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On 7 September 1943 Robert Lowell, a 26-year-old from one of Boston’s oldest families, wrote to President Roosevelt refusing to serve in the Second World War. He spent several months in the federal prison at Danbury, Connecticut. Three years later his second book, Lord Weary’s Castle, won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1959 he dropped the dense, rhymed style that had made his name and published Life Studies, plain-spoken poems about his parents, his marriage and his time in a mental hospital, which gave rise to the label “confessional poetry”. He won a second Pulitzer in 1974 and died in a New York taxi in 1977. This guide covers his twelve key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 12 key books · 1944–1977 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Robert Lowell’s best-known books are Life Studies (1959), which won the National Book Award, Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) and The Dolphin (1973), both Pulitzer winners, and For the Union Dead (1964). Start with Life Studies: it is the book that changed American poetry after 1959, and every later Lowell book reads differently once you know it.
Where to Start with Robert Lowell
If you want his defining book
→ Life Studies (1959) — family, marriage and breakdown in plain speech.
If you want the early, formal Lowell
→ Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) — the 1946 Pulitzer winner, dense and rhymed.
If you want public and political poems
→ For the Union Dead (1964) — Boston, the Civil War and the Cold War.
If you want his last, quietest book
→ Day by Day (1977) — free verse written in the final years.
12 Robert Lowell Books, in Order
Land of Unlikeness
His first book, a limited edition with an introduction by his mentor Allen Tate. The title comes from a phrase of Saint Bernard, and the poems, written after his conversion to Catholicism, describe a modern world cut off from God. Several of them reappear, revised, in Lord Weary’s Castle.
Lord Weary’s Castle
Dense, rhymed, heavily religious poems against war, Puritan New England and greed, published by Harcourt Brace. The best known is “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket”, an elegy for his cousin Warren Winslow, whose Navy destroyer sank in New York harbour during the war, built on images from Moby-Dick. Randall Jarrell wrote that no one younger than Auden had written better poetry. It won the Pulitzer when Lowell was thirty.
The Mills of the Kavanaughs
A series of long dramatic monologues, written in the years in which he divorced Jean Stafford, left the Catholic Church, had his first serious manic attack and married Elizabeth Hardwick. Critics generally rank it below Lord Weary’s Castle.
Life Studies
Four parts: formal poems, “91 Revere Street”, a prose memoir of his Beacon Hill childhood and his parents’ marriage, poems to Hart Crane, Santayana and Ford Madox Ford, and the “Life Studies” sequence itself, including “Waking in the Blue”, set in a mental hospital, and “Skunk Hour”. M. L. Rosenthal’s review “Poetry as Confession” first applied the word “confessional” to it. Stanley Kunitz called it perhaps the most influential book of verse since The Waste Land.
Imitations
Loose versions of poems from Homer to Eugenio Montale, by way of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Rilke. Lowell did not aim for literal translation but rewrote the originals in his own voice. The same year he published Phaedra, a verse translation of Racine.
For the Union Dead
The title poem, first read at the Boston Arts Festival in 1960, is set on Boston Common while it was dug up for an underground car park, beside Saint-Gaudens’s monument to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Black 54th Massachusetts regiment of the Civil War. It moves from his childhood memory of the old aquarium to television images of school desegregation. Other poems turn to middle age, his marriage and figures such as Jonathan Edwards.
The Old Glory
Three verse plays about early America: Endecott and the Red Cross and My Kinsman, Major Molineux, both from Hawthorne, and Benito Cereno, from Melville’s novella about a slave revolt at sea. Jonathan Miller directed it off-Broadway in 1964, and it won five Obie Awards, including Best American Play. A revised edition followed in 1968.
Near the Ocean
Poems in couplet stanzas borrowed from Andrew Marvell, a form Lowell said “seemed fit to handle national events”, alongside translations. It appeared in the years of his public opposition to the Vietnam War: in 1965 he turned down an invitation to the White House, and in 1967 he marched on the Pentagon, as Norman Mailer recorded in The Armies of the Night.
