Life Studies

Robert Lowell was an American poet, but he published Life Studies in the United Kingdom before releasing it in America so that it could be included in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry Book Society, which required British first editions. The American version of the book, published a few months later, includes an added prose section called “91 Revere Street,” named for the Boston address where Lowell lived as a boy. Life Studies won the National Book Award in 1960 and ushered in a new era of poetry in which confessing one’s own experiences and emotions was paramount.