Robert Lowell (1917-1977). Biography and creative work

Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was born March 1, 1917, to Robert Traill Spence Lowell III and Charlotte Winslow Lowell. He grew up in Boston as their only child, attending the private Brimmer School as a child and St. Mark’s Preparatory as a young man. The Lowell family has a prominent lineage that traces back to the earliest Protestant settlers in New England. This lineage includes the poets James Russell Lowell, a contemporary of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Amy Lowell, a contemporary of Ezra Pound, as well as an assortment of successful academicians and military officers. Although the family name had lost some of its luster by the early to mid-20th century, it once held the public interest strongly enough to be included in John Collins Bossidy’s famous toast:

And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God.

Lowell’s father graduated from Harvard, joined the navy, and, after a mediocre career as a naval officer, left the military at his wife’s urging to work as a businessman for the Lever Brothers’ Soap Company. In “91 Revere Street,” a narrative fragment that constitutes the second section of Life Studies (1959), Lowell writes about his “father’s downhill progress as a civilian and Bostonian” (147). In contrast to the Lowell ancestors, the photographs and the toy soldiers to which Lowell compared his father, the soap executive, appears tragic and buffoonish. In Lowell’s rendering, his mother becomes a dominating figure whose marriage forces her to squander her energies. Of himself he writes, “I was less rather than more bookish than most children” (135). By other accounts, however, Lowell decided to become a poet at a young age, spent his free time studying the English tradition, and forced friends to read works that interested him so they would have a common ground for discussion.

At St. Mark’s Preparatory, Lowell studied under the direction of Richard Eberhart, who encouraged him to write. Although Lowell never had a class with Eberhart, they spent time together discussing and reading poetry. After four years at St. Mark’s Lowell followed a family tradition and enrolled at Harvard. While there he met and fell in love with a woman named Anne Dick. The romance and proposed marriage led to a dispute with Lowell’s parents, and Lowell, enraged, physically attacked his father. Both the poem “Rebellion” from Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) and “Anne Dick 1. 1986” from History (1973) mention the event.

His parents called upon the poet and psychologist Merrill Moore to assess their son’s mental state. Grasping the difficulties that he was having at Harvard, Merrill suggested that Lowell study with a poet, thus inspiring Lowell’s looking south for cultural sanctuary from industrial New England. At about the same time, Lowell had met the poet Allen Tate, who became an important mentor and who also encouraged him to study with a poet. After two years he left Harvard to begin studying with the poet-critic John Crowe Ransom, one of Tate’s mentors, at Kenyon College in Ohio. Many years later in an interview for the Paris Review, Lowell talked about his parents’ reaction to the move, saying only that “it seemed to them a queer but orderly step” (29).

The summer before starting at Kenyon, Lowell traveled to Clarksville, Tennessee, to visit Allen and Caroline Tate. In Paris Review he explained that, having three guests already and no place to put him, the Tates jokingly suggested that he would have to pitch a tent on their lawn. He explained that “the Tates were too polite to tell me that what they’d said had been just a figure of speech. I stayed two months in my tent and ate with the Tates” (30). Under Tate’s influence Lowell continued writing poetry and contemplating its practice while also sharing his work and spending time with important literary figures, such as Ford Maddox Ford, who passed through the Tate home. He left their yard to begin study at Kenyon in fall 1937. While there he befriended Randall Jarrell and Peter Taylor, both of whom went on to have successful writing careers. By 1940 he had graduated summa cum laude with a degree in classics and decided to marry the writer Jean Stafford.

That same year Lowell moved to Baton Rouge to continue his studies with the critic Cleanth Brooks and the author Robert Penn Warren at Louisiana State University. There his training focused more directly on English. The time Lowell spent in the South helped him get through a difficult period in his life and have a successful university career. More than that, though, it shaped him as a writer and a thinker, giving him a new framework within which he could explore his early poetic sensibilities. Although New Criticism had not yet become an institutionalized literary movement or theory, all of Lowell’s mentors—Tate, Ransom, Warren, and Brooks—were among its foundational members and earliest proponents. Their interest in poetic form, tradition, and the text as an autonomous object of art influenced his first years of writing poetry. In those years he also eschewed his Protestant heritage and converted to Roman Catholicism, which seemed to him much more sincere and authentic. Having struck his father, left Harvard, moved to the South, and finally rejected Protestantism, Lowell estranged himself from his family.

