The English-speaking
world hails
a magnificent poet
Life
Studies
New poems and
an autobiographical
fragment
by
Robert
Lowell
Alfred Kazin:
"Lile Studies
is a remarkable book
precisely because Lowell has had
the wit-or is this simply the virtue
of his imagination? - to face his
past and to strip his style without
sacrificing its native elegance. It is
the book of an absolutely first·rate
talent. In these poems twentieth·
century poetry comes back to its
great tradition as plain speech;
comes back, in Pasternak's phrase,
'to its sister, life.' "
THE REPORTER
Charles Poore:
"A dozen years have passed since
Robert Lowell won a Pulitzer Prize
in poetry with
Lord Weary's Castle.
He should win another for his new
book,
Life Studies,
a volume of
·poems silhouetted against a prose
memoir of his Boston childhood."
NEW YORK TIMES
M. L.
Rosenthal:
"Life Studies
brings to culmination
one line of development in our
poetry of utmost importance. Tech·
nically, it is an experiment in the
form of the poetic sequence com·
parable to
Mauberley
and
The
Bridge.
To build a great poem out
of the predicament and horror of
the lost Self has been the recurrent
effort of the most ambitious poetry
of the last century. It is too early to
say whether
Life Studies
is great
art. It is certainly major art."
THE NATION
