Robert Trail Spence Lowell Jr

UXL Newsmakers, (2005)

Robert Trail Spence Lowell Jr.

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.