Robert Lowell IV was an American poet. He was born into a Boston Brahmin family that could trace its origins back to the Mayflower. His family, past and present, were important subjects in his poetry. Growing up in Boston also informed his poems, which were frequently set in Boston and the New England region.
Lowell wrote in both formal, metered verse as well as free verse; his verse in some poems from "Life Studies and Notebook" fell somewhere in between metered and free verse.
After the publication of his 1959 book "Life Studies," which won the 1960 National Book Award and "featured a new emphasis on intense, uninhibited discussion of personal, family, and psychological struggles," he was considered an important part of the confessional poetry movement. However, much of Lowell's work, which often combined the public with the personal, did not conform to a typical "confessional poetry" model. Instead, Lowell worked in a number of distinctive stylistic modes and forms over the course of his career.
He is "widely considered one of the most important American poets of the postwar era."
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