Robert Lowell

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American poet Robert Trail Spence Lowell, Jr. (1917-1977) was one of the most highly esteemed and honored poets of his day. Many still acclaim his work for its mastery of diverse literary form, intense expression of personal concern, and candid commentary on social and moral issues.

Robert Lowell, winner of three Pulitzer Prizes, was the only child of Commander R.T.S. Lowell, U.S. Navy, and Charlotte Winslow Lowell, born on March 1, 1917, in Boston, Massachusetts. His was a famous family, including James Russell Lowell, 19th-century poet and ambassador to England; Amy Lowell, another notable New England poet; and A. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard. On his mother's side, Robert was descended from early New England colonists, including Edward Winslow, one of the Pilgrim Fathers; the key masculine figure in young Lowell's life was his maternal grandfather, Arthur Winslow. His troubled childhood is candidly pictured in "91 Revere Street," an autobiographical prose memoir included in Life Studies (1959).

Following graduation from the St. Mark preparatory school, he attended Harvard for two years, where he encountered the poetry of William Carlos Williams, which later influenced his switch in the 1950s to what critics refer to as his confessional verse (his friend Elizabeth Bishop once called him the leading poet of the "anguish school"). His passion for poetry took him to Kenyon College, where poet John Crowe Ransom was teaching a generation of critics and creators. Lowell studied classics, graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and class valedictorian. He had just married Jean Stafford, a novelist and short-story writer.

For a while Lowell supported himself by teaching and then working in publishing in New York City. Throughout 1942, he attempted to enlist, hoping to go officer's school, but when he was drafted in September of 1943, he "regretfully declined to serve," writing to President Roosevelt about how painful it was "for an American whose family traditions, like your own, have always found their fulfillment in maintainin…. our country's freedom and honor." Lowell was sentenced to a year in prison, five months of which were spent in Danbury, Connecticut and the rest on work-release parole.

Lowell's first book, Land of Unlikeness, was published in 1944. Some of these poems were included in his second volume, Lord Weary's Castle (1946), which won him, at the age of 29, the Pulitzer Prize. It was immediately apparent that a poet of unusual stature had emerged, one who combined rebellion and tradition, formalism and experiment, to achieve what some called "a disciplined wildness." Poet and critic Randall Jarrell said that "the degree of intensity of his poems is equalled by their degree of organization…. It is hard to exaggerate the strength and life, the constant richness and surprise of metaphor, and sound and motion, of the language itself. It is impossible not to notice the weight and power of his lines…. One or two of these poems, I think, will be read as long as men remember English."

With succeeding volumes Lowell became widely regarded as the most important poet of the period. Before he turned 30, he had won a Guggenheim fellowship and a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He also received the Bollingen Prize. In 1947-1948 he was consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress.

The title poem of The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951) consisted of long, dramatic monologues, which most critics regarded as convoluted and burdensome. In Life Studies (1959), Lowell turned to free verse in the confessional manner; it became one of the most influential volumes of post-World War II poetry, and won the National Book Award for the best book of poetry published that year. One of the poems, "Skunk Hour," is perhaps Lowell's best known.

In his forties, Lowell began writing for the theater; The Old Glory (1965), which was successfully produced off-Broadway, consisted of three one-act plays based on stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. He also made a free adaptation of Jean Racine's Phèdre and an even more individualistic rendering of Aeschylus's tragedy Prometheus Bound (1969). In addition, he wrote critical essays.

But it was Lowell's poetry that made the deepest impression. Imitations (1961) was a book of free translations ranging from the classic Greek of Homer to the modern Russian of Boris Pasternak translations that are re-created poems rather than literal renderings. For the Union Dead (1964), has been considered the most powerful and direct of Lowell's books. Near the Ocean (1967) contained, among its 13 poems, some of his darker meditations. Notebooks, 1967-68 (1969) consists of some 260 conversational sonnets (some polished verse, some unrhymed), presenting pictures of himself and his family, private associations, and social criticism. Lowell revised and expanded much of this material into three separate volumes of unrhymed sonnets, published in 1973 as For Lizzie and Harriet, The Dolphin, and History.

