In the following essay, Hammer examines Lowell's artistic break from the influence of Allen Tate and the significance of Lowell's nervous breakdown as a metaphor for this schism as evident in Life Studies. "Lowell's 'breakdown' is itself a literary construction," according to Hammer.

In the following essay, Witek examines Lowell's search for personal identity and Freudian themes relating to his parents in the poetry of Life Studies and his autobiographical prose writings.

In the following essay, Tillinghast provides an overview of Lowell's literary career, artistic development, and critical reception.

In the following essay, Wallingford examines free associational thinking as an important element of Lowell's creative process. Wallingford notes that free association, a technique derived from psychoanalysis, permits Lowell to both engage and reflect upon his own unconscious thoughts.

In the following essay, Doreski explores Lowell's effort to reconcile his aesthetic attraction to warfare and moral objection to the Second World War in the poetry of Land of Unlikeness.

In the following essay, Doreski traces the creative evolution of "For the Union Dead" and offers alternative interpretations. According to Doreski, the poem "centers not in its public language of history and heroism, as some critics would have it, but in its tropes of memory and psychological alienation."

In the following essay, Tillinghast discusses Lowell's death and offers critical evaluation of Day by Day.

In the following essay, Flanzbaum discusses Lowell's literary fame, political protest, and critical reception during the 1960s. Flanzbaum contends that Lowell's public ambition "should not be understood as a venal thirst for fame but rather as a result of his yearning to find common ground with the large American audience."

Historical judgment and public distance—the tone realized, for example, in "For the Union Dead"—are entangled with [Robert Lowell's] own partly victimized awareness that he is a Lowell and a New Englander…. In his best poetry there is an unspoken and often intended plot: the ambition to write resonant public poetry is corroded again and again by private nightmare, by a failure to escape ghosts of the past…. Lowell said that at the time he wrote Life Studies h...

The doctrine of incarnation has an inherent appeal to poetic thought because it promises to resolve the two basic forms of contradiction bred by a sense of the ironic distance between concepts and world. Incarnation is first of all the union of flesh and spirit, the coming of a principle of divine order in the otherwise chaotic war between the ungoverned flesh and the harsh letter of the old law. The incarnation informs the flesh with spiritual force and, by thus transforming existence, allows the law to be...

In the following essay, Druska provides an overview of Lowell's literary career, artistic development, and major themes in his poetry.

In the following review, Bogen offers positive evaluation of Lowell's Collected Prose.

In the following essay, Lane discusses Lowell's use of allusion and metaphorical reference in "Man and Wife," "Sailing Home from Rapollo," and "For the Union Dead."

That Robert Lowell was always interested in formal experiment we may argue from the evidence of the poems. What I would like to suggest here is that this interest is not only a reflection of formal inventiveness, but of the integrity of the moral experience explored. Thus the knotted and syntactically confusing forms of the early poems tell us a great deal about the quality of the religious vision involved; the free verse looseness of Life Studies reflects the poet's attempt to free himself from rigi...

In the following review, Davie offers favorable assessment of Lowell's Collected Prose.

All [Lowell's] intelligence, his understanding of shifting levels of experience and of language, led him to complexity but not to a reduction of scale or a restriction of feeling. Certainly he lives with bathos, the ironies of mundanity, but when this comes it comes with a bang:      In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother's coffin,     Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL.     ...

Lowell is the most gifted poet of his generation to turn to the stage. Like Schevill, he came to drama through translation, but the way was prepared by the dramatic turn of his lyrics after 1957, with their loosened rhythms and simplified syntax. (p. 280) [Prometheus Unbound is] syntactically varied, inventive in sound play, and lush in imagery. As Lowell's Phaedra was rendered through Freud, his Prometheus has a contemporary existential consciousness. His language has invigorated two classical trage...

Robert Lowell's career as a poet moderated or wavered between his natural inclination towards symbolic formalism and his courtship of confessional free verse…. He would not have smarted at being called the heir of the French Symbolists, or more exactly of the Parnassians…. The Parnassians are neglected in favour of the Symbolists, but their standards of formal beauty and objective, often descriptive, verse found for a while a remarkable inheritor in Lowell. Just as the Parnassians both ...

Though he had written the first two-thirds of his Oresteia in the 1960s, Lowell was still working on the final portion when he died. His purpose, put forth in the brief preface, was to produce an acting version "to trim, cut, and be direct enough to satisfy my own mind and at a first hearing the simple ears of a theatre audience". He did not work from the Greek …, but instead used as his model Richmond Lattimore's "elaborately exact" translation. This was a crucial ...

I had hoped that Robert Lowell, after the disastrous collections of recent years, would emerge into old age with energy and genius as Yeats had done. But when Lowell died last September, he had just published Day by Day, a volume as slack and meretricious as Notebook and History which preceded it. The great poet died thirteen years earlier, with the publication of For the Union Dead. One would not know it, from the book reviews or from the academy. The Literature Industry manufactures truisms like slogans. ...

What, one wonders, would attract a poet to rewrite what is already a rewriting of a translation from the original Greek. For that is what Robert Lowell did with his Oresteia, based as it is on Richard Lattimore's poem script, which Lattimore in turn based on the translation appearing in H. W. Smyth's Loeb Classical Library text. (p. 200) [A new "translation"] can be coming out of one or more of three motives: to explicate the drama in such a way that what was law and revelation t...

Life Studies, [Lowell's] famous transitional volume, was welcomed by myself among other reviewers, for a new kind of direct ease: not, of course, as an ancestor of 'confessional' poetry—if your verses can achieve fame only through hysterical self-exposure and an extra-poetic act like suicide, so much the worse for your verses—but for the skill with which Lowell keyed down his rhetoric and managed to use items of domestic reportage to replace rather worn religious or histor...

[In The Old Glory] Lowell is trying to capture the ironies, cruelties and inconclusiveness on which America was built: in Endecott, the ambiguities are chiefly religious; in Molineux, political; in Cereno, racial. Beyond that, though, he is concerned with essential human nature, which he sees as paradoxical, untrustworthy, and above all, tenebrose. But, regrettably, there are three obstacles he cannot quite negotiate: the limitations of the one-acter, the demands of dramatic form, the problem of stage poetr...

Much of [Day by Day] is occupied by the title sequence, dedicated to [Lowell's] wife and tracing a period of their lives in separate but interrelated lyrics; but most of the other poems in the volume are also personal in that they dwell on the poet's past, his friends, and his regular preoccupations (marriage, family history, and, of course, death). However, they do not have the smothering effect of naked autobiography. True, there is some discreet gossip-fodder, and some stimulation of our cu...

In Lowell's work I have always felt a giant pressure exerted on language and experience, not only in dense and highly wrought poems but in relatively conversational and casual ones as well. In the wide range of poetry that this force has given us, I continue to distinguish two kinds that I noted years ago in "Exile's Return," the opening poem in Lord Weary's Castle: the first unverifiable, so to speak, being chiefly dreamwork and earwork ("The search-guns click and ...

The sheer size of what [Robert Lowell] did in verse exceeded the life work of any of his coevals, and I do not mean in bulk alone—also in scope and grasp and largeness of mind. Randall Jarrell instructed him, John Berryman rivaled him. Each was a masterly and inspired poet, but neither had quite his range over politics in the grand sense. (p. 10) For 30 years Lowell continued from time to time to make a stir.