The poems from For the Union Dead built upon the more personal, looser style that Lowell had established in Life Studies.

Instead, the more personal poems here focus on Lowell's close family relationships, centering on individuals like his daughter ("Child's Song"), his cousin Harriet Winslow ("Soft Wood"), his father ("Middle Age"), and his ex-wife ("The Old Flame").

The closest that Lowell comes to addressing his mental illness is in the poem "Eye and Tooth" when, in the final line, he writes, "I am tired.

"[2] Lowell originally wrote the poem "For the Union Dead" for the Boston Arts Festival in 1960 where he first read it in public.

[3] The title refers to the 1928 poem "Ode to the Confederate Dead", by Lowell's former teacher and mentor Allen Tate.

My own owes everything to a few of our poets who have tried to write directly about what mattered to them, and yet to keep faith with their calling's tricky, specialized, unpopular possibilities for good workmanship.

"[4] The setting of "For the Union Dead" is the Boston Common, near the well-known Robert Gould Shaw Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.