Robert Lowell - Poet
"If we
see light at the end of the tunnel,
It's
the light of the oncoming train."
Robert Lowell (born March 1, 1917 Boston - died September 12, 1977 New
York), born Robert Traill Spence Lowell, Jr., was an American poet
known for inspiring and teaching several literary superstars of the
1950s and 1960s, including Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Widely
considered the pre-eminent poet of the mid-20th cent. In 1940 he
converted to Roman Catholicism and married the writer Jean Stafford.
During World War II he served a jail sentence as a conscientious
objector. He taught at Boston Univ. and at Harvard. His second wife
(1949-72) was the novelist and critic Elizabeth Hardwick. A descendant
of a distinguished family that included James Russell Lowell and Amy
Lowell, he was part of the Brahmin Lowell family, a grandnephew of
James Russell Lowell. Lowell's childhood nickname was Caligula because
he had an unruly temper. He was later known as Cal. (Nicknamed Cal,
partly after the the Roman emperor Caligula, known for his cruelty, and
Caliban, familiar from Shakespeare's play The Tempest.) His personal life was
full of marital and psychological turmoil. He suffered from severe
episodes of manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Dying of a heart attack in the
back of a taxi in 1977, Lowell is buried in Stark Cemetery, Dunbarton
Center, New Hampshire, USA.
He was educated at St Mark's School,
Southborough, Massachusetts, then an unhappy year at Harvard
University, and Kenyon College, Ohio, from where he graduated in 1940.
In the same year he converted to Catholicism, which he later abandoned,
partly in rebellion against what he viewed as the Puritan capitalist
ethic of his parents' world. Lowell spent much of his life as a poet
reacting to cultural and historical influences that threatened to
define him and to define American literature as well. As the descendant
of Mayflower New Englanders, he struggled toward an individualistic
vision and voice that greatly influenced his contemporaries in the
1950s and 1960s.
Beginning at Harvard as a student of
English literature, he moved to Kenyon College and later to Louisiana
State University to study with various New Critics, thus placing
himself in the midst of intellectual debates about literature. Lowell
also found himself in conflict with tradition when he protested both
World War II and the Vietnam War and as he wrestled with the place of
religion in poetry, with the morality of capitalism, and with the
vicissitudes of three marriages. Although the more formal verse of Lord Weary's Castle (1946) won the
Pulitzer Prize, he is best known for the confessional tone of Life Studies (1959).
In 1940 he married Jean Wilson
Stafford (1915-79), a writer from the American west. Jean Stafford came
from a background of poverty and family problems and Lowell's family
opposed his marriage to her. In 1948, they were divorced, but not
before he had broken her nose in a fight, tried to strangle her and
crashed a car they were in - fracturing her skull. She spent the last
years of the marriage in a psycho-alcoholic clinic.
When the Second World War began in
1941, Lowell had volunteered for military service. His poor eyesight
led to his initial rejection from armed service. In 1943, however,
Lowell received a conscription notice from the United States military.
Shocked and dismayed by the Allied firebombing of civilians in German
cities like Dresden, he declared himself at this time a conscientious
objector. He served for several months in jail (his experiences form
the basis of "Memories of West Street and Lepke"), and finished 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
book found a warm critical reception, sparked in part by Jarrell's
appreciative review in The Nation, and it was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize for Poetry in 1947. Lowell's reputation as a leading poet of the
new generation was consolidated.
In 1948, Lowell and
Stafford divorced and in 1949 Lowell married Elizabeth Hardwick, a
young writer from Kentucky who was already moving with ease 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. The book was roundly criticized as inferior to Lord Weary's Castle, and even
Lowell recognized the stiffness of the new book's dramatic monologues.
