Robert Lowell
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet. He was born into a Boston Brahmin family that could trace its origins back to the Mayflower. His ancestors and contemporary family were important subjects in his poetry. Growing up in Boston also informed his poems, which were frequently set in Boston and the New England region. Literary scholar Paula Hayes analyses that Lowell mythologized New England, particularly in his early work.
Lowell stated, "The poets who most directly influenced me... were Allen Tate, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams. An unlikely combination!... but you can see that Bishop is a sort of bridge between Tate's formalism and Williams's informal art." Lowell wrote in both formal, metered verse as well as free verse; his verse in some poems from Life Studies and Notebook fell somewhere in between metered and free verse.
After the publication of his 1959 book Life Studies, which won the 1960 National Book Award and "featured a new emphasis on intense, uninhibited discussion of personal, family, and psychological struggles", he was considered an important part of the confessional poetry movement. However, much of Lowell's work, which often combined the public with the personal, did not conform to a typical "confessional poetry" model. Instead, Lowell worked in a number of distinctive stylistic modes and forms over the course of his career.
He was appointed the sixth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, where he served from 1947 until 1948. In addition to winning the National Book Award, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947 and 1974, the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1947. He is "widely considered one of the most important American poets of the postwar era." His biographer Paul Mariani called him "the poet-historian of our time" and "the last of influential public poets."
Life
Family history
Lowell was born to United States Navy Cmdr. Robert Traill Spence Lowell III and Charlotte Winslow in Boston, Massachusetts. The Lowells were a Boston Brahmin family that included poets Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell; clergymen Charles Russell Lowell Sr. and Robert Traill Spence Lowell; Civil War general and war hero Charles Russell Lowell III ; and the Federal Judge John Lowell.His mother was a descendant of William Samuel Johnson, a signer of the United States Constitution; Jonathan Edwards, the Calvinist theologian ; Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan preacher and healer; Robert Livingston ; Thomas Dudley, the second governor of Massachusetts; and Mayflower passengers James Chilton and his daughter Mary Chilton. Lowell's parents share a common descent from Philip Livingston, the son of Robert Livingston, and were sixth cousins.
As well as a family history steeped in Protestantism, Lowell had notable Jewish ancestors on both sides of his family, which he discusses in Part II of Life Studies. On his father's side, Lowell was the great-great-grandson of Maj. Mordecai Myers, a soldier in the War of 1812 and later mayor of Kinderhook and Schenectady; and on his mother's side, he was descended from the German-Jewish Mordecai family of Raleigh, North Carolina, who were prominent in state affairs.
Early years
As a youth, Lowell had a penchant for violence and bullying other children.Describing himself as an 8½-year-old in the prose piece "91 Revere Street", Lowell wrote that he was "thick-witted, narcissistic, thuggish". As a teenager, Lowell's peers gave him the nickname "Cal" after both the villainous Shakespeare character Caliban and the tyrannical Roman emperor Caligula, and the nickname stuck with him throughout his life. Lowell later referenced the nickname in his poem "Caligula", first published in his book For the Union Dead and later republished in a revised sonnet version for his book, Notebook 1967–1968.
Image:St. Mark's from Street.jpg|thumb|250px|right|St. Mark's School, Southborough, MassachusettsLowell received his high school education at St. Mark's School, a prominent prep school in Southborough, Massachusetts. There he met and was influenced by the poet Richard Eberhart, who taught at the school, and as a high school student, Lowell decided that he wanted to become a poet. At St. Mark's, he became lifelong friends with Frank Parker, an artist who later created the prints that Lowell used on the covers of most of his books.
Lowell attended Harvard College for two years. While he was a freshman at Harvard, he visited Robert Frost in Cambridge and asked for feedback on a long poem he had written on the Crusades; Frost suggested that Lowell needed to work on his compression. In an interview, Lowell recalled, "I had a huge blank verse epic on the First Crusade and took it to him all in my undecipherable pencil-writing, and he read a little of it, and said, 'It goes on rather a bit, doesn't it?' And then he read me the opening of Keats's 'Hyperion', the first version, and I thought all of that was sublime."
