The characteristics of confessional poetry in Robert Lowell's Life Studies

로버트 로월 "인생연구"에 나타난 고백시의 특징

Robert Lowell is one of the major poets in the modern American poetic world. His major work, Life Studies, is a representative of confessional poetry. It presented American spiritual civilization and universality for life from the late 1950s to 1960s. It dealt with the subject of the poet's private life under the psychological pressure. Lowell described his distinctive vision of the relationship of painful world and suffering self in his poetry. An important feature of his confessional poems was the criticism on modern civilization by means of characterization. Life Studies was written as a kind of therapy to overcome his early trauma, as well as the social problems of contemporary Americans which Lowell was confronted with. Through his personal experiences, Lowell exposed and judged the collapse of traditional value and moral confusion in the society. Therefore, he is a poet who opened his own world of poetry with his poetic achievements.