Robert Lowwell

Robert Lowell is best known for his volume Life Studies,but his true greatness as an American poet lies in the astonishing variety of his work. In the 1940s he wrote intricate and tightly patterned poems that incorporated traditional meter and rhyme; in the late 1950s when he published Life Studies, he began to write startlingly original personal or "confessional" poetry in much looser forms andmeters; in the 1960s he wrote increasingly public poetry; and finally in the 1970s he created poems that incorporated and extended elements of all the earlier poetry. Meanwhile he also produced a volume of translations he called "imitations" and wrote or translated several plays. Lowell had a profound interest in history and politics; in his poetry he juxtaposed self and history in ways thatilluminated both. His art and his life were inseparably intertwined, and he believed firmly in the identity of self and language. 

In "After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays on Me," a 1977 Salmagundi essay, Lowell wrote that "looking over my Selected Poems, about thirty years of writing, my impression is that the thread that strings it together is my autobiography." His poetry and "91 Revere Street,"the prose sketch that forms an important part of Life Studies,give glimpse after glimpse into the world of his childhood. He was born on March 1, 1917, into a home dominated by the incessant tension between his ineffectual father and his imperious mother. His father was a member of the famous Lowell family of Massachusetts, and his mother's prominent family, the Winslows, dated, like the Lowells,back to the early days of New England. The young Lowell felt acutely the strains of his childhood, and both his immediate family and his Puritan forebears would figure largely in his poetry. 

In "91 Revere Street," Lowell described his experiences at the Brimmer Street School in Boston; he later attended preparatory school at St. Mark's in Southborough, Massachusetts, and then, briefly, HarvardUniversity. But while he was a student at Harvard in 1937, he had a fight with his father and left home, a rebellion that had serious consequences for his life and his poetry. Lowell went south to the Tennessee home of poet Allen Tate, who proved to be an important influence on the young writer; in a 1961 Paris Review interview with Frederick Seidel, Lowell gave this account of his arrival at theTate home: "Mrs. Tate . . . had three guests and her own family, and was doing the cooking and writing a novel. And this young man arrived, quite ardent and eccentric. I think I suggested that maybe I'd stay with them. And they said, 'We really haven't any room, you'd have to pitch a tent on the lawn.' So I went to Sears Roebuck and got a tent and rigged it on their lawn. The Tates were too politeto tell me that what they'd said had been just a figure of speech. I stayed two months in my tent and ate with the Tates." 

Lowell crammed much activity into the next few years. He followed Tate to Kenyon College in Ohio; received a degree in classics, summa cum laude; met Randall Jarrelland Peter Taylor, two writers who would remain his lifelong friends; converted to Roman Catholicism; marriedthe fiction writer Jean Stafford; refused induction into the armed forces; and served five months in jail as a conscientious objector. And during all this time, Lowell was working on the poems that would be published in Land of Unlikeness and Lord Weary's Castle. 

The title of Land of Unlikeness, as Jerome Mazzaro points out in The Poetic Themes of Robert Lowell, is taken from a quotation ofSaint Bernard and refers to the human soul's unlikeness to God and unlikeness to its own past self. In this volume, according to Hugh B. Staples in Robert Lowell: The First Twenty Years, the poet "appears so horrified by the spectacle of contemporary chaos that he can scarcely bring himself to comment on it in realistic terms. Cut off from the sight of God, modern man wanders about in his Land of...