Max Liu on Robert Lowell's Relevance

This year marks the centenary of American poet Robert Lowell's birth. The poet whose confessional turn in the '60s raised many an eyebrow, is according to The Guardian writer Max Liu, "best known for his fourth collection, Life Studies (1959)." In that collection, Lowell traded meter for free verse, a form that allowed him to fully explore and depict his tumultuous New England upbringing. Liu:

He abandoned the tight metrical forms of his earlier work for free verse, helping him articulate his experiences and the turbulence of postwar America. Radiant and unsettling, Lowell examines his parents' unhappy marriage, his responses to their deaths and his bouts of manic depression, in a pioneering style of confessional writing ("the C-word," as Michael Hofmann put it). His psychological insights are as sharp as the "locked razor" of Waking in the Blue; in the magnificent Skunk Hour, his clarity pierces the night: "My mind’s not right."

In an age when we narrate our lives online, it is difficult to appreciate how revolutionary Lowell's candour seemed to his contemporaries. Not that the poems are unmediated or spontaneous: he was a rigorous rewriter, who altered facts where it suited him and whose finished poems rarely contained a line of his first drafts. But Life Studies opened up new possibilities for poetic subject matter and made Lowell, along with his friends John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop, one of the most influential poets of the mid-20th century. Sylvia Plath, who was taught by Lowell at Boston University, hailed his "intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience which … has been partly taboo".

Lowell continued to make art from life. The title poem of his collection For the Union Dead (1964) combines American social change with personal loss. In 1973, he controversially deployed letters from his second wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, in The Dolphin. Fellow poet Bishop considered this move crass and unethical, telling him: "Art just isn’t worth that much."

Read more. And if you need even some more Lowell today, head to the Library of America for a portfolio of photos by John Suiter that documents Lowell's Boston.