It sometimes seems that Robert Lowell's most vigorous advocates do his reputation more harm than good. ‘Lowell is the real thing, a giant of a poet […] a writer who restored poetry to its public role’, claimed Grey Gowrie in his review of the Collected Poems (2003) for The Spectator. Tom Paulin's Observer review also presented Lowell as a literary colossus, with its judgement that the ‘gigantic nature of his talent must be celebrated – he was fascinated by Napoleon and, like Napoleon, he remains heroic and magnificent’. More exorbitant still was Michael Hofmann's verdict on the poet's achievement in an essay for the London Review of Books : ‘by comparison with him, other poets don't use language, don't write about the world […] in his absence, literary and civic life have both deteriorated’. Admittedly, these are rather far-fetched examples of the kind of adulation that Lowell's work at times inspires, but they are instructive in highlighting the way in which the qualities for which he is often praised convey the regrettable impression that his work fulfils a conception of poetry long since outmoded. Casting one's eye over the mostly highly favourable estimations of Lowell's oeuvre in the newspaper and journal reviews (there are, of course, some voices of dissent), it is hard not to notice the discrepancy between the insistent trumpeting of Lowell as irrefutably ‘major’ by his champions and the frequent laments for his fading star. Yet the discrepancy also intimates a curious relation: Lowell is presented as such a major poet of his own time as inevitably to seem a minor figure of ours. There is a somewhat dated, as well as an over-inflated, quality to recent characterisations of Lowell as prophetic, heroic, authoritative and nationally representative. Such descriptions perpetuate terms in which Lowell was defined in the 1960s; they are continuous, for example, with Irvin Ehrenpreis's view in an influential article of 1965 that Lowell's poetry is able to ‘serve as the record of his age, and connect that age with the sweep of earlier epochs’, and with the opinion of M. L. Rosenthal, expressed in a much-discussed essay of 1960, that the poems of Life Studies (1959), Lowell's most celebrated volume, ‘carry the burden of the age within them’. Such characterizations are in themselves potentially burdensome.