Life Studies
The book that founded confessional poetry. Lowell broke open the genteel conventions of American verse and wrote directly about his family's distinguished decline, his father's failures, his mother's neurosis, his own manic episodes and hospitalizations. "Skunk Hour," ending with "I myself am hell; / nobody's here," announced that the private life was now the proper subject of serious poetry. Plath, Sexton, and Berryman followed the door Lowell opened.
Lowell parks a forty-page prose memoir, '91 Revere Street,' in the middle of a poetry collection, and the opening section is leftover formal verse from his earlier manner. The family poems assume you care about Boston Brahmin genealogy. And the confessional door he opened let in fifty years of worse poets who skipped the craft and kept the self-exposure.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