Lowell had great powers of concentration, closeting himself in New York or Maine for ten-and twelve-hour stretches of reading and writing. He taught intermittently at Harvard, Cambridge, and several other American colleges. He suffered numerous severe breakdowns from a bipolar disorder and was hospitalized frequently. In his school days his nickname was "Cal," after the infamous Roman emperor, because of his manic behavior. For much of his adult life Lowell was subjected to electroshock therapy, psychotherapy, and chemical therapy, although sometimes he added alcohol to the mix and couldn't remember to take his drugs. His personal and family relations were often turbulent. His marriage to Jean Stafford ended in 1948; he was then married to the writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick for over 20 years, and then to Lady Caroline Blackwood, a writer as well, for four. There were also numerous other women in his life. A mercurial person, he once declined President Lyndon Johnson's invitation to the White House Festival of the Arts in 1965, after having agreed to attend. He then agreed not to publicize his refusal to attend, but changed his mind and sent his letter of refusal to the New York Times, which made it into a front page story. Among other problemmatic traits, Lowell had a capacity for cruelty. In The Dolphin, he quoted directly from letters Elizabeth Hardwick had written him as he was leaving her for Caroline Blackwood. Some notable poets agreed that this use of personal material was in poor taste. W.H. Auden threatened to not speak to Lowell again because of the book, and Elizabeth Bishop pled with him to forego publication. Poet and critic Adrienne Rich, an old friend, told Lowell it was "a poor excuse for a cruel and shallow book," and Miss Hardwick herself called it "inane, empty, unnecessar…. so many fatuities, indiscretions, bad lines still there on the page." One critic noted that The Dolphinis a self-conscious depiction of the poet ordering material and trying to come to terms with his actions, a process reflecting Lowell's emotional candor and "the confessional nature of his verse." Despite these criticisms, Lowell was awarded his third Pulitzer Prize for this work.

By his late fifties, Lowell was a sickly man with a weakened heart. In his last book of poems, Day by Day, Lowell adds up the sadness of a painful life coming to its close. He died of a heart attack at age 60, in a New York taxi cab, on his way to see Elizabeth Hardwick. To a friend, Lowell had written, "I think in the end, there is no end, the thread frays rather than is cut," and to another he said he never quite comprehended his own life: "it is addition not to be understood, just completed."

Further Reading

For a brief view of Lowell's life and work, see Joseph Epstein, "Mistah Lowell He Dead" The Hudson Review (September 1996), pp. 185-202. For fuller treatments, see Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography (1982); Paul Mariani Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell (1994); Richard Tillinghast, Damaged Grandeur (1995). See also William Doreski, The Years of Our Friendship: Robert Lowell and Allen Tate (1990); Patrick K. Miehe (comp.), The Robert Lowell Papers at the Houghton Library, Harvard University: A Guide to the Collection (1991).

(1917-1977), poet. Through the power of his poetic voice and the daring of his stylistic innovations, Lowell changed the course of English-language poetry in the post-World War II era. From 1946, the date of his first major volume, to 1977, the year of his death, Lowell was the preeminent American poet of his generation.

In the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lord Weary's Castle (1946), Lowell perfected a style traditional in its metrical complexity and verbal ambiguity. He used that style to inveigh against modern civilization, war, materialism, and misused authority. The volume combined traditional values (e.g., a yearning for Christian transcendence) with a disaffected critique of American history and national policy (e.g., the war against Germany). Almost every poem expresses an apocalyptic rage that subverts any possibility of affirmation: "The scythers, Time and Death,/ Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath."

In 1959, Lowell published his most important single volume, the revolutionary Life Studies. Here he perfected what has come to be called "confessional poetry." Banished were the intensity and artificiality, the Christianity and fury, of the earlier volume. Instead, Life Studies takes on the narrative power of fiction and the psychological insight of autobiography. Unable to save or even to understand the world, the poet focuses on the self--as sufficient problem and mystery, and as microcosm of larger societal dilemmas.

The volume's title sequence traces the life course of the poet from the age of five to the present and concludes in a celebrated harrowing depiction of mental collapse: "I myself am hell;/ nobody's here." Life Studies brought poetry off its stilts and down to the soil of everyday life. Soon other poets were writing about the crises, complexities, and vulnerabilities of a diminished "I" in a baffling, unhappy world. Lowell helped poetry discover a new way of speaking, a new reason for its existence.

In the 1960s, Lowell sought to highlight political concerns again, but this time as a consensus liberal rather than a radical-conservative. Nevertheless, his enduring antipathy to war, materialism, and injustice unifies his political phases. In For the Union Dead (1964), he celebrates a black Civil War army regiment and its modern-day counterpart, the "Negro school-children" bravely attempting to integrate southern schools. In a dramatic trilogy, The Old Glory (1965), he excoriates the anti-Indian, antiblack racism central to American history. And in Near the Ocean (1967), he eloquently laments the Vietnam War and other political ills.