Notebook 1967–68
Unrhymed fourteen-line poems written as a kind of diary through 1967 and 1968, mixing private life with the news of those years. Lowell described it as one poem written in sonnets. He kept revising and adding to it, and an expanded Notebook followed in 1970.
History
Lowell took the public poems of Notebook, revised them, added new ones and rearranged them in historical order, from the Bible and the ancient world to his own century and his friends. The poems about his marriage were taken out for For Lizzie and Harriet, published the same year, and the book centres on death and art.
The Dolphin
A sequence of new sonnets covering a year in which Lowell, living in England from 1970, left Elizabeth Hardwick for the writer Caroline Blackwood, whom he married in 1972 and who is the “dolphin” of the title. It quotes and alters lines from Hardwick’s private letters, which Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich objected to. It won his second Pulitzer Prize.
Day by Day
His last book of new poems, published shortly before his death in September 1977. He dropped the sonnet and went back to free verse for poems about age, illness, his marriage to Blackwood and his memories, ending with “Epilogue”, which asks “Yet why not say what happened?”.
In What Order to Read Robert Lowell
There is no series to follow, but publication order matters more with Lowell than with most poets, because he changed style so sharply. The first books are dense, rhymed and Catholic; Life Studies breaks into plain speech; the sonnet books of 1969–1973 return to a fixed form and a diary-like flow; Day by Day lets the form go again.
Starting with Life Studies and then going back to Lord Weary’s Castle shows you what he left behind. The three 1973 books overlap, as they all grew out of Notebook; if you read one, read The Dolphin. Collected Poems (2003) contains all of the poetry in one volume.
A reading path
1. Life Studies (1959)
2. For the Union Dead (1964)
3. Lord Weary’s Castle (1946)
4. The Dolphin (1973)
5. Day by Day (1977)
Everything Else Robert Lowell Published
Beyond the 12 key books: 11 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Translations and plays
4
4 books · 1961–1978
- 1961Phaedraverse translation of Racine
- 1969Prometheus Boundversion of Aeschylus, staged by Jonathan Miller at Yale
- 1969The Voyage and Other Versions of Poems by Baudelairetranslations
- 1978The Oresteia of Aeschylusposthumous translation
Revised editions and selections
4
4 books · 1970–2003
- 1970Notebookthe expanded version of Notebook 1967–68
- 1973For Lizzie and Harrietthe Notebook poems about his marriage and daughter
- 1976Selected Poemsrevised in 1977
- 2003Collected Poemsall the poetry in one volume
Prose and letters
3
3 books · 1987–2022
- 1987Collected Prosehis prose writings
- 2019The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979letters with Elizabeth Hardwick, edited by Saskia Hamilton
- 2022Memoirsedited by Steven Axelrod and Grzegorz Kość
The years · 1917–1977
Quick facts about Robert Lowell
- Known for
- Robert Lowell is known for turning American poetry towards open autobiography with Life Studies (1959), the book that gave rise to the term “confessional poetry”.
- 1917
- Born in Boston, Massachusetts
- 1943
- Jailed as a conscientious objector
- 1947
- Pulitzer Prize for Lord Weary’s Castle
- 1959
- Life Studies
- 1973
- The Dolphin
- 1977
- Dies in New York City
- Born
- 1 March 1917, Boston, Massachusetts
- Died
- 12 September 1977, New York City, of a heart attack in a taxi
- Education
- Harvard (two years); Kenyon College, A.B. in classics, 1940
- Married
- Jean Stafford (1940), Elizabeth Hardwick (1949), Caroline Blackwood (1972)
- Honours
- Pulitzer Prize (1947, 1974); National Book Award (1960); Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 1947–48
- War
- Conscientious objector; served several months in Danbury federal prison
The red mark is 1959: Life Studies, the book that gave rise to the label “confessional poetry”.
How Robert Lowell Writes: From Rhyme to “What Happened”
Lowell began under Allen Tate and the New Critics, writing packed, rhymed, Latinate verse full of Catholic symbolism and New England history. Lord Weary’s Castle is the peak of that manner: “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” folds a cousin’s death at sea into Moby-Dick and the Bible.