After two years at Harvard, Lowell was unhappy, and his psychiatrist, Merrill Moore, who was also a poet, suggested that Lowell take a leave of absence from Harvard to get away from his parents and study with Moore's friend, the poet-professor Allen Tate who was then living in Nashville and teaching at Vanderbilt University.
Lowell traveled to Nashville with Moore, who took Lowell to Tate's house. Lowell asked Tate if he could live with him and his wife, and Tate joked that if Lowell wanted to, Lowell could pitch a tent on Tate's lawn; Lowell then went to Sears to purchase a tent that he set up on Tate's lawn and lived in for two months. Lowell called the act "a terrible piece of youthful callousness".
After spending time with the Tates in Nashville, Lowell decided to leave Harvard. When Tate and John Crowe Ransom left Vanderbilt for Kenyon College in Ohio, Lowell followed them and resumed his studies there, majoring in Classics, in which he earned an A.B., summa cum laude in 1940. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa his junior year and was valedictorian of his class. He settled into the so-called "writer's house" with fellow students Peter Taylor, Robie Macauley and Randall Jarrell.
Partly in rebellion against his parents, Lowell converted from Episcopalianism to Catholicism, and was for a time an editor at the Catholic publishing house Sheed and Ward. He corresponded with literary critic, poet, and Catholic nun M. Bernetta Quinn. Lowell graduating from Kenyon, he worked on a master's degree in English literature at Louisiana State University and taught introductory courses in English for one year before the U.S. entered World War II.
Political engagement
Lowell was a conscientious objector during World War II and served several months at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. He explained his decision not to serve in World War II in a letter addressed to President Franklin Roosevelt on September 7, 1943, stating, "Dear Mr President: I very much regret that I must refuse the opportunity you offer me in your communication of August 6, 1943 for service in the Armed Force." He explained that after the bombing at Pearl Harbor, he was prepared to fight in the war until he read about the American terms of unconditional surrender that he feared would lead to the "permanent destruction of Germany and Japan." Before Lowell was transferred to the prison in Connecticut, he was held in a prison in New York City that he later wrote about in the poem "Memories of West Street and Lepke" in his book Life Studies, inspired by a prison encounter with notorious gangster Lepke Buchalter.While at Yaddo in 1949 Lowell became and accused then director, Elizabeth Ames, of harboring communists and being romantically involved with another resident, Agnes Smedley. If Ames were not fired immediately, Lowell vowed to "blacken the name of Yaddo as widely as possible" using his connections in the literary sphere and Washington. The Yaddo board voted to drop all charges against Ames.
Lowell's letter to the president was his first major political act of protest, but it would not be his last. During the mid to late 1960s, Lowell actively opposed the Vietnam War.
In response to American air raids in Vietnam in 1965, Lowell rejected an invitation to the White House Festival of the Arts from President Lyndon Johnson in a letter that he subsequently published in The New York Times, stating, "We are in danger of imperceptibly becoming an explosive and suddenly chauvinistic nation, and may even be drifting on our way to the last nuclear ruin." Ian Hamilton notes that "throughout , was in demand as a speaker and petition signer . He was vehemently opposed to the war, but equivocal about being identified too closely with the 'peace movement': there were many views he did not share with the more fiery of the 'peaceniks' and it was not in his nature to join movements that he had no wish to lead." However, Lowell did participate in the October 1967 March on the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. against the war and was one of the featured speakers at the event. Norman Mailer, who was also a featured speaker at the rally, introduced Lowell to the crowd of protesters. Mailer described the peace march and his impression of Lowell that day in the early sections of his non-fiction novel The Armies of the Night.
Lowell was also a signer of the anti-war manifesto "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority" circulated by members of the radical intellectual collective RESIST.
In 1968, Lowell publicly supported the Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy in his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president in a three-way primary against Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. Lowell spoke at numerous fundraisers for McCarthy in New York that year, but " heart went out of the race" after Robert Kennedy's assassination.