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 historical or literary symbols by domestic memorialising. Of course, in doing so Lowell had the advantage through his ancestry and his personal history of being himself a distinctly symbolic personage. The aristocrat without power or wealth except in so far as he embodies the history and the lost hopes of his country is a very poetic figure: especially when the lost dream of the colonial governors, the Founding Fathers, the oldest...