In Life Studies he let go of most of it. After a reading tour on the West Coast, where he met Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, he said he “didn’t have to bang words into rhyme and count”. The poems use casual, spoken lines and name real people: his parents, his grandfather, fellow patients at the hospital. In 1959 his Boston University seminar was audited by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, both of whom took that permission further.
He never settled on one form. In the late 1960s he wrote hundreds of unrhymed sonnets and revised them obsessively, moving poems from book to book; Notebook, History, For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin all share material. The constant through every style is the same material: his family, his illness, his marriages and American history, and the question of how much of a life a poem is allowed to use.
Frequently asked questions about Robert Lowell’s books
How many books has Robert Lowell written?
More than twenty, counting translations, plays, selections and posthumous editions. Twelve are the key books on this page, from Land of Unlikeness (1944) to Day by Day (1977); the others are translations, revised versions of Notebook, selections, his Collected Prose and Memoirs, and his letters.
What are Robert Lowell’s books in order?
Land of Unlikeness (1944), Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951), Life Studies (1959), Imitations (1961), For the Union Dead (1964), The Old Glory (1965), Near the Ocean (1967), Notebook 1967–68 (1969), History (1973), The Dolphin (1973) and Day by Day (1977).
Where should I start with Robert Lowell?
Life Studies (1959). It is short, it contains the prose memoir “91 Revere Street” as well as the poems, and it is the book that made his name outside poetry circles. If you prefer formal, rhymed verse, start with Lord Weary’s Castle instead.
What is Robert Lowell’s most famous book?
Life Studies, which won the National Book Award in 1960 and which Stanley Kunitz called perhaps the most influential book of verse since The Waste Land. His best-known single poems include “Skunk Hour”, “For the Union Dead” and “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket”.
Was Robert Lowell a confessional poet?
He is usually called the first. M. L. Rosenthal’s review of Life Studies, “Poetry as Confession”, first used the word for his work, and Plath and Sexton followed. Some critics, including Adam Kirsch and Frank Bidart, question the label, since Lowell also wrote historical, political and formal poetry.
What prizes did Robert Lowell win?
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry, for Lord Weary’s Castle (1947) and The Dolphin (1974); the National Book Award for Life Studies (1960); the Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize for Imitations (1962); Obie Awards for The Old Glory; the National Book Critics Circle Award for Day by Day; and the National Medal for Literature in 1977.
Why was Robert Lowell in prison?
He refused military service in the Second World War. In a letter to President Roosevelt of 7 September 1943 he declared himself a conscientious objector, and he served several months in the federal prison at Danbury, Connecticut, after time in a New York jail that he later wrote about in “Memories of West Street and Lepke” in Life Studies.
Why was The Dolphin controversial?
In The Dolphin (1973) Lowell quoted and altered lines from private letters by Elizabeth Hardwick, the wife he had left for Caroline Blackwood. Before publication Elizabeth Bishop wrote to him that “art just isn’t worth that much”; Adrienne Rich called the poems “cruel and shallow”, which ended their friendship. The book still won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize. Their correspondence from those years was published as The Dolphin Letters in 2019.
Did Robert Lowell teach Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton?
Yes. In 1959 both audited his poetry seminar at Boston University, with the poet George Starbuck. Plath later named Life Studies as a major influence on her work.
How did Robert Lowell die?
Of a heart attack in a taxi in Manhattan on 12 September 1977, aged 60, on his way to see Elizabeth Hardwick. He had lived for most of his adult life with bipolar disorder, then called manic depression, and took lithium from the age of 50.
Footnotes
- Robert Lowell — Wikipedia
- Robert Lowell — Poetry Foundation
- Life Studies — Wikipedia
- For the Union Dead — Wikipedia
- Lowell, Plath and Sexton in the same room — NEH
- The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979 — Kirkus Reviews
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Yet why not say what happened? / Pray for the grace of accuracy”
— Robert Lowell, “Epilogue”, Day by Day (1977)
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