With some features of an intellectual biography, this book offers a radical re-examination of Robert Lowell s entire oeuvre. The author finds in it a sustained, if erratic, effort to move beyond the high-modernist paradigm. The book begins by exploring the aesthetic and ethical dilemmas the poet was confronted with at the start of his career, dilemmas which were only temporarily resolved in the deceptive mode of confessionalism. Incorporating some material from the poet s unpublished manuscripts, the author argues that the late Lowell seeks a poetic mode that would be both more public and...