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.
Lowell brought assorted baggage from his New England background to his personal and professional life. For his rigid piety, critics called him the “Catholic poet.” His marriage to fiction writer Jean Stafford foundered because of his infidelities, depression, and alcoholism. In 1941, the couple lived in Baton Rouge while he taught at Louisiana State University, then resettled in Boston. At the height of World War II, Lowell spent five months in jail for refusing to register for the draft. He gained parole in March 1944 and undertook janitorial duties at the nurses’ quarters of St. Vincent’s hospital. He recounts the experience through “In the Cage” in Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), an antiauthoritarian volume that won him the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
In 1951, Lowell suffered full-blown manic depression, which burdened him until his death. After marrying critic Elizabeth Hardwick, he settled on Marlborough Street near his childhood home, entered psychoanalysis, and enjoyed a period of stability. While teaching and lecturing at Iowa State University, Kenyon School of Letters, Boston University, and Harvard, he produced his best known free verse in Life Studies (1959). The collection, which won a National Book Award, tapped the energy and audacity of Beat poetry and recorded Lowell’s break with Catholicism, soul-bearing confessions, and revelations of dishonor and scandal among some of Boston’s most revered families.
Lowell’s buoyant years saw the issue of For the Union Dead (1964), which showcases one of the most anthologized titles, and the Obie-winning play The Old Glory (1965), a trilogy based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno. During this vigorous, assertive era of the Vietnam War, Lowell produced Near the Ocean (1967), two dramas; Prometheus Bound (1967); Endecott and the Red Cross (1968); and Notebook 1967–1968 (1968), a diary in unrhymed sonnet form that lauds colleagues Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Randall Jarrell, and T. S. Eliot. Following Lowell’s marriage to his third wife, British author Lady Caroline Blackwood, and the birth of a son, he found hope in lithium treatment. He began detailing the emotional crisis and renewal in a deeply allusive sonnet series entitled The Dolphin (1973), winner of a second Pulitzer Prize.
To his detriment, Lowell explored personal events in indiscreet verse, which he performed at public readings. A final collection, Day by Day (1977), a pensive series weakened by obscurity and repetition, won a National Book Critics Circle award. Imitations, containing modernizations of Homer, Sappho, Rilke, Villon, Mallarme, and Baudelaire, won the 1962 Bollingen Prize; Poetry (1963) received a Helen Haire Levinson Prize. Shortly after abandoning England and his wife to return to Elizabeth Hardwick, on September 12, 1977, Lowell died unexpectedly of congestive heart failure in a New York City taxi. He was eulogized at Boston’s Episcopal Church of the Advent and buried among his ancestors. Collected Poems was issued in 1997.
