Robert Lowell

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Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV (March 1, 1917 – September 12, 1977) was an American poet.

He was born in a Boston Brahmin family whose roots can be traced back to the Mayflower.

His family, both past and present, were important figures in his poetry.

His poems, which were often set in Boston and the New England region, were also inspired by growing up in Boston.

Lowell's mythologized New England, particularly in his early work, according to literary scholar Paula Hayes, "The poets who most directly inspired me were Allen Tate, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams."

An unlikely combination!

But you'll see that Bishop is a link between Tate's formalism and Williams' informal art." Lowell wrote both formal, metered verse and free verse; his verse in a collection of Life Studies and Notebook poems fell somewhere in between metered and free verse. He was identified as a key figure in the confessional poetry movement after the publication of his 1959 book Life Studies, which won the 1960 National Book Award and "included a fresh focus on vivacious, uninhibited discussion of personal, family, and psychological challenges."

However, much of Lowell's work, which often combined the public and the personal, did not comply with a neoclassical poetry" model.

Rather, Lowell served in a variety of distinct stylistic styles and styles throughout his career.

He received the National Book Award in 1947 and 1974, the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1947.

He is "widely regarded as one of the most influential American poets of the postwar period." Paul Mariani, his biographer, referred to him as "the poet-historian of our time" and "the last of [America's] most influential public poets" after his death.

Life

Lowell was born in the United States Navy Cmdr. In Boston, Massachusetts, Robert Traill Spence Lowell III and Charlotte Winslow. The Lowells were a Boston Brahmin family with poets Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell; clergymen Charles Russell Lowell Sr. and Robert Traill Spence Lowell; and federal Judge John Lowell III (about whom Lowell wrote his poem "Charles Russell Lowell, 1835-1864"; and federal Judge John Lowell.

His mother was a descendant of William Samuel Johnson, a signer of the United States Constitution; Jonathan Edwards, the Calvinist theologian (about whom Lowell wrote "Mr. Edwards and the Spider); and "The Worst Sinner"; and "After the Surprising Conversions); and Mayflower passengers James Chilton and his daughter Mary Chilton, the second governor of Massachusetts; and Benjamin Edwards, the poet; and "The Worst Sinner" Lowell's parents have a common descent from Philip Livingston, Robert Livingston's uncle, and they were sixth cousins.

Lowell also had notable nun ancestors on both sides of his family, which he addresses in Part II ("91 Revere Street") of Life Studies, as well as a family history steeped in Protestantism. Lowell's great-grandson, Lowell's great-grandfather, a soldier in the War of 1812 and later mayor of Kinderhook and Schenectady, as well as the German-Jewish Mordecai family, who were active in state affairs, was descended from the German-Jewish Mordecai family, who were influential in state affairs.

Lowell, as a youth, had a penchant for violence and bullying others. In the prose piece "91 Revere Street," Lowell wrote that he was "thick-witted, narcissistic, thuggish." Lowell's peers gave him the nickname "Cal" after he encountered both the villainous Shakespeare character Caliban and the tyrannical Roman emperor Caligula, and the phrase stayed with him throughout his life. Lowell's poem "Caligula," first published in his book "The Union Dead" and later republished in a redesigned sonnet version of his book Notebook 1967-1968, would later use the name.

Lowell attended St. Mark's School, a popular prep school in Southborough, Massachusetts, where he received his high school education. Lowell wanted to be a writer after he encountered and was inspired by writer Richard Eberhart, who taught at the college, and as a high school student. He became a lifelong friend of Frank Parker, an artist who later created the prints that Lowell used on the fronts of most of his books.

Lowell spent two years at Harvard College. When he was a freshman at Harvard, he visited Robert Frost in Cambridge and asked for feedback on a long poem he had written about the Crusades; Frost suggested that Lowell must work on his compression. "I had a huge blank verse epic on the First Crusade and brought it to him all in my undecipherable pencil-writing," Lowell said, and he read a little of it.' "History is about five years ago," Keats' 'Hyperion,' the first version, was enthralled, and I thought all of it was magical."

