Robert Lowell’s psychological lyricism.

Robert Lowell (1917–1977), born Robert Traill Spence Lowell, IV, was an American poet whose works, confessional in nature, engaged with the questions of history and probed the dark recesses of the self. He is generally considered to be among the greatest American poets of the twentieth century.

Robert Lowell was born into the Boston Brahmin family that included Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell. He attended Harvard College but transferred to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, to study under John Crowe Ransom. He was a Roman Catholic from 1940 to 1946, which influenced his first two books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and the Pulitzer Prize winning Lord Weary’s Castle (1946). In 1950, Lowell was included in the influential anthology Mid-Century American Poets as one of the key literary figures of his generation.

Lowell was a conscientious objector during World War II and served several months at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. He was married to novelist Jean Stafford from 1940 to 1948. In 1949 he married the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. In the 1960s, he became a media personality, befriending such celebrities as Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy, Mary McCarthy, Father Daniel Berrigan, and Eugene McCarthy.

Lowell was hospitalized approximately twenty times for a bipolar disorder that was later identified as “manic depression.” He was never entirely free of the symptoms that caused erratic behavior all through his life.

In 1970 he left Elizabeth Hardwick for the British author, Lady Caroline Blackwood. He spent many of his last years in England. Lowell died in 1977, suffering a heart attack in a cab in New York City, and is buried in Stark Cemetery, Dunbarton, New Hampshire.

Lowell’s collected poems were published in 2003 and his letters in 2005, leading to a renewed interest in his work.

Lowell reached wide acclaim for his 1946 book, Lord Weary’s Castle, which included ten poems slightly revised from his earlier Land of Unlikeness, and thirty new poems. Among the better known poems in the volume are Mr Edwards and the Spider and The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket. Lord Weary’s Castle was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1947.

The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951) did not receive a similar acclaim, but Lowell was able to revive his reputation with the award-winning Life Studies (1959), a book that reflected stylistic changes that seemed more in line with the popular openness of Beat and Confessional poetry. It was a shift that for the rest of Lowell’s career would produce frequent flashes of brilliance and enable him to achieve respect among Counter Culture revisionists.

Lowell followed Life Studies with a volume of loose translations of poems by, among others, Rilke and Rimbaud, Imitations, for which he received the 1962 Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize.

For the Union Dead, 1964, was also widely praised, particularly for its title poem, which invokes Allen Tate’s Ode to the Confederate Dead. Following this book, however, many critics began to find Lowell’s poetry collections becoming more inconsistent.

During 1967 and 1968 he experimented with a verse journal, published as Notebook, 1967−68. These poems loosely based on the sonnet form were reworked into three volumes. History deals with public history from antiquity onwards, and with modern poets Lowell had known; For Lizzie and Harriet describes the breakdown of his second marriage; and The Dolphin, which won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize, includes poems about his marriage to Caroline Blackwood and their life in England.