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 McLean's, a mental hospital in
Massachusetts. During the years of suffering and sickness and despair
of the middle 1950s, years also characterized by a political atmosphere
Lowell depressing (the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower, a key moment
for this political culture, is the subject of "Inauguration Day:
January, 1953"). One source of poetic rejuvenation, though, was William
Carlos Williams, whose work Lowell reviewed positively and whose
example of looser poetic forms influenced Lowell to write himself out
of the strictness of structure that characterizes the poems of Lord
Weary's Castle. At the same time, Lowell was urged by his psychiatrists
to write about his childhood; these writings led finally to "91 Revere
Street," the prose memoir at the heart of Lowell's 1959 book, Life Studies, as well as to the
autobiographical poems of that book's "Life Studies" section. Beginning
with "Skunk Hour," a poem Lowell wrote in 1957 in answer to Elizabeth
Bishop's "The Armadillo," Lowell brought something of Williams'
prosodic relaxation (a very controlled relaxation, though, nothing like
the formlessness of some subsequent free verse) to consideration of
himself, his psyche, and his surroundings. The publication of Life Studies in 1959 renewed
Lowell's reputation; the book received 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. Along with W.D. Snodgrass' Heart's Needle, published
just before Life Studies, Lowell's new book inaugurated the poetry that
came to be called, in M.L. Rosenthal's coinage, "Confessional."
Lowell’s poetry is
individualistic and intense, rich in symbolism and marked by great
technical skill. His later work indicates a philosophic acceptance of
life and the world. Life Studies
is a frank and highly autobiographical volume in verse and prose, one
of the first and most influential works of what is widely called
“confessional” poetry. Lowell often used his life as raw material for
his verse, writing, for instance, of his family, his relationships with
his wives, and his frequent bouts of depression and madness. Life Studies contains an
autobiographical essay and 15 complex, confessional poems largely based
on his family history and personal life, which included time in mental
institutions. His activities in liberal causes in the 1960s influenced
his next three volumes, including For
the Union Dead (1964).
Robert Lowell achieved the status of
major poet during his lifetime. In Land
of Unlikeness (1944), his poetry is marked by themes of
rebellion, corruption and chaos. Lord
Weary's Castle (1946) won a Pulitzer prize. Both books were
influenced by the metaphysical poets of the l7th. From 1947-8 he was
poetry consultant to the Library of Congress.
With Life Studies (1959) Lowell's work
took a different direction, exhibiting the loose form and sharp irony
which characterised his later work and dealing with the theme of mental
illness. His new style was influential on the work of Sylvia Plath
amongst others.
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," commissioned for and first read at the Boston Arts
Festival in 1960, became the title poem of Lowell's next collection of
his own poems (For the Union Dead,
1964). The early sixties, though, found Lowell also publishing his
collection of Imitations,
loose translations of poems by Rilke, Rimbaud, and others (the book won
the Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize in 1962), and working on the
plays that would, in 1965, be published and performed as The Old Glory, a trilogy based on
works by Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The historical interest
evident in Lowell's poetry and plays alike during the middle 1960s
translated into a political activism of sorts. Invited to a White House
Arts Festival in 1965, Lowell publicly refused Lyndon Johnson's
invitation as a statement of his disagreement with American escalation
of the war in Vietnam. In October, 1967, Lowell went further still,
participating along with thousands of others in the March on the
Pentagon (this March is the subject of "The March I" and "The March
II"). In 1967, Lowell published Near
the Ocean, a collection of lyrics more formal than the work he
had produced since Life Studies, and he saw his translation of
Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound
produced at Yale (the play was published two years later). But the work
in which Lowell 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. The
book clearly aspires to something like Ezra Pound's "poem including
history," and has moments of stunning success, though some of the poems
seem overly constrained by the form Lowell has chosen and by the
pressure to keep producing poems quickly. 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 the couple's son. He was,
however, on his way to see Hardwick in New York when he died of a heart
attack on 12 September 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.
Bibliography
Land of Unlikeness
(1944)
Lord Weary's Castle (1946 - Pulitzer Prize)
Poems, 1938-1949 (1950)
The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951)
Life Studies (1959 - National Book Award)
Imitations (1961) (Translations)
Phaedra (1961) (Translations of Jean
Racine)
For the Union Dead (1964)
Selected Poems (1965)
The Old Glory (1965) (Drama - a trilogy of
plays)
Near the Ocean (1967)
The Voyage and Other Versions of Poems by
Baudelaire (1968)
Notebook, 1967-1968 (1969)
Prometheus Bound (1969) By Aeschylus
(Translation)
History (1973)
For Lizzy and Harriet (1973)
The Dolphin (1973 - Pulitzer Prize)
Selected Poems (1976)
Day by Day (1977)
The Oresteia (1978 - Translation:
Agamemnon, Orestes, The Furies, by Aeschylus)
Collected Prose (1987, ed. by R. Giroux)
Collected Poems (2003, ed. by F. Bidart
and D. Gewanter)
Secondary Sources:
Biographies by I.