Lowell was dissatisfied with two years at Harvard, and Merrill Moore, a poet, suggested that Lowell take a leave of absence from Harvard to study with Moore's mentor, Allen Tate, who was then living in Nashville and teaching at Vanderbilt. Lowell and Moore travelled to Nashville, which brought Lowell to Tate's house. Lowell asked Tate if he could live with him and his partner, and Tate joked that if Lowell wanted to, he'd pitch a tent on Tate's lawn; then Lowell went to Sears, Roebuck to buy a tent that he built up on Tate's lawn and lived in for two months. The act, according to Lowell, was "a tragic piece of youthful callousness."

Lowell, who spent time with the Tates in Nashville (and taking some classes taught by John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt), has decided to leave Harvard. Lowell followed Tate and John Crowe Ransom after they left Vanderbilt for Kenyon College in Ohio, majoring in Classics, where he earned an A.B. Summa cum lauded. He was nominated to Phi Beta Kappa in junior year and was named Valedictorian of his class. He settled into the so-called "writer's house" (a dorm that had acquired a number of talented young writers) with fellow classmates Peter Taylor, Robie Macauley, and Randall Jarrell.

Lowell converted from Episcopalianism to Catholicism partially in protest against his parents; however, by the time of the forties, he would have left the Catholic Church. Lowell earned a Master's degree in Classics from Kenyon University in 1940 and taught English introductory classes for a year before World War II began.

Lowell, a conscient objector during World War II, spent several months in Danbury, Connecticut, in the federal jail. In a letter sent to President Franklin Roosevelt on September 7, 1943, he explained his decision not to serve in World War II, saying, "I really regret that I must decline your offer to me in your letter from August 6, 1943 for service in the Armed Force." He said that after the bombing at Pearl Harbor, he was ready to fight in the war until he heard about the American terms of unconditional surrender, which he feared would result in the "perpetual destruction of Germany and Japan." Lowell was in a prison in New York City that he later wrote about in his book Life Studies' poem "Memories of West Street and Lepke."

Lowell was involved in the Red Scare in 1949 and accused then-director Elizabeth Ames of harbouring communists and being intimately linked with Agnes Smedley, a Yaddo resident. Lowell promised to "blacken the name of Yaddo as broadly as possible" if Ames were not fired immediately, and Washington used his connections in the literary world and Washington. All charges against Ames were dropped by the Yaddo board.

Lowell's letter to the president was his first big political act of resistance, but it would not be his last. Lowell fought the Vietnam War from the mid-to-late 1960s. Lowell rebutted an invitation to the White House Festival of the Arts in a letter sent by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, "We're in danger of becoming an explosive and subsequently chauvinistic world, and we might even be drifting on our way to the last nuclear disaster." Ian Hamilton says that [throughout [1967] [Lowell] was in demand as a speaker and petition signer [against the conflict]. He was vehemently opposed to the war, but equivocal about being linked too closely with the 'peace campaign': there were many reasons he did not agree with the more ardent 'peaceniks' and that joining movements that he did not want to lead.' Lowell, on the other hand, was one of the featured speakers at the 1969 March on the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., against the war. Lowell was welcomed by Norman Mailer, who had been also a featured speaker at the rally. In the early portions of his non-fiction book The Armies of the Night, Mailer related the peace march and his impression of Lowell that day. Lowell was also a signer to the anti-war slogan "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority" circulated by members of the radical intellectual group RESIST.

In 1968, Lowell publicly endorsed Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy in his Democratic nomination for president in a three-way primary against Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. Lowell spoke at numerous fundraisers for McCarthy in New York this year, but "[his] heart went out of the fight" after Robert Kennedy's assassination.

Lowell taught in the University of Iowa's well-known Iowa Writers' Workshop from 1950 to 1953, as well as Paul Engle and Robie Macauley. Donald James Winslow recruited Lowell to teach at Boston University, where his students included poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Over the years, he taught at a variety of universities, including the University of Cincinnati, Yale University, Harvard University, and the New School for Social Research. Several writers, researchers, and scholars, including Kathleen Spivack, James Atlas, Helen Vendler, and Dudley Young, have written about Lowell's teaching style and/or his influence on their lives. Spivack wrote a book with Robert Lowell and His Circle in 2012 about her Boston University experience in 1959. Lowell travelled from New York City to Boston in order to teach Harvard classes from 1963 to 1970.

