Robert Lowell's Shifting Colors: The Poetics Of The Public & The Personal

"Unlike previous studies, Robert Lowell's Shifting Colors considers Lowell not as a religious poet, or a political or autobiographical poet, but as a writer whose primary poetic impulse was to make personal vision and public exhortation cohere. This makes him an essential poet for our era, in which the political almost universally seems to have become the personal."--BOOK JACKET.

"Following the course of Lowell's poetic development, Doreski argues that the ambiguity of Lowell's social and religious beliefs, as far as the poems express them, is functional, and that the formal restraints of Lowell's poems serve to reveal rather than mask the difficulties he found in formulating public and private values."--BOOK JACKET.