Hamilton (1982), P. Mariani (1994), R. Tillinghast (1995), and S. P.
Stuart (1998)
Axelrod, Steven G., Robert Lowell:
Life and Art (1978)
Axelrod, Steven G. and Deese, Helen,
eds., Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry (1987)
Bell, Vereen M., Robert Lowell:
Nihilist as Hero (1982)
Cooper, Philip. The autobiographical
myth of Robert Lowell. Chapel Hill, U of North Carolina P 1970.
Crick, John. Robert Lowell.
Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1974.
Fein, Richard J., Robert Lowell (1970)
Hart, Henry. Robert Lowell and the
sublime. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1995.
Hemenway, Robert. ed. Becoming a
poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. NY:
Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989.
Heymann, C. David. American
aristocracy: the lives and times of James Russell Amy, and Robert. NY:
Dodd, Mead, 1980.
Kalstone, David, Becoming a Poet:
Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (1990)
London, Michael, and Robert Boyers.
eds. Robert Lowell: a portrait of the artist in his time. NY: D. Lewis
1970.
Mariani, Paul L. Lost puritan: a life
of Robert Lowell. NY: W.W. Norton, 1996, 1994.
Martin, Jay. Robert Lowell.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P 1970.
Mazzaro, Jerome, The Poetic Themes of
Robert Lowell (1965)
Meiners, Roger, Everything to Be
Endured: An Essay on Robert Lowell and Modern Poetry (1970)
Meyers, Jeffrey, ed., Robert Lowell:
Interviews and Memoirs (1988)
Parkinson, Thomas, ed., Robert
Lowell: A Collection of Critical Essays (1968)
Perloff, Marjorie. The poetic art of
Robert Lowell. Ithaca, Cornell UP 1973.
Price, Jonathan. ed. Critics on
Robert Lowell. Coral Gables, Fla: U of Miami P 1972.
Procopiow, Norma. Robert Lowell, the
poet and his critics. Chicago: American Library Association, 1984.
Raffel, Burton. Robert Lowell. NY:
Ungar, 1981.
Rudman, Mark. Robert Lowell, an
introduction to the poetry. NY: Columbia UP, 1983.
Smith, Vivian B. The poetry of Robert
Lowell. Sydney: Sydney UP, 1974.
Staples, Hugh B., Robert Lowell: The
First Twenty Years (1962)
Tillinghast, Richard. Robert Lowell's
life and work: damaged grandeur. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.
Von Hallberg, Robert. American poetry
and culture, 1945-1980. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985.
Williamson, Alan, Pity the Monsters
(1974)
Yenser, Stephen, Circle to Circle:
The Poetry of Robert Lowerll (1975)
(Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lowell)
(Source:
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=10)
(Source:
http://www.bartleby.com/65/lo/LowellR.html)
(Source:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/books/author/lowell/index.shtml)
(Source:
http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/lowell_robert.html)
(Source: http://www.britannica.com)
(Source:
http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/lowell_robert.html)
(Source:
http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/litlinks/poetry/rlowell.htm)
(Source: Michael Thurston,
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lowell/bio.htm)
(source:
http://www.lit.kobe-u.ac.jp/~hishika/lowell.htm)
Bipolar Disorder - Robert
Lowell
by Marie Griffin
and Marcia Purse
Poet Robert Lowell described mania as
a funny creeping feeling coming from the spine up. Lowell was diagnosed
with manic depression (now bipolar disorder) after his father died.
Prior to his diagnosis, fellow faculty members found Lowell's excitable
talk flattering and brilliant and found no reason to think of him as
being ill.
Robert Lowell was born
in Boston, Massachusetts, on 1 March 1917. He was educated at private
schools in Boston and, for two years, at St. Mark's preparatory school.
