Waking in the Blue

'Waking in the Blue' is a poem by Robert Lowell that was collected in his book "Life Studies" and is a striking and early example of Confessional poetry.

Composition

Lowell wrote the first draft of the poem at the end of January 1958 while at the McLean Hospital in Belmont near Boston. The title of that first draft was "To Ann Adden (Written during the first week of my voluntary stay at McLean's Mental Hospital)". [Hamilton, page 244] Ann Adden was a girl he had met and fallen in love with during a brief stay at the Boston Psychopathic late the previous year, where she was working as a "psychiatric fieldworker". [Hamilton, page 240]

The first draft is formally loose, the final draft is 25 lines shorter and in places rhyme and snatches of regular meter have been introduced to tighten up the poem.

Cultural references

* "The Meaning of Meaning" is a book by I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden.
* the Porcellian Club at Harvard.

References

* Hamilton, Ian, "Robert Lowell: A Biography", Random House, New York, 1982. ISBN 039450965X.

Footnotes