TO SPEAK OF WOE THAT IS IN MARRIAGE

TO SPEAK OF WOE THAT IS IN MARRIAGE

Robert Trail  Spence Lowell 

Robert Trail Spence Lowell was born in Boston, Massachusetts ,on 1 March 1917 . His father ,also Robert Trail Spence Lowell, was an officer in the United States Navy . Lowell’s mother , Charlotte Win-slow Lowell, descended from an old New England family .Lowell was educated at private schools in Boston and ,for two years ,at St. Mark’s preparatory school. Even during his youth ,and certainly by the time he studded at St. Mark’s ,Lowell had decided upon a career as a  poet . He spent summers reading and studying the English literary tradition , imposing his reading lists on friends from school Upon graduation from St. Mark’s , he attended Harvard ( as men in his family had done for generations ) . After two years at Harvard ,however , Lowell left . His departure was precipitated by his meeting ,in 1937 , with Allen Tate’s poet of the fugitive group and a practitioner of the not - yet - institutionalized “ New criticism .” Lowell  and Tate immediately took to one another and Lowell traveled to Tate’s Tennessee home during the summer of  1937; he camped out in Tate’s yard ,writing poetry and studying at the feet of the older poet instead of returning to Harvard  that fall, Lowell transferred to Kenyon college, in Ohio, to study with John Crowe ransom, Tate’s , mentor. At Kenyon ,Lowell befriended Randall Jarrell and Peter Taylor , both of whom went on to their own successful careers as writers .

Lowell graduated summa cum laude in classics from Kenyon in 1940. He spent the next year studying with cleanth brooks and Robert Penn warren at Louisiana state University .before departing for  Louisiana, Lowell married Jean Stafford, a writer of short  stories and novels . 1940 also saw Lowell’s conversion too Roman Catholics ,a repudiation of his ancestors’ new England Protestantism as well a dedication to what seemed to him the more authentic faith of the roman church . After a year at Louisiana State, Lowell and Stafford moved to Monteagle,Tennessee,where they shared a house with Allen Tate and his wife ,the writer Caroline Gordon .

When the Second world war Began in 1941, Lowell had volunteered for military service .His poor eyesight led to his initial rejection from armed service .In 1943, however, Lowell received a conscription notice from the United states military shocked an dismayed by the allied firebombing of civilians in German cities like Dresden, he declared himself at this time a conscientious objector. He served for several months in jail (  his experiences form the basis of (Memories of West Street and Lepke “ )and finished his sentence performing community service in Connecticut . During these months, he finished and published his first book, Land of unlikeness. During the next year he revised the book and published the new version as sparked in part by Jarrell’s appreciative review in The Nation, and it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry n 1947. Lowell’s reputation as a leading poet of the new generation was consolidated.

In 1948, Lowell and Stafford divorced and in 1949 Lowell married Elizabeth Hardwick, a young writer from Kentucky who was already moving with ease among the New York community of writers and intellectuals .In 1950, Lowell’s father died after a long illness . Lowell published his next book the Mills of the Kavanaughs, in 1951, the book was roundly criticized as inferior to Lord Weary’s castle, and even Lowell recognized the stiffness of the new book’s dramatic monologues. He and Hardwick spent the next several years living largely in Europe ,especially in Italy .These years saw Lowell suffering from a number of mental breakdowns ,episodes of the manic - depressive  disease that plagued him throughout his life .After  his other’s death in 1954 , Lowell was hospitalized at McLean’s  a mental hospital in Massachusetts .During the years of suffering and sickness and despair of the middle 1950s ,years also characterized by a political atmosphere Lowell depressing ( the election of Dwight d. Eisenhower key moment for this political culture ,is the subject of “ Inauguration Day : January , 1953 “ ) One source of peptic rejuvenation , though ,was William Carlos Williams , whose work Lowell reviewed positively and who example  of looser poetic forms influenced Lowell o write himself out of the strictness of structure that characterizes the poems of  Lord Weary’s  Castle. At the same time. Lowell’s  was urged by  his psychiatrists to write   about his childhood ; these writings led finally to “ 91  Revere Street, “ the prose memoir at the heart  of Lowell’s 1959 book, Life studies  “ section .Beginning with “ Skunk Hour ,” a poem Lowell wrote in 1957 in answer to Elizabeth  bishop’s “ the Armadillo,” Lowell brought  something of Williams ‘ prosodic relaxation ( a very controlled relation ,though  . nothing lie the formlessness of some subsequent free verse ) to consideration of himself , his psyche, and his surroundings .The publication of Life Studies in 1959 renewed Lowell’s reputation ; the book received the National book award in 1960 .though some readers ,like  Allen Tate, intensely disliked the new poems and found them both formally slack and personally embarrassing, many readers saw in the book nothing less than a shift  in the American poetic landscape .Along with W.D. Snodgrass’ heart ‘s Needle, published  just  before ,Lowell’s new book inaugurated the poetry that came to be called ,in M.L. Rosenthal’s coinage .” Confessional.”

During the early 1960s ,Lowell was energetically moved notionally in poetic but also n political efforts .He befriended Robert Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy, as well as senator Eugene McCarthy .He addressed, in such poems as “ for  the Union Dead,” the dreadful possibility of humanity’s nuclear annihilation and the miserable  culture  that endured and endorsed that possibility .” For the Union Dead ,” commissioned for and first read at the Boston Arts Festival in 1960 , became the title poem of Lowell’s next collection of his own poems ( For the Union Dead , 1964 ).The early sixties though ,found Lowell also publishing his collection of Imitation , loose  translation of poems by Rilke , Rimbaud ,and others ( the book won the Bollinger Poetry translation Prize in 1962 ), and working on the plays  that would ,in 1965 , be published and performed  as The Old Glory ,a trilogy based on works by Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne .

The historical interest evident in Lowell’s poetry and plays alike during the middle 1960s translated into a political activism of sorts . Invited to a White House Arts Festival in 1965 ,Lowell publicly refused London  Johnson’s invitation as a  statement of his disagreement with American escalation of the war in Vietnam .In October ,1967 ,Lowell went further till participating along with thousands of others in the March on the Pentagon ( this March is the subject to “the March I” and “ The March II “ ) .In 1967 , Lowell published Near the Ocean ,a collection of Lyrics more formal than Aeschylus ‘ Prometheus  bound  produced at Yale ( the play was published two years later ) .,But the work ion which Lowell was most deeply immersed during that year was  the verse journals published the next year  as Notebook 1967-68 . In poems roughly iambic pentameter ,though most are un-rhymed ), Lowell recorded his reactions to contemporary events in the world as well as something like Ezra  Pound’s  “ poem including history ,” and has moments of stunning success, though some of the poems seem overly  constrained by the form Lowell has chosen and by the pressure  to keep producing poems quickly . Notebook is the basis for the three books Lowell published at the same time in 1973 ; History , which includes some of the public -issue poems of the earlier book as well as a number of new poems , For Lizzie and Harriet , which includes some of the poems about his wife and daughter from Notebook and many new poems documenting the  break - up  of his marriage with  Hardwick ,and the Dolphin ,which includes a number of poems about his marriage with Caroline blackwood (the married in 1972 ) the dolphin won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 .

Lowell spent much of his last years in England with Caroline blackwood and the  couple’s  son , he was however , on his way to see Hardwick in new  York when he died of a heart attack on 12  September 1977 .His last book Day by Day ,appeared in the year of his death .