The chapter pushes against the conventional narrative that Lowell’s breakthrough style of the 1950s, the colloquial and conversational diction of Life Studies, originated mostly with his immersion in William Carlos Williams’s poetry and his fascination with the Beats and Allen Ginsberg. Rather, it argues that Lowell fashioned the new confessional style out of inspirations and influences he had received from Robert Penn Warren and Randall Jarrell, who had shown sustained interest in how the practice of prose writing could refresh postwar poetic styles. Weaving together multiple strands of neglected evidence from their overlapping biographies, their letters, and reviews, Joan Shifflett argues that Life Studies owes more to Warren’s Brother to Dragons and Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution than has previously been acknowledged.