Like Lowell's previous book, Lord Weary's Castle, the poetry in Kavanaughs was also ornate, formal, dense, and metered.

"[1] The majority of the book consists of the epic title poem which tells the story of Anne Kavanaugh, a widow living in Maine in 1943, who "is sitting in her garden playing solitaire" and Lowell tells her story through a series of stream-of-consciousness flashbacks in which she recalls her troubled relationship with her now-deceased husband, Harry.

.Joining the Navy prior to Pearl Harbor, her husband returns from the war on the verge of a nervous breakdown; he attempts and fails to suffocate his wife in bed one night because she speaks aloud, while asleep, to a man in a dream; Harry fears that she has committed adultery.

First, there was a magazine version of the poem that appeared in the Kenyon Review in 1951 prior to the publication of The Mills of the Kavanaughs.

[3] Lillian Feder discusses how the myth of Persephone is an important part of the poem in Anne Kavanaugh's thinking.

is a fine new collection of poems in angular, stony meters, sometimes as obscure as one end of an overheard telephone conversation, always savagely brilliant in their hard impact on the mind.

"[7] In a review of Lowell's Collected Poems in 2003, A. O. Scott wrote that the book was "underrated" and that the dramatic monologues in The Mills of the Kavanaughs were "some of the best in the language since Browning.