Born in 1917 into an aristocratic Boston family Robert Lowell was not yet thirty when his first major collection of poems, Lord Weary's Castle, won the Pulitzer Prize. With Life Studies, his third book, he found the intense, highly personal voice that made him the foremost American poet of his generation. He held strong, complex and very public political views. His private life was turbulent, marred by manic depression and troubled marriages. But in this superb biography the poet Ian Hamilton illuminates both the life and the work of Lowell with sympathetic understanding and consummate narrative skill. Hamilton, an English poet who knew Lowell well during his last years in England, writes with the authority of personal acquaintance and personal sympathy, as well as with critical interest in his works. He deftly weaves the life story and literary criticism, covering his childhood, the years at Harvard and Kenyon, the influence of John Crowe Ransom, Peter Taylor, Allan Tate and Caroline Gordon, his three marriages and a discussion of his poems.