Robert Lowell and the Confessional Voice

‘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.