Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was an American author. His works include Land of Unlikeness (1944), Lord Weary's Castle (1946), The Mill of the Kavanaughs (1951), Old Glory (1964), and Dolphin (1973). He won a Pulitzer Prize for Lord Weary's Castle and for Dolphin.[1]

## Life and Works[edit]

Lowell was born March 1, 1917, to a high-class family in Boston, Massachusetts, and claims many famous relatives including Jonathan Edwards, Anne Hutchinson, and Robert Livingston.[2] As a young child, he had decided on a career as a poet, and studied the English poetry tradition each summer between studying at St. Mark's preparatory school.[3] He attended Harvard University for two years before transferring to Kenyon College, where got an undergraduate degree in 1940, and later attended Louisiana State University.[4] He spent a year in jail when he avoided the draft during World War Two (which he did in opposition to Allied saturation bombing).[5] It was during those post-graduation years that he met Randall Jarrell, converted to Roman Catholicism, and wrote the poems that would become Land of Unlikeness and Lord Weary's Castle.[6] He would continue to write in Mills of the Kavanaughs, a series of monologues, though it was his 1959 poetic autobiography Life Studies that would establish the genre of confessional poetry for which he known for creating.[7]

In the 1960s he furthered the movement for confessional poetry.[8] The autobiographical theme is reflected to varying degrees in his following works, For the Union Dead (1964), Near the Ocean (1967), Notebook: Nineteen Sixty-Seven to Nineteen Sixty-Eight (1969), Day by Day (1977), and Last Poems (1977).[9] He won a second Pulitzer Prize for The Dolphin and worked in his later years to translate Racine's Phaedre, Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, and the works of various European poets including Charles Baudelaire.[10]

He died on September 12, 1977 on the way to see his wife, returning from the airport in a taxicab after visiting Ireland.[11]

## References[edit]

1. ↑ The New York Public Library Student's Desk Reference. Prentice Hall: New York, 1991.
2. ↑ https://www.poemhunter.com/robert-lowell/biography/
3. ↑ http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lowell/bio.htm
4. ↑ https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/robert-lowell
5. ↑ http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/poet-robert-lowell-sentenced-to-prison
6. ↑ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/robert-lowell
7. ↑ http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Robert_Lowell
8. ↑ http://www.biography.com/people/robert-lowell-39786
9. ↑ http://www.encyclopedia.com/people/literature-and-arts/american-literature-biographies/robert-lowell
10. ↑ "Lowell, Robert." Encyclopedia Britannica Online.
11. ↑ http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=9/12/1977

## External links[edit]

* Poems on the Poem Hunter website
* Extensive Biography by the Poetry Foundation