In 1959 M. L. Rosenthal first used the term "confessional" in a review of Robert Lowell's "Life Studies" entitled "Poetry as Confession", Rosenthal differentiated the confessional approach from other modes of lyric poetry by way of its use of confidences that (Rosenthal said) went "beyond customary bounds of reticence or personal embarrassment". Rosenthal notes that in earlier tendencies towards the confessional there was typically a "mask" that hid the poet's "actual face", and states that "Lowell removes the mask. His speaker is unequivocally himself, and it is hard not to think of "Life Studies" as a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal". In a review of the book in "The Kenyon Review", John Thompson wrote, "For these poems, the question of propriety no longer exists. They have made a conquest: what they have won is a major expansion of the territory of poetry."