Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell (1917-1977). Photo by Elsa Dorfman. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Robert Lowell
Born	Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV March 1, 1917 Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Died	September 12, 1977 (aged 60) New York City, New York, United States
Occupation	Poet
Nationality	United States
Period	1944-1977
Genres	American poetry
Literary movement	Confessional poetry
Spouse(s)	Jean Stafford (1940-1948) Elizabeth Hardwick (1949-1972) Caroline Blackwood (1972-1977)
Children	Harriet Lowell, Sheridan Lowell
Relative(s)	Amy Lowell, James Russell Lowell
Influences Elizabeth Bishop, John Crowe Ransom, Hart Crane, Allen Tate
Influenced Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Frederick Seidel, Derek Walcott

Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV (March 1, 1917 - September 12, 1977) was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement.

Life

Youth and education

Lowell was born in Boston, Massachusetts to a Boston Brahmin family that included 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, along with 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.

Robert Lowell received his high school education at St. Mark's School, a prominent prep-school in Southborough, Massachusetts, where he met and was influenced by poet Richard Eberhart, who taught at the school.

Lowell then attended Harvard College for 2 years before transferring to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio , to study under John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate.

There is a well-known anecdote about where Lowell lived when he 1st arrived at Kenyon. Before arriving at the school, he asked Allen Tate if he could live with him, and Tate joked that if Lowell wanted to, he could pitch a tent on his lawn. That is exactly what Lowell did. In an interview for The Paris Review, Lowell stated that he went to Sears, Roebuck to purchase the "pup tent" that he set up on Tate's lawn and lived in for 2 months. Lowell called the act "a terrible piece of youthful callousness."

Fortunately for Tate and his wife, Lowell soon settled into the so-called "writer's house" (a dorm that received its nickname after it had accrued a number of ambitious young writers) with fellow students Peter Taylor, Robie Macauley and Randall Jarrell.

Partly in rebellion against his parents, he converted from Episcopalianism to Catholicism, which influenced his first 2 books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lord Weary's Castle (1946). By the end of the 1940s, he had left the Catholic Church.

In 1950, Lowell was included in the influential anthology Mid-Century American Poets as a key literary figure 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.

From 1950 to 1953, Lowell taught in the well-reputed Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, together with Paul Engle, Robie Macauley, and Anthony Hecht. Later, Donald James Winslow hired Lowell to teach at Boston University, where his students included the poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Over the years, he taught at a number of other universities including the University of Cincinnati, Yale University, Harvard University, and the New School for Social Research.

Lowell was a conscientious objector during World War II and served several months at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. He explained his decision not to serve in World War II in a letter addressed to President Franklin Roosevelt on September 7, 1943, stating, "Dear Mr President: I very much regret that I must refuse the opportunity you offer me in your communication of August 6, 1943 for service in the Armed Force." In the letter, he goes on to explain that after the bombing at Pearl Harbor, he was prepared to fight in the war until he read about the United States' terms of unconditional surrender which he feared would lead to the "permanent destruction of Germany and Japan." Before Lowell was tranferred to the prison in Connecticut, he was held in a prison in New York City which he would later write about in the poem "Memories of West Street and Lepke," published in his book Life Studies.

Lowell at the Library of Congress. Courtesy Library of Congress.

He was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for 1947-1948 (a position now known as the U.S. Poet Laureate).

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.

During the 1960s he was active in the civil rights movement and opposed the US involvement in Vietnam. At this point in his career, he was the most public, well-known American poet, and his participation in the October 1967 peace march in Washington, DC and his subsequent arrest would be described in the early sections of Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night. In that book, Mailer wrote, "[Lowell spoke] in his fine stammering voice which gave the impression that life rushed at him in a series of hurdles and some he succeeded in jumping and some he did not." He also wrote that "all flaws considered, Lowell was still a fine, good, and honorable man."

