Lowell, James Russell (1819–91), descendant of a distinguished colonial family, was born at Cambridge, and graduated from Harvard as class poet (1838; LL.B., 1840; M.A., 1841). Finding law not to his liking, he was generally confused about his place in life and went through a morose period from which he was rescued by his future wife, Maria White Lowell. His early poetry, in A Year's Life (1841), shows a sharp difference from the Poems (1844) published the year of his marriage. Under the influence of his wife, an ardent Abolitionist and liberal, he temporarily submerged his native conservatism and was stimulated to forceful thinking and writing. His first journalistic venture was the short‐lived Pioneer (1843), but inspired by his wife he became a contributor to and editor of the National Anti‐Slavery Standard (1848–52) and contributed to the Pennsylvania Freeman.

The year 1848 marked his most important writing in his youth, for it included the publication of works that established him as a poet, critic, humorist, and political satirist: Poems … Second Series⧫, A Fable for Critics, the first series of The Biglow Papers, and The Vision of Sir Launfal. His prose and poetry continued in these varied categories, and his great facility permitted him to become a competent, if not brilliant, author in all these fields. With the exception of these four books, published in his twenty‐ninth year, most of his writing lacks vitality, is too hortatory, depends too much on verbal pranks, ingenious rhymes, and pleasant sounds, and represents the output of a man of taste who was a Bostonian and a Victorian.

His wife died in 1853, and it is significant that until the publication of Fireside Travels (1864), a volume of literary essays, he published no books. He entered the academic world in 1855, succeeding Longfellow as Smith Professor of French and Spanish at Harvard, in which capacity he continued his predecessor's task of directing Americans to the literature of Europe, past and present. After a European journey to perfect his linguistic knowledge, he occupied the post and was nominally professor until 1886, although his teaching career really ended in 1876. As a professor he published little poetry and turned to scholarly interests, emphasizing literary criticism and losing contact with the immediate world.

His criticism, contributed to periodicals and later assembled in book form, includes Among My Books (1870), My Study Windows (1871), a second series of Among My Books (1876), Latest Literary Essays and Addresses (1891), and The Old English Dramatists (1892). Lowell was the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly (1857–61), in this position being a leader among the mid‐19th‐century authors who are said to have brought a renaissance to New England.

In 1864 he temporarily joined C.E. Norton as editor of The North American Review, and here also exerted a powerful influence on public taste and opinion. His Political Essays (1888) were gathered from his prose articles in these magazines, and in addition he contributed to the Atlantic his second series of The Biglow Papers (1867), trenchantly criticizing England's part in the Civil War and stating the patriotic sentiments of Northerners. His feeling for the Union cause was also expressed in one of his most important poems, “Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration” (1865), in honor of the Harvard men who died in the war. The Cathedral (1869) is probably the best of his later poems.

As a staunch Republican, he was appointed a presidential elector in 1876; his firm stand for Hayes was rewarded by his appointment as minister to Spain (1877–80), and Garfield appointed him minister to England (1880–85). As a charming gentleman who had long since reverted to his natural conservatism, he was popularly received in European and English society and helped interpret American ideals to the Old World, both through personal contacts and through more formal addresses, such as On Democracy (1884). After the death of his second wife (1885) he gave up public life and returned to his Cambridge home, Elmwood. The works on which his reputation rests most securely were written before he was 30. Most of his books are periodical or lecture collections, and his writings, loosely connected, though brilliant in parts, have a diffused totality.

James Russell Lowell

The versatility of American poet, editor, and diplomat James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) made him an influential figure in 19th-century America.

James Russell Lowell was born in Cambridge, Mass., on Feb. 22, 1819, of a well-established New England family. Following family tradition, he attended Harvard, graduating in 1838 and taking a law degree there in 1840. Soon after the publication of his first volume of poems, A Year's Life (1841), he gave up law to devote himself to literature.

Encouraged by the success of his second volume, Poems (1844), Lowell married Maria White, a poet and abolitionist whose zeal for attacking social injustices Lowell soon absorbed. For a year he was an editorial writer for the abolitionist journal the Pennsylvania Freeman.

Lowell's reputation as a social critic was soundly established with the publication of the Biglow Papers (first series, 1848). Speaking in dialect through the homespun Yankee character Hosea Biglow, Lowell attacked the war with Mexico as an attempt to extend slave territory. He revived Biglow in 1862 in support of the Union cause against the Confederacy (second series, 1867). The year 1848 also saw the publication of The Vision of Sir Launfal, Poems: Second Series, and A Fable for Critics, humorous (and often barbed) verse which offered Lowell's estimation of a number of contemporary writers—himself included.

A trip abroad in 1851-1852 was followed by the death of Lowell's wife. He married Frances Dunlap in 1857. In 1855 Lowell began his career as a teacher by succeeding Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as professor of modern languages at Harvard, a position he held with distinction until 1876, when he retired. During this period he also served as editor of the newly founded Atlantic Monthly (1857-1861) and the North American Review (1864-1872), wrote books, and took an active interest in politics. In the final phase of his career Lowell served ably as ambassador to Spain (1877-1880) and England (1880-1885).

In addition to the Biglow Papers and A Fable for Critics, Lowell's best-known works include the Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration (1865), The Cathedral (1870), and the collections of essays Fireside Travels (1864), Among My Books (first series, 1870; second series, 1876), My Study Windows (1871), and Democracy and Other Addresses (1887). He died in Cambridge on Aug. 12, 1891.

Further Reading

Lowell's Complete Writings, edited by Charles Eliot Norton (16 vols., 1904), includes a valuable early biography by Horace E. Scudder. The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell, edited by Scudder (1897), is the best one-volume edition. Martin Duberman's biography James Russell Lowell (1966) is excellent, as is Leon Howard, Victorian Knight-Errant: A Study of the Early Literary Career of James Russell Lowell (1952). See also Edward Everett Hale, James Russell Lowell and His Friends (1899), and Richmond Croom Beatty, James Russell Lowell (1942).

Additional Sources

Hale, Edward Everett, James Russell Lowell and his friends, New York: Chelsea House, 1980.

Heymann, C. David (Clemens David), American aristocracy: the lives and times of James Russell, Amy, and Robert Lowell, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980.

Hudson, William Henry, Lowell & his poetry, Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1975; Philadelphia: R. West, 1977.

Scudder, Horace Elisha, James Russell Lowell; a biography, New York, AMS Press, 1974. □

Lowell, James Russell (1819–91), born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was American minister in Spain, 1877–80, and in England, 1880–5. He was editor of the Atlantic Monthly in 1857. His works include several volumes of verse, the satirical Biglow Papers (1848 and 1867, prose and verse), and memorial odes after the Civil War; and various volumes of essays.