Robert Lowell was born March 1, 1917, in Boston, a member of a
patrician New England family, with James Russell Lowell for great-great-uncle
and Amy Lowell for distant cousin. He spent his early years in Boston except
for several periods in Washington and Philadelphia, where his father, a naval
officer, was stationed. He attended St. Mark's School and came to know the
poet Richard Eberhart, who was teaching there. Then, or soon after, Lowell
began to prepare himself with uncanny deliberateness for the life of a poet.
He enrolled at Harvard and immersed himself in courses in English literature;
but after two years he abruptly transferred to Kenyon College so he could
study with John Crowe Ransom. Under Ransom's guidance he studied the classics,
logic, and philosophy. After graduation in 1940, Lowell attended Louisiana
State University, where he studied with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks.
At the same time he formed a close friendship with Allen Tate, so that he was
immersed in the school of New Criticism and in their predilection for
"formal, difficult poems."
In 1940, the year he was
graduated from Kenyon College, Lowell married the novelist Jean Stafford.
(They were divorced in 1948.) He also was converted to Catholicism. Lowell was
greatly disturbed by the advent of the Second World War. At first he tried,
unsuccessfully, to enlist. Then in 1943, as his apocalyptic view sharpened, he
grew horrified, particularly by the bombing of civilians, and declared himself
a conscientious objector. He was given a year's jail sentence but was released
after six months, and afterwards lived for a time in Black Rock, near
Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Lowell has confronted recent events
with courage and conviction. He has been at the center of things, especially
in opposition to the Vietnam War, both through poems and by public action. In
temporary withdrawal from the political scene, he lived in England from 1970
to 1974. He now teaches creative writing at Harvard.
__________
Ellmann, Richard and Robert O'Clair. Modern Poems: An
Introduction to Poetry.
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973, p. 340.
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ARTICLE
- 1
Selected Poems
MODERN POEMS
An Introduction to Poetry
edited by Richard Ellmann & Robert O'Cair
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