Home After Three Months Away

Lowell’s poem is reflective of a movement in poetry where the speaker inserts themselves in the poem, so the poem becomes aligned with their private lives. This movement is known as Confessional poetry; much like a person might confess intimate experiences to a priest, Confessional poets reveal private experiences to the reader. The term “confessional” as it applies to poetry first aired in 1959 when a critic reviewed Lowell’s Life Studies. Confessional poetry largely explores the self. In “Home After Three Months Away,” Lowell documents the difficulty of adjusting to life at home after returning from another stint at a psychiatric hospital. The poem features private moments between himself and his daughter Harriet and turns the people in his life into characters that help propel the poem’s narrative.

Due to the emphasis on the poet, or the poet’s poetic persona, Confessional poetry tends to receive a fair amount of criticism since, in the eyes of the gainsayers, the work becomes more about the person than the poem. Allen Tate told Lowell that the personal poetry in Life Studies was “definitely bad” (quoted in Meyers 39). Lowell’s close friend, Elizabeth Bishop, wrote poems that come across as impersonal and detached, and she called Confessional poetry “the anguish-school” and Confessional poets “self-pitiers” (Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters. The Library of America, 2008, p. 867). However, Bishop exempted Lowell, and, as “Home After Three Months Away” demonstrates, Lowell’s poetic persona doesn’t push aside the craft of poetry, as the poem features several poetic and literary devices from imagery to alliteration to symbolism (Bishop did famously take issue with Lowell using his ex-wife’s letters in his poetry).

Aside from the confessional context, the poem features traits of Postmodernism and Imagism. Imagism developed in the early 1900s, with poets like Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Lowell’s cousin, Amy Lowell, producing poems centered on sharp images. In “Home After Three Months Away,” there are vivid pictures of the nurse’s porkrinds, the daughter in the tub, and the withered flowers. In the later part of the 1900s, Postmodernism arrived, with its fragmentation, playfulness, and embrace of bewilderment. “Home After Three Months Away” is broken up as it moves from the nurse to the child to Lowell’s mindset to the garden. Although melancholy and sad, the poem is playful as it toys with juvenile language. It’s also bewildering, as it’s not always clear who’s speaking.