James Russell Lowell Biography Quotes 55 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
James Russell Lowell was born in 1819 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Elmwood, the family home that would anchor his life for more than seven decades. His father, the Rev. Charles Lowell, was a liberal Unitarian minister with a steady moral presence; his mother, Harriet Spence Lowell, of Scottish descent, nourished in him a taste for ballads and story. In the intellectual atmosphere of Cambridge, Lowell moved naturally into Harvard College, graduating in 1838, and then into Harvard Law School. Although he read law and was admitted to the bar, his vocation proved literary rather than legal, and by the early 1840s he had turned decisively to poetry and criticism.

First Publications and Reformist Voice
Lowell's debut volume, A Year's Life (1841), and the Poems of 1844 announced a writer attentive to meter, tradition, and New England conscience. Through his marriage in 1844 to Maria White, an ardent abolitionist, his private life and public voice joined the antislavery cause. He contributed prose and verse to reform journals, and his political satire emerged fully in The Biglow Papers (First Series, 1848), where the Yankee farmer Hosea Biglow and the Reverend Homer Wilbur mocked war fever and the expansionist aims behind the Mexican-American War. That same year he published The Fable for Critics, a sprightly and sometimes stinging verse panorama of American letters that spared neither contemporaries like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, nor the author himself. The Vision of Sir Launfal (1848) showed his gift for narrative romance and moral allegory.

Marriage, Loss, and European Study
Sustained by the partnership of Maria White, Lowell wrote frequently for the antislavery press and refined his craft. Personal tragedy shadowed these years: several of the couple's children died in infancy, and Maria herself succumbed to illness in 1853. Amid grief, Lowell traveled in Europe to study languages and literature, strengthening the philological base that would inform his later scholarship on Dante, Chaucer, and the Spanish tradition.

Harvard and the Making of a Man of Letters
In 1855 he succeeded his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as Smith Professor of Modern Languages and Belles-Lettres at Harvard. He lectured on medieval and Renaissance literature, translating his European study into lively classroom presence and essays. The scholarly books Among My Books and My Study Windows would eventually gather his critical essays on English, Italian, and Spanish authors, revealing a critic who allied historical learning with a distinctive New England wit.

The Editor and the Circle of New England
Lowell stood at the center of the Boston-Cambridge literary world that included Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., John Greenleaf Whittier, and Emerson. With Robert Carter he launched The Pioneer in 1843, a short-lived but ambitious magazine that published writers such as Poe and Hawthorne. More lastingly, he became the founding editor of The Atlantic Monthly in 1857, recruiting contributors that ranged from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Whittier and Holmes. After The Atlantic, he helped guide the North American Review, often working closely with Charles Eliot Norton. The correspondence and collegiality of this circle, and the engagement of younger figures like William Dean Howells and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, placed Lowell at the heart of American letters during a period of nation-shaping debate.

The Civil War and Public Poetry
The crisis of disunion reawakened the political edge of Lowell's verse. The Biglow Papers (Second Series, 1862) aimed its satire at secession and copperhead sentiment while expressing fierce loyalty to the Union. In 1865, at Harvard's commemoration of its Civil War dead, he delivered his Commemoration Ode, a solemn public poem that sought to dignify sacrifice and bind national grief to civic purpose. He also wrote tributes and memorials for figures of the era, aligning poetry with public feeling.

Essays, Criticism, and Intellectual Range
As an essayist Lowell combined cosmopolitan reading with local attachment. His studies of Dante and Chaucer displayed philological precision; his pages on Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare balanced learned apparatus with a conversational voice; and his essays on New England's Puritan legacy connected regional history to national character. He could be genial or severe, and his judgments were sharpened by a moral sensibility first trained in the reform causes of his youth. Though his early radicalism mellowed, he never lost interest in the ethical responsibilities of literature.

Diplomatic Service and Later Years
President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed Lowell U.S. minister to Spain in 1877, a post he filled with tact and curiosity, extending his longstanding interest in the Iberian world. In 1880 he was sent to Great Britain, where he served for five years in London. There he moved among leading writers and statesmen, conversing with Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, and he delivered widely admired addresses interpreting American democracy to British audiences. These speeches, later gathered in Democracy and Other Addresses, exhibited the cultivated republicanism that had become his hallmark. His second marriage, to Frances Dunlap in the late 1850s, brought stability to his household after the losses of earlier years; she died in 1885, a blow that deepened the elegiac tone of his final writings. His daughter Mabel, the one child to reach adulthood, remained a central presence.

Final Years and Legacy
Lowell returned to Elmwood in Cambridge in his last years, writing essays, introductions, and occasional verse, and receiving a stream of visitors who saw in him a living link to the formative generation of American literature. He died in 1891 and was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery. As a poet he is remembered for the Yankee idiom and moral satire of The Biglow Papers, for the ceremonial gravity of his odes, and for lyrical pieces that reveal a gentler music. As an editor and critic he helped professionalize American letters, giving structure and standards to magazines and reviews at a pivotal moment. As a diplomat he embodied the literary statesman, presenting the American experiment with humor, erudition, and candor. Together with Longfellow, Whittier, and Holmes, he stands among the so-called Fireside Poets, whose domestic popularity once dominated American reading, and whose work, at its best, still speaks to the conscience and culture of a nation he tried to understand and to improve.

Our collection contains 55 quotes who is written by James, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth.

Other people realated to James: Henry W. Longfellow (Poet), Robert Lowell (Poet), James Thomas Fields (Publisher), Abbott L. Lowell (American), Edwin Percy Whipple (Writer), Edmund C. Stedman (Poet)

• 1871 My Study Windows (Collection)
• 1870 Among My Books (Collection)
• 1867 The Biglow Papers (Second Series) (Poetry)
• 1865 Commemoration Ode (Harvard) (Poetry)
• 1848 The Biglow Papers (First Series) (Poetry)
• 1848 A Fable for Critics (Poetry)
• 1845 The Present Crisis (Poetry)