Robert Lowell Biography Quotes 5 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was born on March 1, 1917, in Boston, Massachusetts, into a prominent New England family whose name and expectations shaped his imagination and sense of duty. His father, Robert Traill Spence Lowell III, was a naval officer, and his mother, Charlotte Winslow Lowell, came from an old Boston line; the ancestral aura of the Lowells and Winslows, and a web of relations to earlier literary figures such as James Russell Lowell, fed a lifelong preoccupation with heritage and public responsibility. He attended St. Mark's School, where the poet Richard Eberhart encouraged his early talent. After a year at Harvard, Lowell left in search of rigorous literary mentorship and transferred to Kenyon College to study with the critic and poet John Crowe Ransom. At Kenyon he formed lasting ties, including a close friendship with fiction writer Peter Taylor, and fell under the intellectual influence of Ransom's circle and of Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon, whose counsel shaped his early aesthetics. He graduated summa cum laude in classics, then pursued further study at Louisiana State University with Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, absorbing the formal discipline of the New Criticism.

Emergence as a Poet
Lowell's first collection, Land of Unlikeness (1944), appeared in a limited printing, but Lord Weary's Castle (1946) announced a formidable new voice. The book's densely allusive, formally exacting poems, shaped by the moral intensity of his recent conversion to Roman Catholicism and the example of Ransom and Tate, won the Pulitzer Prize and established him as a leading American poet. The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951) continued his dramatic monologues and narratives. During these years he also served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a recognition of his rising national stature.

War, Conscience, and Imprisonment
World War II forced a reckoning. In 1943 Lowell declared himself a conscientious objector, citing both religious conviction and alarm at the bombing of civilian populations. He refused induction and spent time in federal custody, experiences later transmuted into the poem Memories of West Street and Lepke in Life Studies. This episode marked him as a poet of public conscience and sharpened his sense of moral choice, a theme that would persist through later work.

Personal Life and Literary Circle
Lowell married three times, to figures deeply involved in the literary world. His first marriage, to the novelist Jean Stafford, joined two intense temperaments and exposed the stresses of illness and ambition. After their divorce he married the critic and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick, a central figure in New York intellectual life and later a founder of the New York Review of Books. They had a daughter, Harriet, whose presence and well-being became a subject of several poems. Lowell maintained deep friendships with fellow poets Randall Jarrell and Elizabeth Bishop; Bishop's letters and counsel were crucial throughout his career, and he dedicated his poem Skunk Hour to her. He also drew younger writers into his orbit, counting among his students and mentees Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, George Starbuck, W. D. Snodgrass, and later Frank Bidart, to whom he offered steady encouragement amid artistic crisis.

Life Studies and the Confessional Turn
With Life Studies (1959) Lowell transformed American poetry. The book combined prose memoir, notably 91 Revere Street, with spare, incisive lyrics chronicling family history, mental illness, and civic unease. Its candid exploration of breakdown and recovery, its portraits of parents and Boston ancestors, and its refusal of heroic postures helped catalyze what came to be called confessional poetry. Life Studies won the National Book Award and validated a new kind of intimacy and risk in verse, even as Lowell's technical command remained evident in his modulations of line and voice.

Public Poems and Mid-Career Work
Lowell's career did not fix in one mode. He translated and imitated European poets in Imitations (1961), seeking fresh cadences through refraction. For the Union Dead (1964) fused private memory with public history, its title poem elegizing civic ideals around the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston Common while confronting the city's transformations. Near the Ocean (1967) sustained his preoccupation with national power and private conscience, even as the rhythms shifted toward a looser, more talkative line suited to his developing autobiographical method.

Teaching and Mentorship
Lowell taught at institutions that became hubs of postwar American poetry, including the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Boston University, and Harvard. In his Boston seminar of the late 1950s he worked closely with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, urging a precision of craft equal to the intensity of their material. His encouragement of W. D. Snodgrass, George Starbuck, and later Frank Bidart further extended his influence, and his classrooms became forums where formal resource and personal candor could be forged together.

Activism and Public Voice
Lowell carried his sense of responsibility into public life. In 1965 he declined President Lyndon B. Johnson's invitation to a White House arts event, publishing a letter that criticized the widening war in Vietnam. Two years later, he joined the March on the Pentagon; Norman Mailer chronicled his presence in The Armies of the Night, fixing Lowell in the public imagination as a poet who would risk visibility for conscience. These actions complicated his reputation, aligning his art with ethical debate beyond the page.

Notebooks, Marital Upheaval, and The Dolphin
The late 1960s and early 1970s brought both formal experiment and personal turmoil. Notebook 1967-68 and Notebook 1967-69 gathered hundreds of sonnets in a rangy, improvisatory sequence that he later revised into three separate volumes: History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin (all 1973). The Dolphin, addressing his breakup with Hardwick and his new marriage to the Anglo-Irish writer Caroline Blackwood, incorporated quotations from Hardwick's private letters, provoking a storm of ethical criticism. Elizabeth Bishop, his closest poetic friend, wrote to him dismayed by the use of intimate documents; the exchange remains a touchstone for debates about art and privacy. Despite the controversy, The Dolphin received the Pulitzer Prize, while the companion books broadened his canvas from intensely personal to sweepingly historical.

Illness and Final Years
Lowell lived for decades with manic-depressive illness, enduring recurrent hospitalizations that he later confronted in poems such as Waking in the Blue. The advent of new treatments, including lithium, moderated but did not end his cycles. He divided his time between the United States and the United Kingdom and Ireland while married to Caroline Blackwood; they had a son, Sheridan. The late collection Day by Day (1977) pared his voice even further, rendering exhaustion, regret, and sudden tenderness in a nearly conversational cadence. On September 12, 1977, Lowell died of a heart attack in New York City, in the back of a taxi, a sudden end to a life lived in public struggle and private reckoning.

Legacy
Lowell's achievement lies in the range he made available to American poetry: he mastered high rhetorical formalism and then retooled it for confession, history, and civic meditation. He helped open a space in which intimacy could meet public voice without sacrificing craft, and his poems gave later writers a model for treating personal life as a site of ethical and aesthetic inquiry. Through friendships and mentorships with Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, W. D. Snodgrass, George Starbuck, and Frank Bidart, his influence radiated outward in multiple generations. Honors including two Pulitzer Prizes and the National Book Award signaled his standing, but it is the vitality of Life Studies, the moral pressure of For the Union Dead, the restless sonnets of the Notebook and its offshoots, and the spare candor of Day by Day that continue to define his presence in American letters.

Our collection contains 5 quotes who is written by Robert, under the main topics: Dark Humor - Poetry - God - Youth.

Other people realated to Robert: Norman Mailer (Novelist), Allen Tate (Poet), Karl Shapiro (Poet), Richard Eberhart (Poet), John Berryman (Poet), Paul Engle (Poet)