SOURCE: "Robert Lowell's Tokens of the Self," in American Literature, Vol. 63, No. 4, December, 1991, pp. 712-26.

In the following essay, Witek examines Lowell's search for personal identity and Freudian themes relating to his parents in the poetry of Life Studies and his autobiographical prose writings.

Robert Lowell sold a large collection of manuscript materials to the Houghton Library in 1973, work which is just beginning to be made public, notably in Ian Hamilton's biography and in the 1987 volume of Collected Prose. Among the most interesting of these papers are over two hundred pages of autobiographical prose, many of which are still unpublished. This material, begun while Lowell was recovering from a mental breakdown following the death of his mother in 1954, offers dramatic evidence of his tendency to psychologize both his life and his method, and to conflate the two chronically and emblematically.

Lowell tells many bleakly humorous stories about dealing...