Helen Vendler, a scholar, attended one of Lowell's poetry lectures, stating that one of Lowell's informal style was that he discussed poets in class as if "the poets [being investigated] were students or acquaintances." Hamilton quoted students who said that Lowell "taught 'almost by indirection,' "he turned every poet into a version of himself.'"

The Academy of American Poets named Life Studies one of their Groundbreaking Books of the twentieth century, a century of poets, claiming that it had "a major effect" in the confessional poetry movement, which the book helped launch in March 2005. The book's editors, according to Contemporary Literary Criticism, it "exerted a significant influence on subsequent American poets, including others from the first generation confessionalists like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton." Sylvia Plath said in a 1962 interview that Life Studies had influenced the poetry she was writing at the time (and that her husband, Ted Hughes, would publish Ariel a few years later): "I'm excited about this new breakthrough, which I suspect has been largely taboo." For example, Robert Lowell's poems about his time in a mental hospital. Stanley Kunitz, a poet, wrote an essay in 1985 that Life Studies was "perhaps the most influential book of modern verse after T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land."

Lowell became the most well-known American poet in the 1960s; in June 1967, he appeared on the front page of Time as part of a cover story in which he was praised as "the best American poet of his generation." Although the essay gave a general summary of modern American poetry (quoting Lowell's contemporaries such as John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop), Lowell's life, work, and place in the American literary canon remained the article's focus.

In 1940, Lowell married Jean Stafford, a novelist and short-story writer. Lowell and Stafford were involved in a serious car accident, in which Lowell was driving, leaving Stafford permanently injured, although Lowell was uninsured, while Lowell walked away unscathed. Stafford's nose and cheekbone were crushed, requiring her to have multiple reconstructive procedures. The couple married in 1948, during which Anthony Hecht described it as "a tormented and agoning one." Lowell married Elizabeth Hardwick, a writer who had a daughter, Harriet, in 1957, a short time after. The New York Times will characterize their marriage as "restless and emotionally harrowing" after Hardwick's death in 2007, reflecting Lowell's explicit portrayal of their marriage and divorce as Lowell depicted in his book For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin. Lowell left her for Caroline Blackwood after 23 years of marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick in 1970. Blackwood and Lowell married in 1972 in England, where they decided to settle and raise their son, Sheridan. Lowell's sonnet, Ivana, would be published in his book The Dolphin.

Lowell had a close friendship with poet Elizabeth Bishop, who lived from 1947 to Lowell's death in 1977. Both writers relied on one another for critiques of their poetry (which is evident in their voluminous correspondence, published in the book Words in Air: Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell's Complete Correspondence in 2008) and therefore inspired one another's work. "The Scream" (inspired by Bishop's short story "In the Village") and "Skunk Hour"), three of Lowell's poems, as well as scholar Thomas Travisano's "Life Studies and For the Union Dead," his most popular books, were published under Bishop's direct influence.

Lowell maintained a close friendship with Randall Jarrell from their 1937 meeting at Kenyon College until Jarrell's 1965 death. Lowell openly acknowledged Jarrell's influence over his writing and regularly sought out Jarrell's thoughts about his poems before he published them. "I suppose we shouldn't swap too many compliments, but I am very in debt," Lowell wrote in a letter from 1957.

Lowell was hospitalized several times throughout his adult life due to bipolar disorder, also known as "manic depression." Lowell was admitted to the McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, on several occasions, and one of his poems, "Waking in the Blue," refers to his stay in this large psychiatric facility. Although bipolar disorder was often a burden on the writer and his families, it also inspired some of Lowell's most popular poetry, as in his book Life Studies. Lowell began taking lithium to treat the disease when he was fifty. "Lithium therapy saved him from suffering the belief that he was solely and emotionally accountable for his relapse." The editor of Lowell's Letters, Saskia Hamilton, notes that "the belief that he relapsed." However, it did not entirely prevent relapses... And, he was worried and worried about the consequences of his relapses on his family and friends until the end of his life."

Lowell died in a taxi in Manhattan on September 12, 1977, at the age of 60, while on his way to see his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. He was buried in Dunbarton, New Hampshire, at Stark Cemetery.

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