Robert Lowell’s Confessional Poems and Linda Hutcheon’s Parody: American Modernism’s Shift towards Postmodernism

Abstract

The great modernist tradition fosters impersonality and objectivity in art and life. Though being a modern American poet, Robert Lowell seems to avoid this high modernist tradition by introducing autobiographical details in his collection of confessional poems: Life Studies. Confessional poems connect the past with present observations; they reproduce memories of family and childhood as well as deal with sensitive issues like mental illness. Above all, they use the first person pronoun “I” to create life-like images. In addition to that, these poems share some features with Linda Hutcheon’s concept of parody, discussed in her essay “The Politics of Postmodernism: Parody and History”. According to Hutcheon, parodies are central to postmodernism; they transgress and question authority that controls. However, postmodernism negates modernism; it does not reject it. Unlike modernism, it integrates the past and the repressed history of forms in literature. On the other hand, though Robert Lowell is conscious of the limitations of modernism, his poems are objective and impersonal. Nonetheless, unlike the modern poetic persona, he presents the incongruities of his society not merely as meaningless and helpless ramblings; rather, he connects them with hope. He joins art with life and culture; narrates his contemporary American society in vernacular, and he bridges the gap between the private with the public. By keeping Hutcheon’s idea of Parody in mind, this paper discusses Robert Lowell’s Life Studies as a collection of poems that criticizes modernism, and adopts certain traits of postmodernism to mark American modernism’s shift towards postmodernism.