‘Robert Lowell and “the business of direct experience” ’

This chapter explores the autobiographical urge in Lowell's poetry, especially that written when Lowell was summering in the town of Castine: the poetry of 'Life Studies' and 'Near the Ocean'. I argue that Lowell's New Critical education, which deemed biographical material to be extrinsic and therefore secondary as far as poetic analysis was concerned, clashed with his 'confessional' desire to focus on people, places and events in his own contemporary life, and that his poetry never really resolved the tension between these two fundamentally irreconcilable masters.