Robert Lowell, a biography

Robert Traill Spence Lowell, Jr. was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 1, 1917. His father was an officer in the United States Navy and his mother descended from an old New England family. Educated in private schools, he had decided early on a career as a poet. He spent summers reading and studying the English literary tradition. Upon graduation from St. Mark’s, he attended Harvard, but left after two years to study with Allen Tate, a poet of the Fugitive group and a practitioner of the not-yet-institutionalized “New Criticism.” Lowell spent the summer of 1937 writing poetry and studying at the feet of the older poet. Instead of returning to Harvard that fall, Lowell transferred to Kenyon College, in Ohio, to study with John Crowe Ransom, Tate’s mentor. Lowell graduated summa cum laude in Classics from Kenyon in 1940 and soon married Jean Stafford, a writer of short stories and novels. 1940 also saw Lowell’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, to the chagrin of his New England Protestant family.

Lowell became a conscientious objector during World War II and served several months in jail (his experiences form the basis of “Memories of West Street and Lepke”). He completed his sentence performing community service in Connecticut. During these months, he finished and published his first book, Land of Unlikeness. During the next year he revised the book and published the new version as Lord Weary’s Castle in 1946. This work won critical acclaim and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947.

In 1948, Lowell and Stafford divorced and in 1949 Lowell married Elizabeth Hardwick, a young writer from Kentucky who was already established among the New York community of writers and intellectuals. In 1950, Lowell’s father died after a long illness. Lowell published his next book, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, in 1951; however the book was criticized as Lord Weary’s Castle. He and Hardwick spent the next several years living largely in Europe, especially in Italy. These years saw Lowell suffering from a number of mental breakdowns, episodes of the manic-depressive disease that plagued him throughout his life. After his mother’s death in 1954, Lowell was hospitalized at a mental hospital in Massachusetts.

During the years of suffering and despair of the middle 1950s, Lowell found poetic rejuvenation in the work of William Carlos Williams. Williams looser poetic forms influenced Lowell to write himself out of the strictness of structure that characterized the poems of Lord Weary’s Castle. Counseled by his psychiatrist to write about his childhood, he published Life Studies in 1959. This work, a consideration of himself, his psyche, and his surroundings renewed Lowell’s reputation, winning the National Book Award in 1960. Though some readers, like Allen Tate, intensely disliked the new poems and found them both formally slack and personally embarrassing, many readers saw in the book nothing less than a shift in the American poetic landscape.

During the early 1960s, Lowell was energetically involved not only in poetic but also in political efforts. He befriended Robert Kennedy and Jaqueline Kennedy, as well as Senator Eugene McCarthy. He addressed, in such poems as “For the Union Dead,” the dreadful possibility of humanity’s nuclear annihilation and the miserable culture that endured and endorsed that possibility. “For the Union Dead,” became the title poem of Lowell’s next collection of his own poems (For the Union Dead, 1964).

In 1967, Lowell published Near the Ocean, but the work in which he was most deeply immersed during that year was the verse journal published the next year as Notebook, 1967-68. In poems whose form is loosely based on the sonnet (each is fourteen lines, roughly iambic pentameter, though most are unrhymed), Lowell recorded his reactions to contemporary events in the world as well as his thoughts on American history and his family. Notebook is the basis for the three books Lowell published at the same time in 1973: History, which includes some of the public-issue poems of the earlier book as well as a number of new poems; For Lizzie and Harriet, which includes some of the poems about his wife and daughter from Notebook and many new poems documenting the break-up of his marriage with Hardwick; and The Dolphin, which includes a number of poems about his marriage with Caroline Blackwood (they married in 1972). The Dolphin won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974.

Lowell spent much of his last years in England with Caroline Blackwood and their son. He was on his way to see Hardwick in New York when he died of a heart attack on September 12, 1977. His last book, Day By Day, appeared in the year of his death. Robert Lowell served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1962 until his death 1977.