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Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets

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Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets More Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets Robert Lowell by Eleanor von Auw Berry Other literary forms Robert Lowell made free translations of poems by writers from Homer to Boris Pasternak, which constitute Imitations and the similar translations of Roman TABLE OF poems in Near the Ocean. In addition, he wrote Phaedra, a translation of Jean CONTENTS Other literary forms Racine’s play (published in 1961, premiered at Wesleyan University in 1965), Achievements and The Oresteia of Aeschylus, a translation of Aeschylus’s play (published Biography posthumously in 1979). The Old Glory, a group of plays (Endecott and the Analysis Red Cross, My Kinsman, Major Molineux, and Benito Cereno) based on stories Lord Weary’s Castle by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, was originally published in 1965; The Mills of the the latter two plays were premiered at the American Place Theater in 1964, Kavanaughs winning for Lowell an Obie Award. A revised edition, with an expanded version Life Studies of Endecott and the Red Cross, was issued in 1968, and Endecott and the For the Union Dead Red Cross had its first performance at the American Place Theater in the Near the Ocean same year. Prometheus Bound, Lowell’s only other dramatic work, was Notebook, 1967-1968 presented at Yale in 1967 and published in 1969. Lowell also published a History number of reviews and appreciations of writers; his Collected Prose was The Dolphin published in 1987. Day by Day Bibliography Robert Lowell (©Phil MacMullen, Newsweek/Courtesy, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Achievements Robert Lowell’s poetry gives uniquely full expression to the painful experience of living in modern America; he speaks personally of his own experience as son, husband, lover, father, and mentally troubled individual human being, and publicly of American policy and society as a morally and spiritually troubled inheritor of Western cultural and Christian spiritual values. All the diverse kinds of poetry that Lowell wrote over a career in which he repeatedly transformed his art—religious, confessional, public—share a high degree of formal interest, whether written in traditional metrical forms or in free verse. Indeed, it was Lowell’s ceaseless formal invention that enabled him to articulate, in so many different voices, the experience of modernity. The poet was honored for his work on several occasions in his lifetime. He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize—in 1947 for Lord Weary’s Castle and in 1974 for The Dolphin. He served as consultant in poetry (poet laureate) to the Library of Congress from 1947 to 1948. He won an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1947), the National Book Award in Poetry in 1960 for Life Studies, the Levinson Prize in 1963, the Copernicus Award in 1974, the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry in 1977 for Day by Day, and the Ambassador Book Award in 2004 for Collected Poems. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1954 and served as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1962 to 1977. Biography Robert Traill Spence Lowell, Jr., the only child of Commander Robert Traill Spence Lowell, a naval officer, and Charlotte Winslow Lowell, was joined by birth to a number of figures variously prominent in the early history of Massachusetts Bay and in the cultural life of Boston. On his mother’s side, he was descended from Edward Winslow, who came to America on the Mayflower in 1620. His Lowell ancestors included a Harvard president, A. Lawrence Lowell, and the astronomer, Percival Lowell, as well as the poets James Russell Lowell and Amy Lowell. His ancestors’ prominent roles in the early history of Massachusetts and its culture made him feel implicated in the shameful events of that history—such as the massacre of the native Indians— and the failings of the Puritan culture that became the ground out of which a money-centered American industrial society grew. His sense of his family’s direct involvement in the shaping of American history and culture was conducive to the conflation of the personal and the public that is one of the distinguishing features of his poetry. The poet had a childhood of outward gentility and inner turmoil. He attended Brimmer School in Boston and St. Mark’s Boarding School in Southborough, Massachusetts. His parents had limited means relative to their inherited social position, and his ineffectual father and domineering mother filled the home with their contention. Richard Eberhart, then at the beginning of his poetic career, was one of Lowell’s English teachers at St. Mark’s, and at Eberhart’s encouragement, Lowell began to write poetry, some of which was published in the school magazine. In 1935, Lowell entered Harvard, intent