Historical judgment and public distance—the tone realized, for example, in "For the Union Dead"—are entangled with [Robert Lowell's] own partly victimized awareness that he is a Lowell and a New Englander…. In his best poetry there is an unspoken and often intended plot: the ambition to write resonant public poetry is corroded again and again by private nightmare, by a failure to escape ghosts of the past….

Lowell said that at the time he wrote Life Studies he didn't know whether it was a death-rope or a lifeline. His handling of autobiographical material since then suggests that he is still not ready—and perhaps need never be—to answer that question. The tone of Life Studies, flat and unadorned, was indeed a breakthrough. But his changes of manner since then, his likening Life Studies to still photographs, suggests that those poems did not solve the problem...