SOURCE: "Damaged Grandeur: The Life of Robert Lowell," in Sewanee Review, Vol. CII, No. 1, Winter, 1994, pp. 121-31.

In the following essay, Tillinghast provides an overview of Lowell's literary career, artistic development, and critical reception.

A meteorologist of late twentieth-century American poetry, noting changes in the literary climate, tuning his awareness to the shifting winds of reputation and ideology, will be aware of at least one major cooling trend. I am speaking of the decline in estimation of Robert Lowell's poetry. He is still taught, his importance is acknowledged, but I wonder how many younger poets actually read him anymore? During his lifetime it was quite another story. Early in Lowell's career Peter Viereck had judged him "best qualified to restore to our literature its sense of the tragic and the lofty." When Life Studies appeared in 1959, John Thompson wrote in the Kenyon Review that "the great past, Revolutionary...