A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z


Robert Lowell (1917-1977)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=10

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Robert Lowell including a biography, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lowell/lowell.htm

This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on Robert Lowell.

BIOGRAPHY

Born into an elite Boston family, Robert Lowell claimed as distant relatives both the Fireside poet James Russell Lowell and the modern imagist poet Amy Lowell. At St. Marks School, Lowell benefited from studying with the poet Richard Eberhart. After graduating from St. Marks, Lowell went to Harvard but stayed there for only a year before transferring to Kenyon College in order to study with John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. In 1940 Lowell graduated from Kenyon, converted to Roman Catholicism, and married the novelist Jean Stafford. Lowell would further his connections to the American New Critics by studying with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks at Louisiana State University. Such connections helped secure a powerful critical reception for his early volumes such as the Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (1946), which won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1947. Meanwhile, his antiwar stance as a conscientious objector to World War Two had earned him in 1943 a year of jail time in New York's West Street prison which he would latter commemorate in his poem "Memories of West Street and Lepke." His stormy marriage to Stafford lasted just eight years and following his divorce, the poet met writer and editor Elizabeth Hardwick at the Yaddo writer's institute and the two married the following year in 1949.

Lowell went by the nickname Cal that signified both on the cruelty of the Roman emperor Caligula and the wildness of Shakespeare's monstrous character Caliban from The Tempest. As it happened, Lowell suffered from manic depression and was periodically institutionalized for mental illness throughout his life. Like other contemporaneous poets such as John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, and Anne Sexton, Lowell exploited his bouts of psychosis as material for his verse, which took on more intimate and less formal qualities in the so-called confessional poetry of Life Studies (1959) that received the National Book Award in 1960. Lowell's poetry during the 1960s became more politically engaged with public history as in the title piece of his 1964 collection For the Union Dead. His translations of Rilke and Rimbaud among others collected in Imitations (1961) won the prestigious Bollingen Prize in 1962. Later on in the decade, Lowell became a vocal critic of the Vietnam War and participated in antiwar rallies which he would record in such poems as "The March I" and "The March II" from his volume Notebook (1970). Lowell expanded on the work in Notebook in three volumes published in 1973: History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin. These books record his divorce from Hardwick, its effects on his daughter Harriet, and his remarriage to Caroline Blackwood in 1972. Although critics were divided on Lowell's use of private letters in the intimate confessional verse of The Dolphin, this volume did win the poet another Pulitzer Prize. Four years after this success, Lowell died of a heart attack in a taxicab while enroute to Lizzie and Harriet in New York City.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Axelrod, Steven Gould, Ed. The Critical Response to Robert Lowell. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Doreski, William. Robert Lowell's Shifting Colors: The Poetics of the Public and the Personal. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999.

Hart, Henry. Robert Lowell and the Sublime. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995.

Hobsbaum, Philip. A Reader's Guide to Robert Lowell. London: Thames and Hudson, 1988.

Mariani, Paul L. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.

Stuart, Sarah Payne. My First Cousin Once Removed: Money, Madness, and the Family of Robert Lowell. New York: HarperCollins, 1998.

Tillinghast, Richard. Robert Lowell's Life and Work: Damaged Grandeur. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER