Life Studies: and, For the Union Dead - Softcover

Robert Lowell, one of America's great men of letters, died in 1977.

"[Life Studies] gives us the naked psyche of a suffering man in a hostile world, and Lowell's way to manage this material, to keep it, is by his insistent emphasis on form. The natural heir to Eliot and Pound as well as to Crane, he extends their methods."—M. L. Rosenthal, Salmagundi

"No other English or American poet of his generation has, in his handling of language, the sheer brute strength [that Lowell has in For the Union Dead]; no other poet is so deeply moved not only by moral but by physical horror and disgust (which can include self-disgust), and by a kind of blind Samson-like ferocity. And yet, insensibly, in Lowell's hands, the tale of the world's horrors becomes a tale of the world's wonders, the catalogue of obscure absurdities, a song of praise."—G. S. Fraser, The New York Times Book Review

"Lowell is, by something like a critical consensus, the greatest Amnrican poet of the mid-century . . . More than any contemporary writer, poet or novelist, Lowell has created the language, cool and violent all at once, of contemporary introspection. He is our truest historian."—Richard Poirier, Book Week