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by: Robert Lowell
List Price: $14.00Amazon.com's Price: $11.20 You Save: $2.80 (20%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 818.5209
EAN: 9780374530969
ISBN: 0374530963
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 176
Publication Date: October 16, 2007
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date: October 16, 2007
Sales Rank: 418884
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Robert Lowell, with Elizabeth Bishop, stands apart as the greatest American poet of the latter half of the twentieth century—and Life Studies and For the Union Dead stand as among his most important volumes. In Life Studies, which was first published in 1959, Lowell moved away from the formality of his earlier poems and started writing in a more confessional vein. The title poem of For the Union Dead concerns the death of the Civil War hero (and Lowell ancestor) Robert Gould Shaw, but it also largely centers on the contrast between Boston’s idealistic past and its debased present at the time of its writing, in the early 1960's. Throughout, Lowell addresses contemporaneous subjects in a voice and style that themselves push beyond the accepted forms and constraints of the time.
Customer Reviews
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Rating: - "For the Union Dead" - A Timeless Civil War Poem
I read this poem again on Martin Luther King Day, a fitting day for this poem, a tribute to the Union dead of the Civil War and a particular remembrance of the black soldiers who wore the uniform of the Union-- particularly of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment (made famous to non-Civil War students by the movie Glory several years ago).
The 54th Massachusetts was the first black regiment to march from the North to fight the Confederacy. These men were quite brave knowing that in battle ... Read More
Rating:  - Confessional Intensity, Disaffection, and Technical Brilliance
Robert Lowell's poetry is praised for its technical brilliance, metrical complexity, and verbal ambiguity. In an earlier review of Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle (awarded Pulitzer Prize of Poetry in 1947) I compared reading his poetry to studying mathematics, too advanced mathematics.
Furthermore, I am often uncomfortable with Lowell's disaffection, mistrust, and anger (one critic calls it apocalyptic rage) evident both in his criticism of contemporary society, and in his confessional topics ... Read More
Rating: - My own minority judgment Good but not great poems
The quality of a writer for us , it seems to me, is often defined by how much of ourselves we are willing to put into knowing their work. I read the poems in this collection, but am not tempted to reread them. They make sense and tell of Lowell's childhood, his relation to his father, his meditation on the way he first met his first wife and the way they have grown distant through the years, his sense of his grandfather's grandness as he takes him with him on a local tour, his friendships with other writers. ... Read More
Rating: - an american giant at his best
Robert Lowell is a giant in American poetry. He is pretty much unanimously considered one of the best of his generation. This book combines two of his volumes of poetry. One of those volumes is his masterpiece Life Studies--the reason why he is a giant in American poetry. This is his seminal work. No matter how you look at it, this is an important book of poetry. And an excellent book of poetry. Most of the poems are good and there are several phenomenal poems within. Life Studies alone belongs on any serious ... Read More
Rating: - My Favorite Poet
Lowell is of the vanguard of American twentieth century poets, a man who created many brilliant works other than the two joined in this volume. In such poems in Life Studies as Beyond the Alps and A Mad Negro Soldier Confined in Munich, as well as his portraits of various friends and family, we discover a man capable of both acid humor and outright sadness. However, in Life Studies, these excellent poems are overshadowed by the towering biographical essay 91 Revere Street. In this touching memoir, Lowell describes ... Read More
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