The book that founded confessional poetry. Lowell broke open the genteel conventions of American verse and wrote directly about his family's distinguished decline, his father's failures, his mother's neurosis, his own manic episodes and hospitalizations. "Skunk Hour," ending with "I myself am hell; / nobody's here," announced that the private life was now the proper subject of serious poetry. Plath, Sexton, and Berryman followed the door Lowell opened.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.