After a politically active period during which he joined the peace movement and campaigned for Senator Eugene McCarthy, Lowell in the 1970s retreated to a meditational mode in which he reflected on his involvement with history (in Notebook and History), on his divorce and remarriage late in life (in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Dolphin), and on the ambiguous relationship of writing to life (in both The Dolphin and his last volume, Day by Day). He asked whether "art" could be "a way to get well," either for the artist or for society. His career suggests that art, when imbued with the "grace of accuracy," can indeed foster social health. Lowell revived poetry in his time by exploring the endless complexities and interpenetrations of language, self, and community.

Bibliography:

Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (1978); Jeffrey Meyers, ed., Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs (1988).

Author:

Steven Gould Axelrod

See also Literature.

Quotes:

"If we see light at the end of the tunnel, it the light of the oncoming train."

Robert Lowell
Born	Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV 1 March 1917(1917-03-01) Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Died	12 September 1977 (aged 60) New York City, New York, USA
Occupation	Poet
Nationality	United States
Genres	Confessionalism
Spouse(s)	Jean Stafford (1940-1948) Elizabeth Hardwick (1949-1970) Caroline Blackwood (1970-1977)
Relative(s)	Amy Lowell, James Russell Lowell
Influences Elizabeth Bishop, John Crowe Ransom, Hart Crane, Allen Tate
Influenced Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin

Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV (March 1, 1917 – September 12, 1977) was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946.^[1]

Contents 1 Biography 2 Writing 3 Bibliography 4 References 5 External links

Biography

Lowell was born in Boston, Massachusetts to a Boston Brahmin family that included the poets Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell. His mother, Charlotte Winslow, was a descendant of William Samuel Johnson, a signer of the United States Constitution, Jonathan Edwards, the famed Calvinist theologian, Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan preacher and healer, Robert Livingston the Elder, Thomas Dudley, the second governor of Massachusetts, and Mayflower passengers James Chilton and his daughter Mary Chilton. He was at St. Mark's School, a prominent prep-school in Southborough, Massachusetts, before attending Harvard College for two years and transferring to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, to study under John Crowe Ransom.^[2] He converted from Episcopalianism to Catholicism,^[3] which influenced his first two books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lord Weary's Castle (1946). By the end of the forties, he left the Catholic Church. In 1950, Lowell was included in the influential anthology Mid-Century American Poets as one of the key literary figures of his generation. Among his contemporaries who also appeared in that book were Muriel Rukeyser, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell, and John Ciardi, all poets who came into prominence in the 1940s. In the 1950s, Lowell taught in the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Lowell was a conscientious objector during World War II and served several months at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. In 1949, he was involved in Yaddo's share of the Red Scare when he attempted unsuccessfully to oust Yaddo's director Elizabeth Ames who was being questioned by the FBI for her alleged involvement with writer Agnes Smedley, who was being accused of spying for the Soviet Union.^[4] During the 1960s he was active in the civil rights movement and opposed the US involvement in Vietnam. His participation in the October 1967 peace march in Washington, DC, and his subsequent arrest are described in the early sections of Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night.

Lowell suffered with alcoholism and manic depression and was hospitalized many times throughout his life. He was married to novelist Jean Stafford from 1940 to 1948. In 1949 he married the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. In 1970 he left Elizabeth Hardwick for the British author Lady Caroline Blackwood. He spent many of his last years in England. Lowell died in 1977, having suffered a heart attack in a cab in New York City on his way to see Hardwick. He is buried in Stark Cemetery, Dunbarton, New Hampshire.

Lowell's collected poems were published in 2003 and his letters in 2005, leading to a renewed interest in his work.

Writing

He reached wide acclaim for his 1946 book, Lord Weary's Castle, which included ten poems slightly revised from his earlier Land of Unlikeness, and thirty new poems. Among the better known poems in the volume are "Mr Edwards and the Spider" and "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket." Lord Weary's Castle was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. Lowell's early poems are formal, ornate, and concerned with violence and theology; a typical example is the close of "The Quaker Graveyard" -- "You could cut the brackish winds with a knife / Here in Nantucket and cast up the time / When the Lord God formed man from the sea's slime / And breathed into his face the breath of life, / And the blue-lung'd combers lumbered to the kill. / The Lord survives the rainbow of His will."

The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951), a book that centered on its epic title poem, did not receive similar acclaim, but Lowell was able to revive his reputation with Life Studies (1959). The poems in this book were written in a mix of free and metered verse, with much more informal language than he used in his first two books. It marked both a big turning point in Lowell's career, and a turning point for American poetry in general. Because many of the poems documented details from Lowell's family life and personal problems, one critic, M.L. Rosenthal, labeled the book "confessional." For better or worse, this label stuck. Lowell's editor and friend Frank Bidart notes in his afterword to Lowell's Collected Poems, "Lowell is widely, perhaps indelibly associated with the term 'confessional,'" though Bidart questions the accuracy of this label.^[5]

Lowell followed Life Studies with Imitations, a volume of loose translations of poems by classical and modern European poets, including Rilke, Montale, Baudelaire, Pasternak, and Rimbaud, for which he received the 1962 Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize.

