Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell (1 March 1917 – 12 September 1977) was an American poet who was, by wide consensus, the dominant American poet of his generation — the figure around whom the poetry of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s organised itself, whether in allegiance or opposition. His career traced the central arc of postwar American poetry: from the dense, formally masterful, Catholic-inflected verse of Lord Weary’s Castle (1946, Pulitzer Prize) through the revolutionary autobiographical breakthrough of Life Studies (1959) — the book that launched confessional poetry — to the restless, prolific, politically engaged sonnets of his late period. He was also a public intellectual and antiwar activist whose refusal to attend a White House ceremony during the Vietnam War became a defining act of literary dissent.

Life and Career

Lowell was born in Boston into one of America’s most distinguished families — the Lowells of Massachusetts, whose members included the poet James Russell Lowell, the astronomer Percival Lowell, and the president of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell. He grew up in a household of privilege, dysfunction, and emotional violence: his father, a retired naval officer, was weak and ineffectual; his mother was domineering and socially ambitious. The family’s decline from Brahmin grandeur to bourgeois mediocrity became one of Lowell’s great subjects.

He attended St. Mark’s School and Harvard, but left Harvard after two years to study at Kenyon College with John Crowe Ransom, the New Critic and poet. At Kenyon he befriended Randall Jarrell and Peter Taylor and converted to Roman Catholicism — a conversion that shaped the fierce, apocalyptic religious imagery of his early poetry. He married the novelist Jean Stafford in 1940 (the first of three marriages).

During World War II, Lowell was drafted but refused to serve, writing an open letter to President Roosevelt declaring that “the bombing of civilians” made the war morally unacceptable. He was sentenced to five months in federal prison — an experience that deepened his political convictions and produced one of his finest early poems, “Memories of West Street and Lepke.”

Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) — which won the Pulitzer Prize when Lowell was twenty-nine — established him as the most formidable young poet in America. The poems are dense, formally demanding, metrically powerful, and suffused with a Catholic fury at the materialism and violence of American civilisation. “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” — an elegy for his cousin Warren Winslow, drowned at sea — is the collection’s masterpiece.

Life Studies (1959) changed American poetry. The book’s fourth section — a sequence of autobiographical poems about Lowell’s parents, his childhood, his marriages, and his mental illness (he suffered from bipolar disorder and was hospitalised repeatedly throughout his life) — broke every rule of decorum that the New Critical consensus had established. Poems like “Skunk Hour,” “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” “Man and Wife,” and “Waking in the Blue” (set in a psychiatric hospital) were shocking in their directness — and they opened the door for Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton (who studied with Lowell), John Berryman, and the entire confessional movement.

For the Union Dead (1964) and Near the Ocean (1967) continued his engagement with both autobiography and American public life. In 1967 he participated in the march on the Pentagon alongside Norman Mailer (who wrote about it in The Armies of the Night). Notebook 1967–68 (1969), revised as History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin (1973), are three books of unrhymed sonnets that constitute a vast diary-in-verse.

The Dolphin (1973) — which won the Pulitzer Prize but incorporated, virtually verbatim, letters from his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, written during their divorce — provoked the most famous ethical controversy in modern American poetry. Elizabeth Bishop, Lowell’s closest literary friend, wrote to him: “art just isn’t worth that much.”

Critical Standing

Lowell is one of the essential American poets. His influence on postwar American poetry — as model, as teacher (at Boston University and Harvard), and as public figure — is unmatched. Life Studies is one of the defining books of the century.

Key Works

• Lord Weary’s Castle (1946)
• Life Studies (1959)
• For the Union Dead (1964)
• The Dolphin (1973)
• Day by Day (1977)

Collecting Lowell

Land of Unlikeness (1944, Cummington Press) — his debut, in an edition of 250 copies — brings $1,000–$4,000. Lord Weary’s Castle (1946, Harcourt Brace) brings $200–$600. Life Studies (1959, Farrar Straus) brings $100–$300. Later collections are modestly priced. Lowell signed at readings; signed copies are available.