Robert Lowell
From Philosopedia
Lowell, Robert (1 March 1917 - 12 September 1977)
Lowell, the great-grand nephew of James Russell Lowell, was born in Boston. Often paired with Allen Ginsberg as the two greatest American poets of the second half of the twentieth century, he wrote works that were confesional and that probed the inner self. Saying to friends that at an early age he had always wanted to be a poet, he attended Harvard for two years and eventually graduated from Kenyon in 1940.
When he married his first wife, the novelist Jean Stafford, Lowell became a fanatical convert to Roman Catholicism, but his Land of Unlikeness betrays the conflict of Catholicism and his Boston ancestry. In the Second World War, he was jailed for six months as a conscientious objector. His second wife was Elizabeth Hardwick. Lowell reached the height of his public fame during his opposition to the Vietnam war and support of Senator Eugene McCarthy. He then married the writer Caroline Blackwood in 1973, and his later work indicates a philosophic acceptance of life and the world.
In 1946 he received a Pulitzer Prize for Lord Weary’s Castle, and he received another Pulitzer in 1973 for The Dolphin. Humanists have highly praised his translation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound (1969), one of the lines of which is
- “[Prometheus to the chorus]: I have little faith now, but I still look for truth, some momentary crumbling foothold.
Lowell suffered from manic depression in the 1950s, living much of the time in Europe. His career rebounded with Life Studies (1959), containing what one critic dubbed as "confessional" poetry.
Lowell's second marriage broke up and he married Caroline Blackwood in 1972. The Dolphin won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974.
Critics have found that Lowell's work is often autobiographical, is richly symbolic, and has been influenced by “new critic” John Crowe Ransom. “The kind of poet I am was largely determined by the fact that I grew up in the heyday of the New Criticism,” Lowell wrote in the Kenyon Collegian (1974). “From the beginning I was preoccupied with technique, fascinated by the past, tempted by other languages.”