His next book For the Union Dead, 1964, was also widely praised, particularly for its title poem, which invokes Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead." In Near the Ocean, which followed a couple of years later, Lowell had returned to stanzaic forms. The best known poem in this volume, "Waking Early Sunday Morning," is written in eight-line stanzas borrowed from Andrew Marvell's poem "Upon Appleton House."

During 1967 and 1968 he experimented with a verse journal, published as Notebook, 1967-68. These fourteen-line poems loosely based on the sonnet form were reworked into three volumes. History deals with public history from antiquity onwards, and with modern poets Lowell had known; For Lizzie and Harriet describes the breakdown of his second marriage; and The Dolphin, which won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize, includes poems about his marriage to Caroline Blackwood and their life in England.

A minor controversy erupted when he incorporated private letters from his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, into The Dolphin. He was particularly criticized for this by his friends Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Bishop.

Robert Lowell was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for 1947−1948 (a position now known as "Poet Laureate").

Bibliography

• Land of Unlikeness (1944)
• Lord Weary's Castle (1946)
• The Mills of The Kavanaughs (1951)
• Life Studies (1959)
• Phaedra (translation) (1961)
• Imitations (1961)
• For the Union Dead (1964)
• The Old Glory (1965)
• Near the Ocean (1967)
• The Voyage & other versions of poems of Baudelaire (1969)
• Prometheus Bound (1969)
• Notebook (1969) (Revised and Expanded Edition, 1970)
• For Lizzie and Harriet (1973)
• History (1973)
• The Dolphin (1973)
• Selected Poems (1976) (Revised Edition, 1977)
• Day by Day (1977)
• The Oresteia of Aeschylus (1978)
• Collected Poems (2003)
• Selected Poems (2006) (Expanded Edition)
• Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano, with Saskia Hamilton (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2008) ISBN 978-0374185435
  • Reviewed by Don Chiasson, "Works on Paper: the letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell" The New Yorker 84/35 (3 November 2008) : 106-110

References

1. ^ "Poet Laureate Timeline: 1953-1960". Library of Congress. 2008. http://www.loc.gov/poetry/laureate.html. Retrieved 2008-12-19. 
2. ^ Robert Lowell Poets of Cambridge, USA
3. ^ Robert Lowell @ Poets.org
4. ^ The Lowell Affair: Yaddo's Red Scare
5. ^ Bidart, Frank, editor. "On Confessional Poetry." Robert Lowell Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Robert Lowell

• Works by or about Robert Lowell in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Articles on Lowell at Modern American Poetry
• Lowell's interview with The Paris Review
• Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell
• Literary Criticism on Robert Lowell
• Helen Vendler audio interview on Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop podcast from The New York Review of Books

v • d • e Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress Joseph Auslander (1937) · Allen Tate (1943) · Robert Penn Warren (1944) · Louise Bogan (1945) · Karl Shapiro (1946) · Robert Lowell (1947) · Léonie Adams (1948) · Elizabeth Bishop (1949) · Conrad Aiken (1950) · William Carlos Williams (1952) · Randall Jarrell (1956) · Robert Frost (1958) · Richard Eberhart (1959) · Louis Untermeyer (1961) · Howard Nemerov (1963) · Reed Whittemore (1964) · Stephen Spender (1965) · James Dickey (1966) · William Jay Smith (1968) · William Stafford (1970) · Josephine Jacobsen (1971) · Daniel Hoffman (1973) · Stanley Kunitz (1974) · Robert Hayden (1976) · William Meredith (1978) · Maxine Kumin (1981) · Anthony Hecht (1982) · Reed Whittemore (1984) · Robert Fitzgerald (1984) · Gwendolyn Brooks (1985) · Robert Penn Warren (1986) · Richard Wilbur (1987) · Howard Nemerov (1988) · Mark Strand (1990) · Joseph Brodsky (1991) · Mona Van Duyn (1992) · Rita Dove (1993) · Robert Hass (1995) · Robert Pinsky (1997) · Rita Dove / Louise Glück / W. S. Merwin (1999) · Stanley Kunitz (2000) · Billy Collins (2001) · Louise Glück (2003) · Ted Kooser (2004) · Donald Hall (2006) · Charles Simic (2007) · Kay Ryan (2008)  · Kay Ryan (2009)

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