Distinguished in family and literary career, Robert Traill Spence Lowell, Jr., flourished as a teacher, poet, translator, and playwright. His flight from an aristocratic background, numerous emotional breakdowns, and three failed marriages contrasts the bond he shared with the stars of modern American poetry — Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, William Carlos Williams, and Anne Sexton, all supportive friends who called him "Cal." He was alienated from white-gloved elitists and their over-refined notions of family, home, and church, and he reshaped himself through poetry that delved into New England's sins and reevaluated American ideals. His contentment took root in the classroom amid student writers who looked up to him as mentor. To the literary world, he was the American prophet of a new poetic freedom, a structurally uninhibited lyricism that was true to self, speech, and history.
Lowell was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 1, 1917, and was kin to poet Amy Lowell. After elementary studies at the Brimmer Street School, he studied at St. Mark's School to prepare for entrance into Harvard. In his second year of college, he eluded his father's control by transferring to Kenyon College and boarding with Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon. He studied literary criticism under poet John Crowe Ransom and graduated summa cum laude in 1940.
