Biography
A descendant of a patrician Boston family, Robert Lowell
experienced life as a series of revisions: he left Harvard
after two years to study at Kenyon College; he converted
from Protestantism to Catholicism; and he married three times.
Lowell refused to participate in the draft for World War
II and spent a year in a New York City jail for protesting
the bombing of Hamburg and the Allied policy of conditional
surrender. Lowell's poetry reflects revision too, with the
poet returning to the same subjects time and again, rewriting
published poems, and changing his poetic style. This process
gave him great range as a poet, and, consequently, Lowell
often seamlessly unites a random event, a personal moment,
and elements of epic poetry in his work. His collections
include Lord Weary's Castle (1946), Life Studies (1959), For
the Union Dead (1964), Notebook (1970), and Day
by Day (1973).
Explorations
Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop were
close friends and correspondents throughout their careers.
By the early 1960s, they were being lauded by critics as
leaders in postwar American verse, renovating a New England
poetic tradition that stretched back through Frost, Robinson, Dickinson,
and Emerson, to Bradstreet.
In temperament, however, they could hardly have been more
different. Emotionally unstable, Lowell was a figure of public
self-torment, an artist who favored dramatic shifts in form
and voice and insurrections against previous identities;
Bishop, by contrast, was famous for her reserve, for understatement,
for self-concealment in her verse, and for refusing the "confessional" mode
that Lowell joined and helped to lead in the last fifteen
years of his life. In contemporary literary histories, these
poets are often spoken of as a pair--not merely for their
long friendship but also for certain perceived similarities
in what they attempted to do as artists. In reading these
poets together, we need to consider whether their achievements
are complementary, fundamentally at odds, or in some other
relationship to one another. 1. Lowell's Skunk Hour (1959) is dedicated to
Bishop; Bishop's The Armadillo (1965) is dedicated
to Lowell. Lowell introduces the skunks in line 37, toward
the end; Bishop's armadillo also doesn't appear until near
the end of her poem. Aside from the fact that these poems
are both "about" small mammals, what connects them thematically?
Why are these animals here at all?
2. Bishop's In the Waiting Room (1976) is in part
about Bishop's puzzlement about her own identity, about
the confinements and imprint of family and tradition. Compare
this poem to Lowell's My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux
Winslow, in which Lowell, about five years old, thinks
about his ancestors, former homes, and life and death.
Compare the tone of these poems and the kinds of details
that are gathered into them. Compare the endings as well,
in both form and effect.
3. Bishop's Over 2,000 Illustrations (1955) and
Lowell's For the Union Dead (1964) both look at
ways of remembering -- Bishop peruses an illustrated and
annotated Bible; Lowell looks at Civil War monuments. In
each poem, what is the effect of this indirectness, this
mediated experience of the past?
4. Bishop's Over 2,000 Illustrations ends with "infant" looking.
Why? Lowell's For the Union Dead opens with himself
as a young child, looking at fish through the glass of
the city aquarium. Why does he begin there?
Other sites to consult:
Academy
of American Poets Lowell page, includes a
biography, bibliography, selected poems, audio files,
and links to discussions of his contemporaries.
Robert
Lowell page, includes the poem "Father's
Bedroom" and biographic and bibliographic notes (maintained
by Michael Eiichi Hishikawa).
View
Vermeer's "Maidservant Pouring Milk" and then consider
how Lowell uses it in his poem "Epilogue".
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lowell/lowell.htm:
Information on Lowell from Modern American Poetry.
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=10&CFID=9020342&CFTOKEN=13372336:
Information on Lowell from the Academy of American Poets.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/programmes/centurions/lowell/lowbiog.shtml:
A biography of Lowell from the BBC.
http://www.nybooks.com/authors/2043:
A timeline of Lowell’s
life from the New York Review of Books.
http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0600/lowell/:
Hear Lowell read his poems at this Random House site.
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