Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell (Robert Traill Spence Lowell 4th), 1917-77, American poet and translator, widely considered the preeminent poet of the mid-20th cent., b. Boston, grad. Kenyon College (B.A., 1940). A grandnephew of James Russell Lowell , 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 .

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. His Life Studies (1959) 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. Among his other poetry collections are Lord Weary's Castle (1946; Pulitzer Prize), For the Union Dead (1964), Near the Ocean (1967), Notebook: Nineteen Sixty-Seven to Nineteen Sixty-Eight (1969), The Dolphin (1973; Pulitzer Prize), Day by Day (1977), and Last Poems (1977). His translations include Racine's Phèdre (1969), Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound (1969), and miscellaneous European verse, collected as Imitations (1961). His dramatic adaptation of Melville's story "Benito Cereno" is part of Lowell's trilogy of plays, The Old Glory (1968).

Bibliography: See his collected poems ed. by F. Bidart and D. Gewanter (2003) and collected prose ed. by R. Giroux (1987); Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs (1988), ed. by J. Meyers; The Letters of Robert Lowell (2005), ed. by S. Hamilton; biographies by I. Hamilton (1982), P. Mariani (1994), R. Tillinghast (1995), and S. P. Stuart (1998); studies by M. Perloff (1973), J. Crick (1974), J. Price, ed. (1974), S. Yenser (1975), S. G. Axelrod (1978), B. Raffel (1981), M. Rudman (1983), N. Procopiow (1984), J. Meyers (1985), S. G. Axelrod, ed. (1986 with H. Deese and 1999), H. Bloom, ed. (1987), K. Wallingford (1988), and W. Doreski (1999).

Lowell, Robert (1917–77) US poet. Lowell was perhaps the most important voice in American poetry to emerge after World War II. His early work, such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lord Weary's Castle (1946) is rich in Catholic symbolism. He is best known for his later, more intimate ‘confessional’ style, best represented by the autobiographical Life Studies (1959). Lowell and other ‘confessional’ poets, such as Sylvia Plath, reappraised the gap between the private and the public. He won a second Pulitzer Prize for The Dolphin (1973).

Lowell, Robert (Traill Spence) (1917–77), American poet, born in Boston, and educated at Kenyon College, where he became friendly with R. Jarrell and J. C. Ransom. In 1940 he married the novelist Jean Stafford, and became a fanatical convert to Roman Catholicism: his first volume of verse, Land of Unlikeness (1944), betrays the conflict of Catholicism and his Boston ancestry. His second volume, Lord Weary's Castle (1946), which contains ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’ and ‘Mr Edwards and the Spider’, was hailed in extravagant terms. In 1949, having divorced, he married the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. His other volumes of poems include The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951), which has as its title poem a meditation by a Catholic widow reflecting on the past in her ancestral home in Maine; Life Studies (1959); For the Union Dead (1964); Near the Ocean (1967); and Day by Day (1977).

He reached the height of his public fame during his opposition to the Vietnam War and support of Senator Eugene McCarthy, as his Notebook 1967–1968 (1968) records; but he had long been suffering bouts of manic illness and heavy drinking, and a visit to Britain in 1970 increased the disorder of his private life. His highly personal, confessional volume of poetry, The Dolphin (1973), caused scandal with its revelations of martial anguish and discord. He married the writer Caroline Blackwood in 1973, but later returned to America, where he died. A legendary figure in his lifetime, both poète maudit and aristocrat, both classic and romantic, he suffered from the claims made on his behalf as the greatest American poet of his time, a heroic myth-maker whose work was compared favourably with that of Yeats, an ironic intellectual whose ambiguous, complex imagery satisfied the demands of the New Criticism. The response to Ian Hamilton's frank biography (1982) bore witness to a sense of the need for reassessment.