Lowell married novelist Jean Stafford in 1940. Before their marriage, in 1938, Lowell and Stafford got into a terrible car accident, in which Lowell was at the wheel, that left Stafford permanently scarred, while Lowell walked away unscathed. The couple had a tumultuous marriage that ended in 1948. The poet Anthony Hecht characterized the marriage as "a tormented and tormenting one."

Shortly thereafter, in 1949 Lowell married writer Elizabeth Hardwick with whom he had a daughter, Harriet, in 1957. Later, the press would characterize their marriage as "restless and emotionally harrowing." After 23 years of marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick, in 1970, Lowell left her for British author Lady Caroline Blackwood. Blackwood and Lowell were married in 1972 in England, where they decided to settle and where they raised their son, Sheridan.

Lowell had a notably close friendship with poet Elizabeth Bishop that lasted from 1947 until Lowell's death in 1977. Both writers relied upon one another for feedback on their poetry (which is in evidence in their voluminous correspondence, published in the book Words in Air: the Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell in 2008) and thereby influenced each other's work. Bishop's influence over Lowell can be seen at work in at least 2 of Lowell's poems: "The Scream" (inspired by Bishop's short story "In the Village") and "Skunk Hour" (inspired by Bishop's poem "The Armadillo").

Lowell suffered from manic depression and was hospitalized many times throughout his adult life for this mental illness. Although his manic depression was often a great burden (for himself and his family), the subject of that mental illness led to some of his most important poetry, particularly as it manifested itself in his book Life Studies. When he was fifty, Lowell began taking lithium to treat his mental illness. The editor of Lowell's Letters, Saskia Hamilton notes, "Lithium treatment relieved him from suffering the idea that he was morally and emotionally responsible for the fact that he relapsed. However, it did not entirely prevent relapses. . .And he was troubled and anxious about the impact of his relapses on his family and friends until the end of his life."

Lowell died in 1977, having suffered a heart attack in a cab in New York City on his way to see his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. He was buried in Stark Cemetery, Dunbarton, New Hampshire.

Writing

File:Cal, Jean & Peter.jpg

Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, and Peter Taylor in front of The Presbytere at Jackson Square in New Orleans in 1941. Photo by Robie Macauley.

1940s

Lowell's debut book of poems, Land of Unlikeness (1944), did not receive much attention. However, in 1946, Lowell received wide acclaim for his next book, Lord Weary's Castle, which included five poems slightly revised from Land of Unlikeness, plus 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."

1950s

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 which was published in 1959 and won the National Book Award for poetry in 1960. In his acceptance speech for the award, Lowell famously divided American poetry into two camps: the "cooked" and the "raw." This commentary by Lowell was made in reference to the popularity of Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation poets and was a signal from Lowell that he was trying to incorporate some of their "raw" energy into his own poetry.

The poems in Life Studies were written in a mix of free and metered verse, with much more informal language than he had 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." 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. But for better or worse, this label stuck and led to Lowell being grouped together with other influential confessional poets like Lowell's former students W.D. Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton.

1960s

Lowell followed Life Studies with Imitations (1961), 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. However, critical response to Imitations was mixed and sometimes hostile (as was the case with Vladimir Nabokov's public response to Lowell's Mandelstam translations). In the book's introduction, Lowell explained that his idiosyncratic translations should be thought of as "imitations" rather than strict translations since he took many liberties with the originals, trying to "do what [his] authors might have done if they were writing their poems now and in America."

His next book For the Union Dead (1964) was widely praised, particularly for its title poem, which invokes Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead." For the Union Dead was Lowell's 1st book since Life Studies to contain all original verse (since it did not include any translations), and in writing the poems in this volume, Lowell built upon the looser, more personal style of writing that he'd established in the final section of Life Studies. However, none of the poems in For the Union Dead explicity addressed the taboo subject of Lowell's mental illness (like some of the poems in Life Studies did) and were, therefore, not notably "confessional." The subject matter in For the Union Dead was also much broader than it was in Life Studies. For instance, Lowell wrote about a number of world historical figures in poems like "Caligula," "Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts," and "Lady Raleigh's Lament."

