| Robert Lowell - Poet | |
Died 09-12-1977
|
by Marie Griffin and Marcia Purse
Poet Robert Lowell described mania as a funny creeping feeling coming from the spine up. Lowell was diagnosed with manic depression (now bipolar disorder) after his father died. Prior to his diagnosis, fellow faculty members found Lowell's excitable talk flattering and brilliant and found no reason to think of him as being ill.
Robert Lowell was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 1 March 1917. He was educated at private schools in Boston and, for two years, at St. Mark's preparatory school. Even during his youth, Lowell was determined to pursue the craft of poetry seriously. He spent summers reading and studying the English literary tradition. After graduating from St. Mark's, he attended Harvard and later dropped out to study with Allen Tate, a poet of the Fugitive group. On a psychiatrist's advice, Lowell transferred to Kenyon College in Ohio to study with John Crowe Ransom, Tate's mentor. At Kenyon, Lowell met Randall Jarrell and Peter Taylor, both of whom went on to successful careers as poets.
Lowell graduated summa cum laude in Classics from Kenyon and spent the next year studying with Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren at Louisiana State University. In 1940 he converted to Roman Catholicism and married writer Jean Stafford.
At the beginning of the World War II, Lowell volunteered for military service, but before he was called up, he was so shocked by the Allied firebombing of civilians in German cities that he declared himself a conscientious objector. He spent several months in jail, followed by community service.
His second book, Lord Weary's Castle, was published in 1946. This book won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
In 1948, Lowell and Stafford divorced, and in 1949 he married Elizabeth Hardwick, a young writer from Kentucky. In 1950, Lowell's father died after a long illness. He and Hardwick spent the next few years living largely in Europe. These years saw Lowell suffering from manic and depressive episodes. He described mania as being an illness for one's friends, whereas depression was an illness for oneself. In 1954, after the death of his mother, he spent time in a Massachusetts mental hospital. There his psychiatrists encouraged him to write about his childhood.
From this work came the book Life Studies, published in 1959 and an award winner in 1960, which helped inaugurate the "Confessional" school of poetry.
From 1955-60 Lowell was a teacher and visiting lecturer; another bipolar poet, Sylvia Plath, was his student in 1959. During the early 1960s, he became energetically involved in political efforts. In 1965, Lowell publicly refused Lyndon Johnson's invitation to a White House Arts Festival as a statement of his disagreement with the war in Vietnam.
In 1972 he divorced his second wife to marry writer Caroline Blackwood. His work continued to win awards and high praise. It is said that he was returning to his second wife and their daughter when, in a New York taxi, he died of a heart attack on September 12, 1977.
