The first of what would be a long list of Confessional Poets in the latter half of the 20th century. One of Boston's and America's bluest blood families Lowell's poetry cannot be separated from this identity as a New England blue stocking raised as an only child with a rocky upbringing. This family background proved the fodder for his best long poems, mapping New England in his poems the way Robert Frost did for Vermont Woods. A precocious angry and pyschotic youth, he earned his first Pulitzer before he was thirty, a manic depressant with bouts of great paranoia verging on the schizophrenic, he was in out of institutions his whole life, yet somehow in between he who wrote classic American verse. Starting out as a traditionalist poest, who corresponded with TS Eliot, the influence of WC Williams moved him to create his own hybrid between formal metered lines with informal blank verse, which when matured would earn him another Pulitzer before he was fifty. Cal was the name he chose for himself at boarding school, as he liked to be called, few knew that he chose it as short for Caligula.

Water

It was a Maine lobster town—
each morning boatloads of hands
pushed off for granite
quarries on the islands,

and left dozens of bleak
white frame houses stuck
like oyster shells
on a hill of rock,

and below us, the sea lapped
the raw little match-stick
mazes of a weir,
where the fish for bait were trapped.

Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.
From this distance in time
it seems the color
of iris, rotting and turning purpler,

but it was only
the usual gray rock
turning the usual green
when drenched by the sea.

The sea drenched the rock
at our feet all day,
and kept tearing away
flake after flake.

One night you dreamed
you were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile,
and trying to pull
off the barnacles with your hands.

We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us.