In Near the Ocean, which followed a couple of years later, Lowell had returned to stanzaic forms, and the second half of the book shows Lowell returning once again to writing loose translations (including verse approximations of Dante, Juvenal, and Horace). The best known poem in this volume is "Waking Early Sunday Morning," which was written in eight-line stanzas (borrowed from Andrew Marvell's poem "Upon Appleton House") and showed contemporary American politics overtly entering into Lowell's work.

Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war - until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.

“

”

From "Waking Early Sunday Morning,"
Near the Ocean (1967)

During 1967 and 1968 he experimented with a verse journal, published as Notebook 1967-68 (and later republished in a revised edition, simply titled Notebook). Lowell referred to these fourteen-line poems as sonnets although they often failed to incorporate regular meter or rhyme (both of which are defining features of the sonnet form); however, some of the sonnets (particularly the ones in Notebook 1967-1968) were often written in blank verse with a definitive pentameter. In the flyleaf to Notebook 1967-1968, Lowell explained the timeline of the book:

The time is a summer, an autumn, a winter, a spring, another summer; here the poem ends, except for turned-back bits of fall and winter 1968. . .My plot rolls with the seasons. The separate poems and section are opportunist and inspired by impulse. Accident threw up subjects, and the plot swallowed them--famished for human chances.

Steven Gould Axelrod wrote that, "[Lowell's concept behind the sonnet form] was to achieve the balance of freedom and order, discontinuity and continuity, that he [had] observed in [Wallace] Stevens's late long poems and in John Berryman's Dream Songs, then nearing completion. He hoped that his form . . . would enable him 'to describe the immediate instant,' an instant in which political and personal happenings interacted with a lifetime's accumulation of memories, dreams, and knowledge." Lowell liked the new form so much that he reworked and revised many of the poems from Notebook and used them as the foundation for his next three volumes of verse, all of which employed the same loose, fourteen-line sonnet form.

1970s to the Present

The first of these books was History (1973) which primarily dealt with world history from antiquity up to the mid-20th century (although the book doesn't always follow a linear or logical path and contains many poems about Lowell's friends, peers, and family). The second book, For Lizzie and Harriet (1973), describes the breakdown of his second marriage and contains poems that are supposed to be in the voice of his daughter, Harriet, and his second wife, Elizabeth. Finally, the last work in Lowell's sonnet sequence, The Dolphin (1973), which won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize, includes poems about his daughter, his ex-wife, and his new wife Caroline Blackwood whom he'd affectionately nicknamed "Dolphin." Notably, the book only contained new poems, making it the only book in Lowell's sonnet trilogy not to include revised poems from Notebook.

A minor controversy erupted when Lowell admitted to having incorporated (and altered) private letters from his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick into poems for The Dolphin. He was particularly criticized for this by his friends, fellow-poets Adrienne Rich (Citation needed) and Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop made an eloquent and thoughtful argument to Lowell against publishing The Dolphin. In a letter to Lowell regarding The Dolphin, dated March 21st, 1972, before he'd published the book, Bishop praises the writing, saying, "Please believe that I think it is wonderful poetry." But then she states, "I'm sure my point is only too plain. . .Lizzie [Hardwick] is not dead, etc.--but there is a 'mixture of fact & fiction' [in the book], and you have changed [Hardwick's] letters. That is 'infinite mischief,' I think. . .One can use one's life as material--one does anyway--but these letters--aren't you violating a trust? IF you were given permission--IF you hadn't changed them. . .etc. But art just isn't worth that much."

