Robert Lowell Biography and List of Works

American poet noted for his complex, autobiographical poetry, and turbulent life history, which was entangled with the social, political, and ideological movements in the U.S. Lowell was called the father of the confessional poets, a term used to describe among others Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman.

Father, forgive me
my injuries,
as I forgive
those I
have injured!

You never climbed
Mount Sion, yet left
dinosaur
death-steps on the crust,
where I must walk.
(from Middle Age, 1964)

Robert Lowell was born in Boston as the son of Robert Traill Spence Lowell, a naval officer, and Charlotte (Winslow) Lowell. He was a member of a distinguished, intellectual family whose members included the poet and critic James Russell Lowell and the poet Amy Lowell. Without the means to maintain their outwardly conventional social position, the family was strained by internal tensions. Lowell was nicknamed Cal after the Roman emperor Caligula, known for his cruelty.

Lowell began writing at St. Mark's School, where his teacher was the poet Richard Eberhart. He studied English literature at Harvard, but left to study poetry and criticism under John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) at Kenyon College (Ohio), graduating in 1940. His radical decision to break with his milieu and past was underlined by his conversion to Roman Catholicism in the same year. From 1949 Lowell spent periods in mental hospitals, he was a heavy drinker, and was married three times. In 1940 he married the writer Jean Stafford - they divorced eight years later.

Although Lowell tried to enlist in the armed forces during WW II, by the time he was called for service, he had declared himself a conscientious objector and served five months of a prison sentence in 1943. In the following year his first collection of poetry, the autobiographical LAND OF UNLIKENESS appeared, in which Lowell used Christian symbolism and juxtaposed the world of grace to the urban life. In his second book, LORD WEARY'S CASTLE (1946), Lowell returned to the New England milieu. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and included the famous 'The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.' These works are among Lowell's confessional works, others were LIFE STUDIES (1959), which won the National Book Award in 1960, and THE DOLPHIN (1973). In THE MILLS OF THE KAVANAUGHS (1949) Lowell blended classical myths with New England landscape.

In 1949 Lowell married the critic Elisabeth Hardwick. He received the Harriet Monroe Poetry award in 1952 and the Guinness Poetry Award (shared with W.H. Auden, Edith Sitwell, and Edwin Muir) in 1959. In the 1950s Lowell spent a number years abroad and settled in Boston in 1954, where he worked as a teacher at the University of Boston (1955-60). He was during this decade a visiting lecturer at the University of Cincinnati and Harvard University.

In IMITATIONS (1961) Lowell adapted and re-created a small anthology of poetry ranging from Homer to Boris Pasternak. Lowell's historical imagination led him to translating such writers as von Racine, Sappho, Rilke, and Baudelaire. The European tradition represented for Lowell at the same time a source of parallels for America. The trio of plays entitled THE OLD GLORY - adapted for the stage from the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville - reflected Lowell's preoccupation with dilemmas of the American past.

In the 1960s Lowell was active in the civil-rights and antiwar campaigns. He made a number of widely published political gestures, refusing among others to attend the White House Festival of the Arts because of opposition to the Vietnam War. From 1963 to 1970 he was a teacher at Harvard.

In 1972 Lowell divorced from his second wife. During the 1970s Lowell lived in England, where he was a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford (1970), visiting lecturer at the University of Essex (1970-72) and at the University of Kent (1970-1975). In 1973 Lowell published three collections of poetry: HISTORY recreated a host of historical figures from biblical times to the present. In FOR LIZZIE AND HARRIET he talked about his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, and his daughter. THE DOLPHIN dealt with the poet's move to England as he left one wife for another. The third collection brought him another Pulitzer Prize. The title poem celebrated the poet's feelings of love - the inspiration behind the poems was Lowell's third wife, the writer Caroline Blackwood. He died of heart failure at the age of sixty, on September 12, 1977 in New York. His last collection, DAY BY DAY, a record of his painful domestic history, received posthumously in 1978 the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this work Lowell abandoned the sonnet form for an irregular free verse.

"Every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public celebration without making public commitments."

For further reading: The Achievement of Robert Lowell by J. Mazzaro (1960); The Poetic Themes of Robert Lowell by J. Mazzaro (1965); Robert Lowell: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by T. Parkinson (1968); Robert Lowell, ed. by R. Boyers and M. London (1970); Pity of the Monsters by A. Williamson (1972); Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell by S. Yenser (1974); Robert Lowell: Life and Art by S.G. Axelrod (1978); Robert Lowell by R.J. Fein (1979); Robert Lowell by Ian Hamilton (1982); Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs by J. Meuers (1988); Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell by P. Mariani (1994); Robert Lowell and the Sublime by H. Hart (1995) - See also: Wole Soyinka

LAND OF UNLIKENESS, (1944)