Even during his youth, Lowell was determined to pursue the craft of
poetry seriously. He spent summers reading and studying the English
literary tradition. After graduating from St. Mark's, he attended
Harvard and later dropped out to study with Allen Tate, a poet of the
Fugitive group. On a psychiatrist's advice, Lowell transferred to
Kenyon College in Ohio to study with John Crowe Ransom, Tate's mentor.
At Kenyon, Lowell met Randall Jarrell and Peter Taylor, both of whom
went on to successful careers as poets.
Lowell graduated summa cum laude in
Classics from Kenyon and spent the next year studying with Cleanth
Brooks and Robert Penn Warren at Louisiana State University. In 1940 he
converted to Roman Catholicism and married writer Jean Stafford.
At the beginning of the World War II,
Lowell volunteered for military service, but before he was called up,
he was so shocked by the Allied firebombing of civilians in German
cities that he declared himself a conscientious objector. He spent
several months in jail, followed by community service.
His second book, Lord Weary's Castle,
was published in 1946. This book won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
In 1948, Lowell and Stafford
divorced, and in 1949 he married Elizabeth Hardwick, a young writer
from Kentucky. In 1950, Lowell's father died after a long illness. He
and Hardwick spent the next few years living largely in Europe. These
years saw Lowell suffering from manic and depressive episodes. He
described mania as being an illness for one's friends, whereas
depression was an illness for oneself. In 1954, after the death of his
mother, he spent time in a Massachusetts mental hospital. There his
psychiatrists encouraged him to write about his childhood.
From this work came the book Life Studies, published in 1959 and
an award winner in 1960, which helped inaugurate the "Confessional"
school of poetry.
From 1955-60 Lowell was a teacher and
visiting lecturer; another bipolar poet, Sylvia Plath, was his student
in 1959. During the early 1960s, he became energetically involved in
political efforts. In 1965, Lowell publicly refused Lyndon Johnson's
invitation to a White House Arts Festival as a statement of his
disagreement with the war in Vietnam.
In 1972 he divorced
his second wife to marry writer Caroline Blackwood. His work continued
to win awards and high praise. It is said that he was returning to his
second wife and their daughter when, in a New York taxi, he died of a
heart attack on September 12, 1977.
(Source:
http://bipolar.about.com/library/celebs/bl-robertlowell.htm)
Robert
Lowell, an American poet noted for his complex, oratorical
poetry, and turbulent life. Lowell was called the father of the confessional poets, a term used to
describe among others Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman.
Lowell's work grew from his own unhappiness and the social, political,
and ideological movements in the U.S. during the Post World War II
decades. He was a heavy drinker,
and was married three times. From 1949 the manic-depressive Lowell spent
periods in mental hospitals.
I cowered in
terror.
I wasn't a child
at all -
unseen and
all-seeing, I was Agrippina
in the Golden
House of Nero...
Near me was the
white measuring-door
My Grandfather had
penciled with my Uncle's heights.
In 1911, he had
stopped growing at just six feet.
(from 'My Last
Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow', 1959)
Robert Lowell was born in Boston as
the son of Robert Traill Spence Lowell, a naval officer, and Charlotte
(Winslow) Lowell, the dominating figure in the family. Other members of
the distinguished, intellectual family included the poet and critic
James Russell Lowell and the poet Amy Lowell.
Lowell began writing at
St. Mark's School, where his teacher was the poet Richard Eberhart. He
studied English literature at Harvard. When his parents rejected the
woman he proposed to marry, he broke from his family. On the advice of
a psychiatrist, he transferred to Kenyon College (Ohio). There he
studied poetry and criticism, graduating in 1940. His teachers included
John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974), who was a member of the Agrarian
Movement. In 1940 Lowell converted Roman Catholicism and married
against his parents' will the writer Jean Stafford - they divorced
eight years later. In 1949 Lowell married the novelist and critic
Elisabeth Hardwick. However, two years earlier Lowell had met the poet
Elizabet Bishop, who influenced deeply his work. Lowell fantasized
marrying her and dedicated to Bishop his poem 'Skunk Hour' in LIFE
STUDIES (1959): "Thirsting for / the hierarchic privacy / of Queen
Victoria's century, / she buys up all / the eyesores facing her shore,
/ and lets them fall."
