Lowell’s Life Writing in Prose and Poetry

Abstract

Abstract This article argues against the tendency to favor Robert Lowell’s autobiographical poetry over the autobiographical prose recently published in Memoirs. It opposes the conventional narrative that Lowell’s prose writing was only a preparatory stage for his work on Life Studies. Beyond planting the seeds for a handful of poems in Life Studies, the memoirs also forecast later poems in For the Union Dead and other volumes, and they look backward to Lord Weary’s Castle. The memoirs are best understood as engaging in a dialogue with the poems, probing remembered events in ways untried in the poems, and testifying to the mutability of both language and memory.