Lowell published his last volume of poetry, Day by Day, in 1977 (also the year of his death). The book won that year's National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. In a PBS documentary on Lowell, Anthony Hecht said that "[Day by Day was] a very touching, moving, gentle book, tinged with a sense of [Lowell's] own pain and the pain [he'd] given to others." It was Lowell's only volume to contain nothing but free verse, and for fans of Lowell's work who were disappointed by the uneven "sonnets" that Lowell had been re-writing and re-packaging in volume after volume since 1967, Day by Day marked a return to form. In many of the poems, Lowell reflects on his life, his past relationships, and his own mortality. The best-known poem from this collection is the last one, titled "Epilogue," in which Lowell reflects upon the "confessional" school of poetry with which his work was associated. In this poem he wrote,

           But sometimes everything I write
           with the threadbare art of my eye
           seems a snapshot,
           lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
           heightened from life,
           yet paralyzed by fact.
           All's misalliance.
           Yet why not say what happened?"

Lowell's Collected Poems, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, were published in 2003. The Collected Poems is a comprehensive volume that includes all of Lowell's major works with the exception of Notebook. 1967-1968 and Notebook. However, many of the poems from these volumes were republished, in revised forms, in History and For Lizzie and Harriet. On the heels of the publication of Collected Poems, The Letters of Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton, was published in 2005. Both Lowell's Collected Poems and his Letters received overwhelmingly positive critical responses from the mainstream press, and their publication has since led to a renewed interest in Lowell's writing.

Recognition

Lowell was appointed the 6th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948. He won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in both 1947 and 1974, the National Book Award in 1960, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977.

Publications

Poetry

• Land of Unlikeness (with introduction by Allen Tate). Cummington, MA: Cummington Press, 1944
  • reprinted, Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1971.
• Lord Weary's Castle. New York: Harcourt, 1946
  • reprinted, 1985.
• Poems, 1938-1949. London, England: Faber, 1950
  • reprinted, 1987.
• The Mills of the Kavanaughs. New York: Harcourt, 1951.
• Life Studies. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1959
  • 2nd edition published with prose memoir "91 Revere Street". London: Faber, 1968.
• Lord Weary's Castle [and] The Mills of the Kavanaughs. Meridian Books, 1961,
  • Harcourt, 1979.
• For the Union Dead. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804-1864 (limited edition keepsake of centenary commemoration of Hawthorne's death). Ohio State University Press, 1964.
• Selected Poems. London, Faber, 1965, 1966.
• The Achievement of Robert Lowell: A comprehensive selection of his poems (edited & with introduction by William J. Martz). Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1966.
• Life Studies, [and] For the Union Dead. Noonday, 1967.
• Near the Ocean (drawings by Sidney Nolan). New York:, Farrar, Straus, 1967; London: Faber, 1967.
• 4. Cambridge, MA: privately published, printed by Laurence Scott, 1969.
• R.F.K., 1925-1968, privately published, 1969.
• Notebook 1967-1968. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1969
  • 3rd edition revised and expanded as Notebook, 1970.
• Fuer die Toten der Union (English with German translations; contains poetry from Life Studies,Near the Ocean, and For the Union Dead). Frankfort on Main, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1969.
• Poems de Robert Lowell (English with Spanish translations). Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial Sudamericana, 1969.
• Poesie, 1940-1970 (English with Italian translations). Milan, Italy: Longanesi, 1972.
• History. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.
• For Lizzie and Harriet. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1973.
• The Dolphin. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1973.
• Robert Lowell's Poems: A Selection (edited, & with introduction & notes, by Jonathan Raban). London: Faber, 1974.
• Ein Fischnetz aus teerigem Garn zu knuepfen: Robert Lowell (English with German translations; contains poems from Lord Weary's Castle, Life Studies, For the Union Dead, Near the Ocean,History, The Dolphin, and For Lizzie and Harriet). Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt, 1976.
• Day by Day. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1977.
• A Poem. Vermillion, SD: Menhaden Press, 1980.
• Collected Poems (edited by Frank Bidart & David Gewanter; with assistance of DeSales Harrison). New York: Farrar, Straus, 2003.

