Poet Robert Lowell’s turbulent journey in life is echoed in the more personal of his poetry.

Robert Lowell was born in 1917, the son of the famous Lowells of Boston, a family that already boasted two poets, James Russell Lowell and Amy Lowell. He followed family tradition by enrolling at Harvard, but after two years – and upon the advice of his psychiatrist – transferred to Kenyon College.

At Kenyon, Lowell took up another family tradition – poetry. His studies under poet John Crowe Ransom inspired him, as did his graduate work at Louisiana State University, where his professors included Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks.

Despite a myriad of personal troubles – manic depressive episodes that resulted in his institutionalization on several occasions, a conversion from the Episcopalian faith to Catholicism, political views that saw him imprisoned for conscientiously objecting to World War II – Lowell wrote accomplished, elegant poetry, and for his efforts was rewarded the Pulitzer Prize at the age of 30 for Lord Weary’s Castle.

Encouraged by psychiatrists to write about personal experiences as therapy, and inspired by the burgeoning Beat movement of the 1950s, Lowell began to abandon the formal, impersonal poetry he’d been known for. From the 1950s onward, Lowell’s poetry was more inward and personal, and as a result, stronger; his poetry collection Life Studies, released in 1959, would come to be known as The Waste Land of its day, a collection that changed the face of modern American poetry. Life Studies received the National Book Award in 1960, and its influence spread, leading to a new genre of American poetry named “confessional” by M.L. Rosenthal.

Life Studies cemented Lowell’s reputation as a poet, and during the 1960s, he began to parlay his newfound celebrity into a platform for his political views, publicly refusing an invitation to the Johnson White House as a statement against the Vietnam War, and participating on the March on the Pentagon in 1967.

Concentrating on plays nearly as much as poems throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Lowell returned to poetry in the mid 1970s. He won another Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for the collection of poems The Dolphin, and served as Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets from 1962 until 1977 when he died of a sudden heart attack in a New York taxi at the age of 60.

Poems by Robert Lowell:

Dolphin

My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
a captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Ph?dre.
When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body
caught in its hangman\'s-knot of sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself--
to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,
an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting

my eyes have seen what my hand did.

Man and Wife

Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother\'s bed;
the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,
abandoned, almost Dionysian.
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five days\' white.
All night I\'ve held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad--
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye--
and dragged me home alive. . . .Oh my Petite,
clearest of all God\'s creatures, still all air and nerve:
you were in our twenties, and I,
once hand on glass
and heart in mouth,
outdrank the Rahvs in the heat
of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet--
too boiled and shy
and poker-faced to make a pass,
while the shrill verve
of your invective scorched the traditional South.

Now twelve years later, you turn your back.
Sleepless, you hold
your pillow to your hollows like a child;
your old-fashioned tirade--
loving, rapid, merciless--
breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.

The Withdrawl

1
Only today and just for this minute,
when the sunslant finds its true angle,
you can see yellow and pinkish leaves spangle
our gentle, fluffy tree-
suddenly the green summer is momentary...
Autumn is my favorite season-
why does it change clothes and withdraw?

This week the house went on the market-
suddenly I woke up among strangers;
when I go into a room, it moves
with embarrassment, and joins another room.

I don\'t need conversation, but you to laugh with-
you and a room and a fire,
cold starlight blowing through an open window-
whither?

2
After sunfall, heaven is melodramatic,
a temporary, puckering, burning green.
The patched-up oak
and blacker, indelible pines
have the indigestible meagerness of spines.

One wishes heaven had less solemnity:
a sensual table
with five half-filled bottles of red wine
set round the hectic carved roast-
Bohemia for ourselves
and the familiars of a lifetime
charmed to communion by resurrection-
running together in the rain to mail a single letter,
not the chafe and cling
of this despondent chaff.

3
Yet for a moment, the children
could play truant from their tuition.

4
When I look back, I see a collapsing
accordion of my receding houses,
and myself receding
to a boy of twenty-five or thirty,
too shopworn for less, too impressionable for more-
blackmaned, illmade
in a washed blue workshirt and coalblack trousers,
moving from house to house,
still seeking a boy\'s license
to see the countryside without arrival.

Hell?

Darling,
terror in happiness may not cure the hungry future,
the time when any illness is chronic,
and the years of discretion are spent on complaint-

until the wristwatch is taken from the wrist.
