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73-93. Robert Lowell began his career at the height of Modernism. Early in his career Lowell embraced Eliot and Pound, and he died bearing the burden of his embrace. He had to look at what was a widely accepted model for a twentieth-century poetic career. A poet’s lifework, it has traditionally been felt, must be rounded off by something approaching an epic. In Lowell’s case this was Life Studies.
In undertaking his own epic, Lowell was undoubtedly also influenced by classical epic. In
classical epics like the Odyssey, hero and theme go hand in hand. Likewise if one does wish
to apply a classical epic standard to history and identify a unified hero and theme, then the
hero is clearly Lowell himself, and the theme is, obviously, history. So the poem gives us a
man who embodies the search for the meaning of history. Some modern critics insist that the
epic is not commonly thought to have survived to our own day. However, I think that the form
is still very much alive, and in a state of continual development. (Chung-Ang University)