Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell (born March 1, 1917, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died September 12, 1977, New York, New York) was an American poet noted for his complex, autobiographical poetry. The publication of his collection Life Studies (1959) is regarded as a watershed moment in American literature. It is one of the foundational works of confessional poetry. Lowell’s work continues to resonate with poets and audiences into the 21st century.

In his poetry Lowell expressed the major tensions—both public and private—of his time with technical mastery and haunting authenticity. His earlier poems, dense with clashing images and discordant sounds, convey a view of the world whose bleakness is relieved by a religious mysticism compounded as much of doubt as of faith. Lowell’s later poetry is composed in a more relaxed and conversational manner.

Boston Brahmin

Lowell grew up in Boston. The distinguished New England poet and critic James Russell Lowell was his great-granduncle, and the poet Amy Lowell, astronomer Percival Lowell, and lawyer A. Lawrence Lowell were his distant cousins. Although he turned away from his Puritan heritage—largely because he was repelled by what he felt was the high value it placed on the accumulation of money—he continued to be fascinated by it, and it forms the subject of many of his poems.

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Poetry: First Lines

Lowell attended Harvard University, but, after falling under the influence of the Southern formalist school of poetry, he transferred to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where he studied with John Crowe Ransom, a leading exponent of the Fugitives, and began a lifelong friendship with Randall Jarrell. Lowell graduated in 1940 and that year married the novelist Jean Stafford and converted temporarily to Roman Catholicism.

Lord Weary’s Castle, first Pulitzer, and service as poet laureate

During World War II, Lowell was sentenced, for conscientious objection, to a year and a day in the federal penitentiary at Danbury, Connecticut, and he served five months of his sentence. His poem “In the Cage” from Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) comments on this experience, as does in greater detail “Memories of West Street and Lepke” in Life Studies. His first volume of poems, Land of Unlikeness (1944), deals with a world in crisis and the hunger for spiritual security. Lord Weary’s Castle, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947, exhibits greater variety and command. It contains two of his most praised poems: “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” elegizing Lowell’s cousin Warren Winslow, lost at sea during World War II, and “Colloquy in Black Rock,” celebrating the Feast of Corpus Christi. In 1947 Lowell was named poetry consultant to the U.S. Library of Congress (now poet laureate consultant in poetry), a position he held for one year.

After being divorced in 1948, Lowell married the writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick the next year (divorced 1972); his third wife was the Irish journalist and novelist Lady Caroline Blackwood (married 1972). In 1951 he published a book of dramatic monologues, Mills of the Kavanaughs. After a few years abroad, Lowell settled in Boston in 1954.

Life Studies and confessional poetry

With Life Studies, Lowell helped usher in a new style of poetry that was deeply personal in nature. It won the National Book Award for poetry and contains an autobiographical essay on Lowell’s childhood, “91 Revere Street,” as well as a series of 15 confessional poems. Chief among these are “Waking in Blue,” which tells of Lowell’s confinement in a mental hospital, and “Skunk Hour,” which conveys his mental turmoil with dramatic intensity.

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In a review of the collection published in September 1959 in The Nation, literary critic M.L. Rosenthal argued that Lowell had effectively removed the “mask” behind which earlier poets typically composed their works. The review, “Poetry as Confession,” led to the coining of the term confessional poetry. Lowell’s poems in this collection also reflected his experimentation with meter and displayed a newly informal approach to language, using more colloquialisms than in his earlier work.

Later works

Lowell’s activities in the civil-rights and antiwar campaigns of the 1960s lent a more public note to his next three books of poetry: For the Union Dead (1964), Near the Ocean (1967), and Notebook 1967–68 (1969). The last-named work is a poetic record of a tumultuous year in the poet’s life and exhibits the interrelation between politics, the individual, and his culture. Lowell’s trilogy of plays, The Old Glory, which views American culture over the span of history, was published in 1965 (rev. ed. 1968). His later poetry volumes include The Dolphin (1973), which won him a second Pulitzer Prize, and Day by Day (1977). His translations include Phaedra (1963) and Prometheus Bound (1969); Imitations (1961), free renderings of various European poets; and The Voyage and Other Versions of Poems by Baudelaire (1968).

Influences and legacy

Lowell was influenced by Allen Tate (who had been editor of the Fugitives’ bimonthly magazine), William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop, the last of whom he kept up a lengthy correspondence that was published as Words in Air in 2008. Lowell also interacted with the Beat poets, and he had a profound impact on other major confessional poets, including W.D. Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, all of whom were his students at one point.

Although Lowell’s work fell somewhat out of favor after his death (scholars suggest this was a reaction to his privileged background), numerous poets of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have cited him as a central influence, including Yusef Komunyakaa, Seamus Heaney, Kevin Young, and Claudia Rankine. Indeed, many poets and scholars have studied Lowell’s work precisely for its construction and deconstruction of the themes of race and social class.