He continued to separate himself when he refused military induction in 1943. When the United States joined War World II in 1941, Lowell volunteered his service but was turned down because of his poor eyesight. By the time he received a conscription notice in 1943 he could no longer justify the nation’s war efforts, having learned of innocent Germans firebombed in Dresden. He declared himself a conscientious objector and, as a result, served five months in prison at the West Street Detention Center in New York and the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. He completed the sentence doing community service in Black Rock, Connecticut. His time in jail provided the material for his poem “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” while his community service time gave him an opportunity to finish work on his first book, Land of Unlikeness, which was published in 1944.

Despite Allen Tate’s generous introduction, Land of Unlikeness received no notable critical acclaim. Lowell spent the next two years living in Maine, working on revisions of many of the poems included in his first effort. His work during that time produced a second body of new poetry that included several poems from the first collection. Lowell took the title for his second book from the violent old Scottish ballad “Lambkin” and published the collection in 1946. Lord Weary’s Castle attracted much more attention than Land of Unlikeness, earned Lowell a Pulitzer Prize, and secured his place among important young writers emerging in the middle of the 20th century.

Each poem in the book makes use of a formal pattern, whether of the poet’s own creation or borrowed from some other poet and adapted to the specific circumstances. The work as a whole marks an important beginning for Lowell, who was struggling with his new Catholic faith against the background of his Protestant history. Furthermore, his use of more traditional, formal poetic structures marks a turn away from the free-verse experimentalism ushered in by modernist poets such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and E.E. Cummings.

In the five years between Lord Weary’s Castle and his third book, The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951), Lowell’s life underwent a number of drastic changes. He and Jean Stafford separated, and he left the Catholic Church, moved to New York, befriended William Carlos Williams, spent time in a psychiatric hospital, married the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, lost his father, and moved to Europe. The poetry he wrote during those years, however, remained very similar to what he had published in his first two books. In the years following publication of The Mills of the Kavanaughs, however, Lowell began teaching a younger generation of poets and, at the suggestion of psychiatrists, began writing about his childhood.

After years of intense selfreflection along with the influence of Williams’s more colloquial poetry, Lowell started to work on much looser verse. He published his groundbreaking collection Life Studies, which explored the relationship between his own psyche and his surroundings, in 1959. While some of his longtime endorsers, such as Tate, disliked his new style of writing, many consider it as an important development in American poetry, on par with T. S. Eliot’s publication of The Waste Land (1922). His personal and largely autobiographical poems quickly became the foundation for an entire movement of American verse, earning him the somewhat bombastic title “Father of Confessional Poetry.”

The year after publishing Life Studies, Lowell read his famous poem “For the Union Dead” at the Boston Arts Festival, for which he wrote it. “For the Union Dead,” which later became the title poem for his 1964 collection, exhibits Lowell’s more politically conscious side as an artist. Despite his tumultuous personal life, marred by mental and emotional illness as well as continuous difficulty in marriage, he managed to live a rather public life. In 1965 he declined President Johnson’s invitation to the White House Arts Festival because of his opposition to the Vietnam War. He wrote in a letter to the president, “I thought of such an occasion as a purely artistic flourish, even though every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public celebration without making subtle public commitments” (New York Times, June 3, 1965, p. 2). In 1967 he joined Norman Mailer, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, and many others in the march on the Pentagon, to protest the Vietnam War once again.

In addition to capturing his political discontent, “For the Union Dead” stands at the pinnacle of Lowell’s career as perhaps the most successful of his poems to blend personal and public history. After divorcing Elizabeth Hardwick and marrying Caroline Blackwood in 1972, he released three books at the same time, all of which were based on the earlier collection Notebook (1969). History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin present a vast collection of poems based on the sonnet—most composed of 14 lines using roughly iambic pentameter, but few of them rhymed—that document his reactions to contemporary events and his musings on American history intertwined with details about his ancestral history and the difficulties of his personal life. His efforts to fuse the personal and the public in The Dolphin earned him another Pulitzer Prize. Many critics, however, argue that the length of the three books, their adherence to the sonnet form, and the overly personal details create a mediocre version of what he accomplished in his early collections.

Despite criticisms of some of those later works, Lowell continues to be remembered as one of America’s most important postwar poets. While writing he also taught at a number of prominent American schools, including Harvard University, the Kenyon School of Letters, and Boston University. His students included Anne Sexton, Sylvia PLATH, and W. D. Snodgrass, all of whom carried Lowell’s influence into their most important works. During his career he published translations of poetry, translations of plays, his own plays, prose, and a prolific body of poetry that situates the author within personal and public experience that spans the entirety of Anglo-American history. For all his literary successes, however, he never found complete fulfillment in his personal life. In 1977 he left Caroline Blackwood in England to return to his former wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. He suffered a heart attack and died during the cab ride from the airport to her home in Manhattan. Day by Day, Lowell’s last collection of original poetry, was published the same year.