Plays

• The Old Glory (trilogy; contains "Endecott and the Red Cross" and "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," both based on short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and "Benito Cereno" , based on a novella by Herman Melville; first produced Off-Broadway at the American Place Theatre, November 1, 1964), (introduction by Robert Brustein, director's note by Jonathan Miller). New York: Farrar, Straus, 1965.
  • revised edition, 1968.
• Prometheus Bound: Derived from Aeschylus (first produced by Yale School of Drama, May 9, 1967; produced Off-Broadway at Mermaid Theatre, June 24, 1971). New York: Farrar, Straus, 1969, 1987.
• Endecott and the Red Cross (revised and expanded version of one-act play of the same title; first produced in New York City by the American Place Theatre at St. Clements Episcopal Church, May, 1968). American Place Theatre, 1968.
• Benito Cereno (English with Italian translation, edited & with introduction by Rolando Anzilotti). Milan: All'insegna del pesce d'oro, 1969.

Prose

• Collected Prose (edited & with introduction by Robert Giroux), New York: Farrar, Straus, 1987.

Translated

• Eugenio Montale, Poesie de Montale. Bologna: Laterna, 1960.
• Imitations (versions of poems by Homer, Sappho, Rainer Maria Rilke, Francois Villon, Stephane Mallarme, Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, and others; mimeographed typescript entitled Imitations: A Book of Free Translations by Robert Lowell for Elizabeth Bishop privately circulated before publication, c. 1960). Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1961.
• Jean Baptiste Racine & Pierre Beaumarchais, Phaedra and Figaro ((With Jacques Barzun; Beaumarchais's Figaro translated by Barzun; Racine's Phaedra translated by Lowell). Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1961.
• published in UK as Phaedra. Faber, 1963.
• Charles Baudelaire, The Voyage, and other versions of poems by Baudelaire (illustrations by Sidney Nolan). Farrar, Straus, 1968.
• The Oresteia of Aeschylus (contains "Agamemnon," "Orestes," and "The Furies"). Farrar, Straus, 1978.

Letters

• Letters of Robert Lowell (edited by Saskia Hamilton). New York: Farrar, Straus, 2005.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Robert Lowell Reads "For the Union Dead"

Audio / video

• The Poetry of Robert Lowell (sound recording of reading at Y.M.-Y.W.H.A. Poetry Center in New York City, 1968). Jeffrey Norton, 1974.
• Robert Lowell: A Reading (sound recording of reading at Poetry Center of the 92nd Street "Y" in New York City, December 8, 1976). Caedmon, 1978.
• Robert Lowell Reading His Own Poems (sound recording of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English series). Library of Congress, 1978.

Robert Lowell reads The Old Flame

Except where noted, doscographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

References

Robert Lowell reads Epilogue

• Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography, Faber & Faber, 1982.
• Lowell, Robert. Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003.
• Mariani, Paul. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996.
• Travisano, Thomas and Saskia Hamilton, eds. Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2008.

External links

Poems

• Robert Lowell 1917-1977 at the Poetry Foundation
• Robert Lowell at Harvard Square Library (profile & 7 poems)
• Robert Lowell profile & 14 poems at the Academy of American Poets
• Robert Lowell--Online Poems
• Robert Lowell at PoemHunter (21 poems)

Audio

• Robert Lowell at YouTube
• Helen Vendler phone interview on Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop audio podcast from New York Review of Books.

Books

• Robert Lowell at Amazon.com
• Works by or about Robert Lowell in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

About

• Robert Lowell at NNDB
• Robert Lowell (1917-1977) at Modern American Poetry
• Frederick Seidel (Winter-Spring 1961). "Robert Lowell, The Art of Poetry No. 3". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4664/the-art-of-poetry-no-3-robert-lowell. Retrieved 2010-09-11. 
• "The Illness and Insight of Robert Lowell
• Robert Lowell at Find a Grave