on preparing himself for a career as a poet. He was disheartened by the approach to poetry of his Harvard professors, however, and frustrated in his search for a mentor. He was at a nadir of confidence, thrashing about for direction and desperate for encouragement, when an invitation to visit Ford Madox Ford, whom he had met at a cocktail party at the Tennessee home of Allen Tate, brought him to Tate’s poetry and to Tate himself, who was to be a formative influence. Lowell was then torn between traditional metrical forms and free verse, and Tate brought him down, for the time being, on the side of the former. What Tate advocated was not bland mechanics but rather an intense struggle to apprehend and concentrate experience within the confines of form, depersonalizing and universalizing experience and revitalizing traditional forms. His intimacy with Tate led to Lowell’s immersion in the world and values of the traditionalist Southern Agrarian poets who constituted the Fugitive group. After spending the summer of 1937 at the Tates’ home, Lowell transferred from Harvard to Kenyon College to study with John Crowe Ransom, who had just been hired at Kenyon, which he would turn into a center of the New Criticism. At Kenyon, Lowell met Randall Jarrell, with whom he began a personal and literary friendship that ended only with Jarrell’s suicide in 1965. While apprenticing himself as a poet, Lowell studied classics, graduating summa cum laude in 1940. Also in that year, he married the young Catholic novelist Jean Stafford and converted to Roman Catholicism. He did a year’s graduate work in English at Louisiana State University, studying under Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, and then worked as an editorial assistant at Sheed and Ward, a Catholic publishing house in New York City. Then he and his wife spent a year with the Tates, a year in which Lowell and Allen Tate both did a great deal of writing under each other’s inspiration. For Lowell, the year’s output became the poems of his first book, Land of Unlikeness, about half of which were subsequently revised and included in Lord Weary’s Castle, the book that launched his poetic career, winning him the Pulitzer Prize. Also during this period, Lowell, having earlier tried to enlist, refused to serve in the U.S. Army in protest against Allied bombing of civilian populations and served time in prison for his failure to comply with the Selective Service Act. In 1948, Lowell’s marriage to Stafford ended in divorce, and the following year, he married the essayist and fiction-writer Elizabeth Hardwick. The late 1940’s saw the reemergence of Lowell’s respect for William Carlos Williams’s free verse. Lowell admired the unpoetical language of Williams’s “American idiom,” and developed a close friendship with the older poet, who succeeded Tate as his mentor. The impact of Williams’s work and ideas is reflected in the free-verse form of the poems in the last of the four sections of Life Studies. From 1950 to 1953, Lowell and his wife were in Europe. After returning to the United States in 1953, he taught at the University of Iowa, where one of his students was W. D. Snodgrass; the younger poet, along with the older Williams, helped Lowell develop the “confessional” mode pioneered in Life Studies and in Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle (1959). Lowell’s mother died in February, 1954, in Italy; in “Sailing Home from Rapallo” (from Life Studies), he tells of bringing back her coffin, on which “Lowell” had been misspelled “LOVELL,” for burial in the Winslow-Stark graveyard in Dunbarton, New Hampshire. From 1954 to the end of the decade, Lowell and his wife lived on Marlborough Street in Back Bay, Boston, while he taught at Boston University. His students included Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. His daughter Harriet was born in 1957. In 1960, Life Studies won the National Book Award in Poetry, and Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle took the Pulitzer Prize. In 1960, Lowell moved with his wife and daughter to New York City. Life Studies was followed in 1961 by Imitations, free translations of European poets intended to represent what the poets might have written had they been alive in contemporary America, arranged not chronologically but in an expressive sequence of Lowell’s own. From 1963 to 1977, he taught at Harvard. During the 1960’s, Lowell became active in the movement against American involvement in Vietnam. In June, 1965, in an open letter to President Lyndon Johnson, published in The New York Times, he refused an invitation to participate in the White House Festival of the Arts in protest against American foreign policy. He participated in the Pentagon March protesting American bombing and troop activities in Vietnam in October, 1967, and was active in Eugene McCarthy’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1967-1968, becoming a warm personal friend of McCarthy.
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