At Kenyon College Lowell met his
lifelong friends Peter Taylor and Randall Jarrell. After graduating,
Lowell moved on a fellowship to Louisiana State University, where he
worked with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. Although Lowell
tried to enlist in the armed forces during WW II, he declared himself a
conscientious objector by the time he was called for service. In 1943
he served five months of a prison sentence. It is possible that the
experiences of imprisonment played some role when his mental health
later collapsed. In 1944 appeared Lowell's first collection of poetry,
the autobiographical LAND OF UNLIKENESS. In it Lowell used Christian
symbolism and juxtaposed the world of grace to the urban life. His
second book, LORD WEARY'S CASTLE (1946), which was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize, marked a return to the New England milieu. It included the
famous 'The Quaker Graveyeard in Nantucket.' "This is the end of
running on the waves; / We are poured out like water. Who will dance /
The mast-lashed master of Leviathans / Up from this field of Quakers in
their graves?" Some poems had religious themes, such as 'The Holy
Innocents' and 'Christmas in Black Rock'.
These two early books 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. The work contained a narrative poem of some 600
lines and five other poems. 'The Quaker Graveyeard in Nantucket'
referred to such sources as Henry David Thoreau's Cape Cod, Herman
Melville's Moby-Dick, and the Bible. Captain Ahab and his pursuit of
the great whale is a central image in the poem.
Lowell 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 few years abroad. He settled in 1954 in Boston, where he worked
as a teacher at the University of Boston (1955-60). During this decade
he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Cincinnati and Harvard
University. The 1950s saw also the emergence of the Beat Generation,
but in the tradition-conscious Boston, the influence of the movement
was not earth-shattering.
Lowell's interest in the history led
him to translate such writers as Racine, Sappho, Rilke, and Baudelaire.
He also produced versions of poems by such Russian writers as Anna
Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam. 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 late 1960s and early 1970s, Lowell wrote a number
of unrhymed sonnets, in which he explored his own literary career.
These works he published in NOTEBOOK 1967-68 (1969) and in revised form
in NOTEBOOK (1970).
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.
"Every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public celebration
without making public commitments," he once said. 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. In the
poem 'Harriet', Lowell kills a fly, whamming back and forth across the
nursery bed, "... and another instant's added / to the horrifying
mortmain of / ephemera: keys, drift, sea-urchin shells, / you packrat
off with joy... a dead fly swept / under the carpet, wrinkling to
fulfillment." 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. Lowell used in it excerpts from his wife letters, for
which he was much criticized. The title poem celebrated the poet's
feelings of love - the person behind the poems were Lowell's third
wife, the writer Caroline Blackwood, of England's Guinness family.
Lowell died of heart failure in a taxi on September 12, 1977, in New
York. At the time of his death, he was returning to Elizabeth and his
daughter, after breaking with Caroline. His last collection was DAY BY
DAY, in which he used free verse like he had done in his early works.
Lowell's record of his domestic history received posthumously in 1978
the National Book Critics Circle Award.
(Source:
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rlowell.htm)
Links
http://www.poemhunter.com/robert-lowell/poet-6707/
(incl. poems)
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=10
(incl. poems)
http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0600/lowell/
(incl. hear him read "For the Union Dead", + an essay)
http://www.salon.com/audio/2000/10/05/lowell/
(reads 2 poems himself, "Dunbarton" & "Skunk Hour")
http://www.learner.org/catalog/extras/vvspot/Lowell.html
(video of him reading "My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow".)
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lowell/lowell.htm
(critical studies)
"The Difficult Grandeur of Robert
Lowell" - http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/robertlowell.htm
"For the Union Dead" article &
poem - http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/soundings/lowell.htm
"A Life's Study: Why Robert Lowell is
America's most important career poet"
By A.O. Scott - http://slate.msn.com/id/2084651/
http://www.todayinliterature.com/biography/robert.lowell.asp
In 1948, Lowell and
Stafford divorced and in 1949 Lowell married Elizabeth Hardwick, a
young writer from Kentucky who was already moving with ease 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. The book was roundly criticized as inferior to Lord Weary's Castle, and even
Lowell recognized the stiffness of the new book's dramatic monologues.
