Life Studies - Critical Response

Critical Response

M. L. Rosenthal wrote a review, entitled 'Poetry as Confession' which first applied the term 'confession' to Lowell's approach in Life Studies, and led to the name of the school of Confessional poetry. For this reason, Life Studies is viewed as one of the first confessional books of poetry, although some poets and poetry critics such as Adam Kirsch and Frank Bidart question the accuracy of the confessional label. However, no one questions the book's lasting influence. The prominent poet Stanley Kunitz noted this tremendous influence when he wrote, in a 1985 essay, "Life Studies. . . perhaps the most influential book of modern verse since T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land."

In a 1962 interview with Peter Orr, Sylvia Plath specifically cited Lowell's Life Studies as having had a profound influence over the poetry she was writing at that time (and which her husband would publish posthumously as Ariel a few years later), stating, "I've been very excited by what I feel is the new breakthrough that came with, say, Robert Lowell's Life Studies, this intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience which I feel has been partly taboo. Robert Lowell's poems about his experience in a mental hospital, for example, interested me very much."

The website for the Academy for American Poets states that, "Lowell's work in Life Studies had an especially profound impact that is discernible not only in the poetry of his direct contemporaries, such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, but also in the treatment of biographical detail by countless poets who followed." John Thompson in The Kenyon Review supports this contention stating that, "For these poems, the question of propriety no longer exists. They have made a conquest: what they have won is a major expansion of the territory of poetry."