Lost Puritan

"In the midst of our worst century so far we have produced a great poet." Those words by Elizabeth Bishop, a friend of Robert Lowell and a great poet in her own right, ring ever truer almost two decades after Lowell's death. Lowell had a meteoric career, exploding into the world of literature in 1959 with Life Studies. His poetry radically altered the American literary landscape, combining as it did family drama and an apocalyptic view of the history of our times. A very public voice which went forth in For the Union Dead, another much-honored work, Lowell decried the decay of urban life and…