Born into a distinguished Boston family with literary credentials, Robert Lowell converted to Catholicism shortly after his first marriage and his early poetry is riddled with Catholic symbolism. Lowell was a prolific and restlessly inventive poet who moved through many styles. By the time of his most famous work Life Studies (1959), he had developed what was widely hailed, and since much imitated, a new 'confessional style' of poetry: direct, intimate and autobiographical. Lowell was, perhaps, the most representative poet of his generation; his poetry articulated so many of the anxieties of post-war American life. During the Vietnam War, his verse became significantly more political, revealing an acute gift for observing public as well as private events.