In the two decades that have passed since Robert Lowell’s death, Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors is the first critical survey of the poet's aesthetic efforts to make personal vision and public exhortation cohere and thus combine poetic genres that have been historically discrete.
Rather than consider Lowell primarily as either a religious, political, or autobiographical poet, William Doreski proposes that Lowell’s primary poetic impulse was to shape differing voices into a single entity in which public and private concerns cohere.
This makes him an essential poet for our era, in which the political almost universally seems to have become the personal.