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 McLean's, a mental hospital in
Massachusetts. During the years of suffering and sickness and despair
of the middle 1950s, years also characterized by a political atmosphere
Lowell depressing (the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower, a key moment
for this political culture, is the subject of "Inauguration Day:
January, 1953"). One source of poetic rejuvenation, though, was William
Carlos Williams, whose work Lowell reviewed positively and whose
example of looser poetic forms influenced Lowell to write himself out
of the strictness of structure that characterizes the poems of Lord
Weary's Castle. At the same time, Lowell was urged by his psychiatrists
to write about his childhood; these writings led finally to "91 Revere
Street," the prose memoir at the heart of Lowell's 1959 book, Life Studies, as well as to the
autobiographical poems of that book's "Life Studies" section. Beginning
with "Skunk Hour," a poem Lowell wrote in 1957 in answer to Elizabeth
Bishop's "The Armadillo," Lowell brought something of Williams'
prosodic relaxation (a very controlled relaxation, though, nothing like
the formlessness of some subsequent free verse) to consideration of
himself, his psyche, and his surroundings. The publication of Life Studies in 1959 renewed
Lowell's reputation; the book received 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. Along with W.D. Snodgrass' Heart's Needle, published
just before Life Studies, Lowell's new book inaugurated the poetry that
came to be called, in M.L. Rosenthal's coinage, "Confessional."
Lowell’s poetry is
individualistic and intense, rich in symbolism and marked by great
technical skill. His later work indicates a philosophic acceptance of
life and the world. Life Studies
is a frank and highly autobiographical volume in verse and prose, one
of the first and most influential works of what is widely called
“confessional” poetry. Lowell often used his life as raw material for
his verse, writing, for instance, of his family, his relationships with
his wives, and his frequent bouts of depression and madness. Life Studies contains an
autobiographical essay and 15 complex, confessional poems largely based
on his family history and personal life, which included time in mental
institutions. His activities in liberal causes in the 1960s influenced
his next three volumes, including For
the Union Dead (1964). 
Land of Unlikeness
(1944)
Biographies by I.
Hamilton (1982), P. Mariani (1994), R. Tillinghast (1995), and S. P.
Stuart (1998)
In 1972 he divorced
his second wife to marry writer Caroline Blackwood. His work continued
to win awards and high praise. It is said that he was returning to his
second wife and their daughter when, in a New York taxi, he died of a
heart attack on September 12, 1977.
Lowell began writing at
St. Mark's School, where his teacher was the poet Richard Eberhart. He
studied English literature at Harvard. When his parents rejected the
woman he proposed to marry, he broke from his family. On the advice of
a psychiatrist, he transferred to Kenyon College (Ohio). There he
studied poetry and criticism, graduating in 1940. His teachers included
John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974), who was a member of the Agrarian
Movement. In 1940 Lowell converted Roman Catholicism and married
against his parents' will the writer Jean Stafford - they divorced
eight years later. In 1949 Lowell married the novelist and critic
Elisabeth Hardwick. However, two years earlier Lowell had met the poet
Elizabet Bishop, who influenced deeply his work. Lowell fantasized
marrying her and dedicated to Bishop his poem 'Skunk Hour' in LIFE
STUDIES (1959): "Thirsting for / the hierarchic privacy / of Queen
Victoria's century, / she buys up all / the eyesores facing her shore,
/ and lets them fall."
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. In the
poem 'Harriet', Lowell kills a fly, whamming back and forth across the
nursery bed, "... and another instant's added / to the horrifying
mortmain of / ephemera: keys, drift, sea-urchin shells, / you packrat
off with joy... a dead fly swept / under the carpet, wrinkling to
fulfillment." 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. Lowell used in it excerpts from his wife letters, for
which he was much criticized. The title poem celebrated the poet's
feelings of love - the person behind the poems were Lowell's third
wife, the writer Caroline Blackwood, of England's Guinness family.
Lowell died of heart failure in a taxi on September 12, 1977, in New
York. At the time of his death, he was returning to Elizabeth and his
daughter, after breaking with Caroline. His last collection was DAY BY
DAY, in which he used free verse like he had done in his early works.
Lowell's record of his domestic history received posthumously in 1978
the National Book Critics Circle Award.