular and prosaic rhythmic patterns. Having
thus underlined the mnemonic nature of Lowell's style, she raises the cynical question of
how the poet actually came to be uttered as the outstanding poet of the generation, in an
era when such extravagant epithets are rather rancid, hinting that the reader will be more
or less steered towards the question in the following sections of the essay, which, first of all
and most importantly, not merely restating the fanciful elements found in the confessional
poetry and elsewhere or the social elements traceable even in relatively earlier works of
the poet, embarks to undermine the claim that the amplification of the stound in which
the psyche faces its own madness was unprecedented up to Lowell's composition by giving
examples dating as back as the 18th century. The essay then adopts more of a critical
approach towards Lowell's poetry, the Skunk Hour in particular, by pointing out the elitist
and homophobic undertones of the poem and backing up its arguments with a quote by
Frank O'Hara, who plainly states that guilt is a must, not object of admiration when the

poet does a horrible thing and writes about it in a gloomy tone as Lowell did in his Skunk
Hour. According to Perloff, Lowell's deductive approach towards the social realm, unlike his
powerful command of language and minute depictions of everyday life, is overly simplistic
and pessimistic (e.g., he overlooks the heroes of the WW2 and insists on glorious
tradition/wretched present dicothomy), and more importantly, does not really say anything
that had not already been said by the 19th century. She then goes on to criticize the
Collected Poems, a posthumously published collection which, according to her, does not do
justice to the poet, due to the omission of works which should have been included and the
inclusion of what otherwise should have been published separately for scholars of special
interest or might have been discarded by Lowell, whose best artifice is thus shadowed by
the bulk of the collection, even though there exists even less successful examples among
what was printed before the poet's death, such as the Imitations, which, as shown in
Lowell's translation of Rilke's Selbstbildnis aus dem Jahre 1906, overwhelmingly distorts the
original poems in terms of both form and content despite the fact that Lowell claimed to
remain truthful to the authors he worked on. Moreover, she claims, Lowell grew more
condescending in tone as he became popular, exemplified by the book History, which,
contrary to his earlier more politically-correct point of view, not only shallowly caricaturizes
historical figures but is also historically wrong; this might be linked to his mental condition
of the early seventies, by which time his poetry in general seems to have lost its quality.
While it is known that Lowell revised and re-wrote his poetry intensely in his later career,
Perloff states that revision without self-criticism does not necessarily evolve into the better,
and claims that the reason for the decline of Lowell's popularity in the decades following
his death is such defects in his poetry, most of which is related to his poetic shift from the
private to the public. She concludes with his poem Art of the Possible, exemplifying what
he'll be remembered as: not America's last great poet, but a poet who cherishes in the
expiring chill of cold spots in the bed, found by a solitary barenness, muffling its own
insomniac creator in a burlesque, creative way.