James Russell Lowell

James Russell Lowell was the last of the great New England Brahmins to exercise genuine literary authority — a poet, critic, editor, and diplomat who was, during his lifetime, one of the most celebrated and most influential figures in American letters, a man who edited The Atlantic Monthly in its founding years, held Longfellow’s chair at Harvard, served as American Minister in Madrid and London, and produced in The Biglow Papers the most effective satirical verse in nineteenth-century American literature. His reputation has declined more steeply than that of any of the other Fireside Poets — Whittier and Longfellow still have readers; Lowell is almost entirely unread — but in his own century he was a figure of enormous importance, and his critical essays remain intelligent and occasionally brilliant.

Elmwood

Lowell was born in 1819 at Elmwood, the family estate in Cambridge, Massachusetts — a house he occupied, with interruptions, for most of his life and that remains standing today. He was the son of a Unitarian minister, a member of one of Boston’s oldest and most distinguished families, and a product of the Harvard culture that shaped the New England literary establishment. He graduated from Harvard College in 1838 and Harvard Law School in 1840, but never practised law — literature and reform were his vocations from the beginning.

His first wife, Maria White, was a passionate abolitionist who deepened Lowell’s commitment to the antislavery cause and influenced the political poetry that made his early reputation.

The Biglow Papers

The Biglow Papers, First Series (1848) was Lowell’s most original and most enduring work — a series of satirical verse letters written in Yankee dialect by Hosea Biglow, a New England farmer, attacking the Mexican-American War as a slaveholders’ conspiracy to expand slavery into new territories. The poems were brilliantly effective political satire — funny, angry, and devastatingly pointed — and they established Lowell as a major voice in the antislavery movement.

The Biglow Papers, Second Series (1867), written during the Civil War, continued Hosea Biglow’s commentary, this time on the war itself, on Lincoln (whom Lowell came to admire), and on the question of Reconstruction. The dialect verse of both series influenced later American vernacular writing, from Mark Twain to Finley Peter Dunne.

A Fable for Critics (1848), published the same year as the first Biglow Papers, was a long satirical poem in couplets that reviewed the leading American writers of the day — Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, Longfellow, Bryant, and others — with wit, insight, and sometimes devastating accuracy. The poem is still the best contemporary account of the American literary scene of the 1840s.

The Critic and Editor

In 1857, Lowell was appointed the first editor of The Atlantic Monthly, a position he held until 1861. He shaped the magazine into the most important literary periodical in America, publishing Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, Whittier, Stowe, and other New England writers. He later co-edited the North American Review (1864–1872).

His critical essays — collected in Among My Books (1870) and My Study Windows (1871) — were the most substantial American literary criticism of the period. His essays on Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, and other European writers demonstrated a breadth of learning and a fineness of literary judgment that few American critics of his era could match.

The Diplomat

In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed Lowell Minister to Spain, and in 1880 he was transferred to the Court of St. James’s, where he served as Minister to Great Britain until 1885. He was an immensely popular ambassador — his speeches and addresses, collected in Democracy and Other Addresses (1887), were admired for their eloquence and their thoughtful defence of American democratic institutions.

Collecting Lowell

The Biglow Papers (George Nichols, Cambridge, 1848) in first edition is the primary target — Lowell’s most important work. A Fable for Critics (Putnam, 1848) is the companion piece. The Vision of Sir Launfal (Ticknor, 1848) completes the remarkable output of 1848. Among My Books (Fields, Osgood, 1870) and My Study Windows (Osgood, 1871) are the critical collections. The Riverside Edition of the complete works (Houghton Mifflin, 1890, 10 volumes) is the standard edition.