Robert Lowell

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Robert Lowell (March 1, 1917–September 12, 1977), born Robert Traill Spence Lowell, IV, was an American poet whose works, confessional in nature, engaged with the questions of history and probed the dark recesses of the self. He is generally considered to be among the greatest American poets of the twentieth century.

Contents 1 Life 2 Writing 3 Works 4 Trivia 5 External links

[edit] Life

Robert Lowell was born into the Boston Brahmin family that included Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell. He attended Harvard College but transferred to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, to study under John Crowe Ransom. He was a Roman Catholic from 1940 to 1946, which influenced his first two books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and the Pulitzer Prize winning Lord Weary's Castle (1946). In 1950, Lowell was included in the influential anthology Mid-Century American Poets as one of the key literary figures of his generation. Among his contemporaries who also appeared in that book were Muriel Rukeyser, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell, and John Ciardi, all poets who came into prominence in the 1940s.

Lowell was a conscientious objector during World War II and served several months at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. He was married to novelist Jean Stafford from 1940 to 1948. In 1949 he married the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. In the 1960s, he became a media personality, befriending such celebrities as Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy, Mary McCarthy, Father Daniel Berrigan, and Eugene McCarthy.

Lowell was hospitalized approximately twenty times for a bipolar disorder that had been diagnosed at one point as "acute schizophrenia" and was later identified as "manic depression." He was treated with Thorazine through most of the 1950s and 1960s until it was shown to be ineffective, and in 1967, he began taking lithium, which, with psychiatric therapy sessions added, gradually enabled him to achieve a measure of peace, although he was never entirely free of the symptoms that caused erratic behavior all through his life.

In 1970 he left Elizabeth Hardwick for the British author, Lady Caroline Blackwood. He spent many of his last years in England. Lowell died in 1977, suffering a heart attack in a cab in New York City, and is buried in Stark Cemetery, Dunbarton, New Hampshire.

Lowell's collected poems were published in 2003 and his letters in 2005, leading to a renewed interest in his work.

[edit] Writing

Lowell reached wide acclaim for his 1946 book, Lord Weary's Castle, which included ten poems slightly revised from his earlier Land of Unlikeness, and thirty new poems. Among the better known poems in the volume are "Mr Edwards and the Spider" and "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket." Lord Weary's Castle was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1947.

The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951) did not receive a similar acclaim, but Lowell was able to revive his reputation with the award-winning Life Studies (1959), a book that reflected stylistic changes that seemed more in line with the popular openness of Beat and Confessional poetry. It was a shift that for the rest of Lowell's career would produce frequent flashes of brilliance and enable him to achieve respect among Counter Culture revisionists.

Lowell followed Life Studies with a volume of loose translations of poems by, among others, Rilke and Rimbaud, Imitations, for which he received the 1962 Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize.

For the Union Dead, 1964, was also widely praised, particularly for its title poem, which invokes Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead." Following this book, however, many critics began to find Lowell's poetry collections becoming more inconsistent.

During 1967 and 1968 he experimented with a verse journal, published as Notebook, 1967-68. These poems loosely based on the sonnet form were reworked into three volumes. History deals with public history from antiquity onwards, and with modern poets Lowell had known; For Lizzie and Harriet describes the breakdown of his second marriage; and The Dolphin, which won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize, includes poems about his marriage to Caroline Blackwood and their life in England.

A minor controversy erupted when he incorporated private letters from his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick into For Lizzie and Harriet. He was particularly criticized for this by his friends Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Bishop.

[edit] Works

• Land of Unlikeness (1944)
• Lord Weary's Castle (1946)
• The Mills of The Kavanaughs (1951)
• Life Studies (1959)
• Phaedra (translation) (1961)
• Imitations (1961)
• For the Union Dead (1964)
• The Old Glory (1965)
• Near the Ocean (1967)
• The Voyage & other versions of poems of Baudelaire (1969)
• Prometheus Bound (1969)
• Notebook (1969) (Revised and Expanded Edition, 1970)
• For Lizzie and Harriet (1973)
• History (1973)
• The Dolphin (1973)
• Selected Poems (1976) (Revised Edition, 1977)
• Day by Day (1977)
• The Oresteia of Aeschylus (1978)[1]
• Collected Poems (2003)

[edit] Trivia

• The lyrics of the They Might Be Giants song "Robert Lowell" are taken entirely from the poem "Memories of West Street and Lepke" by Robert Lowell (although they have been "recontextualized" by They Might Be Giants for rock music purposes). The song was featured on a CD accompanying issue #6 of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern featuring letters from a young Robert Lowell.

• John Vanderslice, too, used the Lowell poem 'My Old Flame' in his song by the same name from the album 'Time Travel is Lonely'. Vanderslice also made some minor changes in the lyrics for his version.

• Robert Lowell is a central figure in Norman Mailer's 1968 nonfiction novel Armies of the Night.

• One of the tracks of Poetry Meets Music has a mash-up of Lowell reading For The Union Dead over music by Philip Glass.

[edit] External links

• Articles on Lowell at Modern American Poetry
• 1982 Audio Interview with Ian Hamilton, author of the biography, Robert Lowell - RealAudio
• Lowell's interview with The Paris Review
• Robert Lowell bio and poetry. Part of a series of poets.
• Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell
• Literary Criticism on Robert Lowell

Lowell: Spanish Translation.Raúl Racedo. Argentina [[2]]